Tuesday, January 15, 2008 - Posts
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The real truth? Peel away all the ugly, snarling identity politics of the past few weeks and what you find underneath it is a trio of Democratic presidential hopefuls who are colossal wonks. And in much the same way they might do after someone had landed a truly tasteless joke at a dinner party, everyone at the Democratic debate in Las Vegas tonight is on their superbest behavior. Everyone is for unity, equality, and pulling together. Nobody is for hair-pulling, kicking, or snorting coke.
The most discordant notes of the night are consistently logged by the moderators, Brian Williams and Tim Russert of NBC, who devote at least 38 minutes up front and 12 minutes toward the end to trying to reawaken the race vs. gender tensions that have made for such great television these past few weeks. The candidates steadfastly decline to indulge. The nadir of all this is a question to John Edwards about whether he doesn’t, in effect, feel like shit as a white man running against two historic candidates. His answer, I believe, is “kinda” while Hillary murmurs “poor John” on mic.
The gender nadir is the debate setup, in which Williams and Russet ask real questions while poor Natalie Morales parachutes in from some faraway land of lip gloss to pose intermittent e-mail questions from viewers. This would be horrifying enough, were it not for the fact that the very last e-mail question—ostensibly the only “truly thoughtful” one of the evening—is too important to beam up to Morales and thus must be posed by Williams. As of midnight on Jan. 16, then, the candidates have officially gotten past identity politics. The networks have not.
For the most part, when the candidates are being wonks, they agree. They agree on the subprime crisis and on the energy crisis and Yucca Mountain, and they even agree that while guns are bad, they are obligated to say guns are awesome to be elected. Asked to enumerate their respective great strengths and weaknesses, Obama confesses that he tends to lose whatever he is holding after two seconds, such that he needs to surround himself with good people, whereas Hillary Clinton admits she tends to get impatient and compulsive. Oddly enough, that strikes a chord. Obama is brilliant and funny and self-deprecating. Clinton still looks like she has been programmed to smile warmly at nine-minute intervals. But there’s something about the prospect of having yet another President who needs someone to pick up after him that’s incredibly jarring, and Clinton subtly capitalizes on that tonight.
Amid all the conciliatory agreement here, what you really notice is how the candidates tend to look in repose. As they nod and affirm one another, John Edwards looks like a man on a bus, listening to Woody Guthrie on his iPod. Obama appears to be listening to Democracy and Distrust by John Hart Ely. And Hillary looks to be listening to daily affirmations by Stuart Smalley. But it ultimately takes an unspoken agreement to get past haircuts and skin color and highlights to be able to hear what’s going on in those candidates’ heads in the first place. Which is why, for my money, everybody won tonight.
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Clearly, any article that describes the dilemmas of "young" parents, age 28 (using the same language of regret-for-lost-childhood once reserved for teenage mothers), has a hidden agenda: To make all of those fortysomething readers feel better about themselves. For if 28 is the new 18, then 38 must be the new 28 ... and 48 the new 38!
Subtle message to readers: You're not as old as you thought you were!
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Wow, Dahlia, thanks for sharing that story on "young" parents in the WaPo. I'm not quite sure I get the point of the article, but it leaves me with a million random thoughts. First off, it puts to rest the notion that only women write puff pieces. Are these just-about-thirtysomethings looking for sympathy (for forgoing all those wild nights out and exotic trips to the Galapagos) and plaudits for braving the uncharted waters of having a child ... in their late 20s? Give me a break. For how many years after college do you really need to be hitting the party scene every weekend, or hopping last-minute flights to Vegas, or taking that girls weekend at the spa? (Lest I sound too callous, I should add that I fit the profile of the couples mentioned. After five years of living together, my husband and I married in our late 20s and had our first child when I was 30. We were even among the first of our friends to have kids. Big whoop.)
I have no doubt it can be difficult to decide whether to have children before your career truly takes off or to wait until you're established. Alas, there's no one-size-fits-all solution to that dilemma. But the fact remains that, whether one is 28 or 33 or 38, if you are a college-educated, married professional, raising a child is a heck of a lot easier than it would be if you were 22 and single and struggling to make ends meet. I'm sure there are plenty of such TRULY young parents out there who are doing an admirable job—even if they are too busy to reflect that "parenthood is giving them a new level of ambition that is sophisticated and rejuvenating"—and I think their stories would be vastly more interesting than what was deemed worthy of front-page treatment in the Washington Post.
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Here, in a skit posted months ago, is all you need to know about how the Democratic primary is playing out. Oh, except that the Republican enjoying the show has yet to be named ...
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Dahlia, amen. Racism and sexism are issues in the campaign, no doubt, but they're not the central issues, and playing the game of who-has-it-worst could end up in a form of Mutually Assured Destruction. Luckily, the candidates themselves seem to have realized this, Ann, and are trying to get out of the "identity trap" in a manner akin to your proposal: Both Obama and Clinton released statements yesterday crediting the other candidate and urging us all to get past this narrative. So now it's just time for the media to get back to analyzing the candidates' positions on key issues. (Via Marc Ambinder)
Speaking of which, here's an interesting post on the shrinking gender pay gap from a new blog: It appears that the pay gap is shrinking, mostly because men's wages have remained stagnant while women experience gains. (Via Marginal Revolution)
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Did anyone else find the Washington Post’s front page story today about “young” college-educated parents just surreal? (Disclosure: They own us.) First off, all these extremely young parents who are not hanging out in bars or brunching with their buddies are all either 29 or 31. Where are these playgrounds in which all the parents are “old"? And what, precisely, are “older-looking” parents anyhow? Apparently something to do with Rolling Stones T-shirts but, er, wait, wouldn’t those dads be 60, then?
Unexplored and unexamined is the assumption that it’s best for your kids to have your attention while they are toddlers, so you can be free to make partner when they’re potty trained. Except every mom I know says the opposite is true. Thoughts?
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Dahlia, I'd just been typing up a post in the same spirit as yours, inspired by David Brooks' column today about the "identity trap" the candidates have gotten themselves into. Maybe it's a good moment to invite suggestions for how they could escape, since mere hand-wringing about the situation—virtuous though it makes us feel—is going to get old fast. I wonder if humor might offer a way out. Remember Reagan's deft neutralizing of the ageism that stalked him during the 1984 campaign? "I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign," he joked in the second debate. "I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience." Maybe Obama and Clinton could try out a variation. "We want you to know that henceforth, we won't make race or gender an issue in this primary season," they could say in the debate tonight. "We'll save that up for the general election, when we won't hesitate to exploit, for political purposes, our opponent's aura of white male privilege."
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If the first half of last week was Gender Week in the mainstream media, and the past few days were the Days of Race. Today’s theme is fast shaping up to be Gender Vs. Race, and it’s only going to get worse from here. Having gone one round on Hillary’s soft side and the next on the racist attacks her surrogates have unloosed on Obama, now it’s apparently time to debate once again who has it worse.
Not only does this Olympics of Pain play to the worst stereotypes about what’s wrong with liberals; it also forces us into pointless linguistic bickering about which words are code words for other offensive words and why. Politics as freshman year English lit class, circa 1987. Now there’s a smart way to pick your candidates!
The irony is that in 10 days, we’ve collapsed from a semisubstantive debate on the candidates’ merits to an inchoate debate about identity politics; a debate full of the cheap stereotypes and deliberate misunderstandings you often see when minorities and women square off on a reality show. Unless we can figure out a way to put all this who-suffered-hardest stuff back in the box, this presidential campaign will make history not for race and gender barriers broken, but for the race and gender clichés we relied on to hold us back.
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Hey Melinda, no, I wasn't being deliberately provocative. I've written about women who regret their abortions, and about the importance of counseling. And I think it's an issue that deserves more attention and funding; services like the after-abortion hotline Exhale are a good start. But I think it's also important to remember that for some women, abortion brings simply and merely relief.
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