Hillary the Contender
With her surprise victory
tonight, Hillary Clinton has fared far better than the polls
suggested—and that’s because she “got the women back,” as CNN just put
it. In Iowa, Obama carried women 35 percent to Clinton’s 30 percent. In
New Hampshire, according to exit polls, women broke for Clinton 47
percent to 34 percent for Obama (Edwards got 15 percent of them and
other candidates the remaining 4 percent). In Iowa, Hillary won only
among older women; In New Hampshire, she won the whole kaboodle over 30.
Why the difference between women voters in Iowa and New Hampshire? At Trailhead, Chadwick Matlin has already tweaked
the press for its inevitable leap to the Diner Sob—the moment when
Hillary welled up yesterday in response to a voter who asked how she
gets “out the door every day.” OK, so that’s a tedious
oversimplification I’ll spare myself from making. But it seems entirely
plausible to me that undecided New Hampshire women shifted to Hillary
in the last few days because they were both wincing and empathizing as
they watched her struggle with her sudden second-tier status.
For a lot of us, there are at least two layers to this year’s Democratic choice. As Juliet Lapidos put it in a XX Factor post earlier today (click here to
read the whole thread), there’s the particular Hillary and there’s
Hillary the First Democratic Woman Waging A Serious Run for President.
We can have our doubts about the first one and still root, on some
level, for the second. And even if we’re not certain we ultimately want
her to win, we sure don’t want her embarrassed by a run of heavy early
losses.
And
what’s more, it turns out that Hillary on her heels is more appealing.
Never mind the tears (though don't forget that she didn’t spill them!).
At the debate on Saturday, when she fought to swipe the change mantra
back from Obama, I didn’t buy it. After all, this is the candidate who
is promising us a Clinton sequel in the White House. (And after the
Bush presidency, sequels are looking positively toxic.) And yet I
couldn’t help sympathizing. Since Iowa, Hillary has been for me the
brainy girl who studies hard for every test and writes great papers,
semester after semester. And Obama has been the smooth, crowd-pleasing,
charismatic genius guy who breezes in and charms his way to the
prize—award for best student, admission to the college of choice, a
ticket to the White House, whatever. Gender colors this image. It’s not
the only lens to see the contest through, but at the moment, it seems a
useful and inevitable one.
In the end, Emily Yoffe’s post was right,
this is not a good way to pick a president. Far better to assess
Clinton and Obama and any other candidate based on his or her
individual merits. Maybe the good women of New Hampshire have done just
that. And yet isn’t it a bit of a thrill to write that “his or her”
sentence—and have its meaning be concrete as opposed to hypothetical?
Might not some of those New Hampshire women have thought, when it
actually came time to cast their ballots—damnit, don’t count her out yet?
Meghan O’Rourke pointed out, in responding to Gloria Steinem’s NYT op-ed
today, the way in which Hillary’s candidacy makes us think about
“pervasive, subterranean unease about women and power that rears its
head in surprising ways.” Surprising and hard to chart, I find—that’s
the thing about subterranean—and yet increasingly meaningful, and worth
pondering, as I’ve watched Hillary over the last handful of days.
I asked
after the Iowa caucuses whether it was impressive, in some sense, that
women there transcended identity politics by backing Obama rather than
Clinton. But there is also something moving about this wave of women
supporting their woman at this point in the campaign. Women in other
states may not stick with Hillary. Maybe they shouldn’t. But tonight in
New Hampshire, they weren’t ready to let the country write off the
first real woman candidate without a thorough look. They wanted Hillary
in contention. They decided she deserves that much. Fair enough.