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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.
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Give me a break, indeed. Like Emily Y., I can scarcely believe what I'm seeing on this video of the former president, who in theory is in New Hampshire trying to help his wife get elected. The mere sight of a defiant Bill Clinton waving his finger around stirs up so many bad memories that if we didn't know better, we might think the next Clinton presidency was supposed to be all about redeeming the last one. Just like George W. was supposed to rewrite the book on Poppy, and we know how that turned out. Did you see the poor kids seated behind him squirming like they'd rather have been stuck in traffic? "Ken Starr spent $70 million and indicted innocent people to find out that I wouldn't take a nickel to see the cow jump over the moon!'' Clinton thundered. Yeah, and his wife just spent $100 million to find out he still can't keep ... his mouth shut. Is it too late in the cycle for a legal separation?
(And Meghan, this is sad, but when I saw the USA Today reference to the "seemingly sexist remarks'' of the men who yelled "Iron my shirts!'' at Hillary Clinton, what I assumed was that the editors were hedging their bets in case the guys turned out to be plants from the Clinton campaign, trying to manufacture a little gender-based outrage.)
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Many in this forum have been asking - is Hillary losing out to Obama because she's a woman, or because she's not the woman we've all been waiting for? In other words, are Americans somehow incapable of electing an XX, or just not this particular XX?
So I'm wondering, if Hillary's the wrong candidate, who's right? I can't think of a single female politician who could possibly have come this far, if only because no one else has the name recognition. Pelosi's not stepping up any time soon, and I can't think of any charismatic female governors.
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The Drudge Report is linking to a video of Bill Clinton on the campaign trail attacking Obama. Drudge's headline is Bill's line about Obama's favorable coverage, "This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen." But if you watch the whole clip I think you will conclude that Bill must be hog-tied and left in the rec room in Chappaqua until the campaign is over. He starts to lose it so badly that he makes an extremely oblique reference to a nasty press release from the Obama campaign in June calling Hillary the senator from Punjab (a joke she made on herself) because of big contributions from the Indian community. A summary is here. I had to look it up because I missed the initial flap, as did surely everyone in the audience Bill is addressing: You can see them look at each other quizzically wondering what in the world he is talking about. But Bill keeps going and brings up ... Ken Starr! Ken Starr!!! Bill, if you want your wife to be president, please do not remind us of those glory days and why the American public might collectively feel, "Actually, let's not have another Clinton administration."
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Dahlia (and others): I don't think your point and mine are mutually exclusive. I certainly agree that sexism/the death of feminism is not why Hillary lost Iowa; she lost Iowa, and Obama won, for the very reasons you point out: Obama represents the possiblitiy of change, a break from baby boomer preoccupations and impasses, a break from, well, the Clinton era. (Andrew Sullivan summed it up powerfully in his Atlantic Monthly piece a while back.) These are the reasons many young women I know are supporting Obama. And sure, Steinem overstates the issue and writes from a prescriptive, first-wave point of view that doesn't float my boat. And yet I really do think, as I said earlier, that Steinem captures something crucial about the challenges facing women in America right now, namely, a pervasive, subterranean unease about women and power that rears its head in surprising ways. This unease would dog, it seems to me, even the female candidate "with Obama’s innate confidence and openness" whom you call for, Dahlia. Sure, such a candidate would probably perform better than Hillary is performing. And gender wouldn't be the main factor in her candidacy -- just as it is not the really the main factor for many Democrates, including me, as they try to make up their minds about Hillary vs. Obama. But there would still be the same tiresome debates about what a female presidency meant, and in what ways a woman was or was not tough, and so on.
What I hoped to point out is that in so frequently describing how gender isn't the main factor in this presidential race, we are sometimes quick to assure ourselves that it isn't a powerful factor. I absolutely agree with Melinda that many of Hillary's negatives have little to do with her gender. Yet what so many of the debates about Hillary have reminded me is that as a nation (and as a media) we are strangely anxious about identifying any element of sexism to begin with -- and that's what I find striking. And that's why I liked Steinem's piece, even given its quite obvious limitations. Her point that today gender is harder to overcome than race may be spurious. And yet the notion that gender issues are easier to whitewash than racial ones seems right on. I'm curious: Do you really think that if some men had heckled Obama about race at a campaign stop, a national newspaper would have printed a headline referring to his response to "seemingly racist remarks"? Maybe, but I have a hard time imagining it.
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I'm inclined, as you are, Emily, to downplay the role of sexism in Hillary's recent fortunes, but I'd say she's bent over backward to try to dispel a sense of entitlement. The puzzle to me--and to her, to judge by her choked-up moment--is still why that wonkiness of hers isn't serving her better as proof that she's earning her role, that she's no Bush-like heir to the throne. Sure, her style can be robotic, and having the easy, open, eloquent Obama as a rival doesn't help, as Dahlia notes. Still, isn't the clamor for yet more poetic uplift perhaps just a little unnerving? After Bush's eight years of messianically winging it, you'd think more people might be warier of inspirational calls. Not that she could change it if she tried, but Hillary's hard-working, unglamorous competence--and reticence, too--is probably her most refreshing asset. Being a pioneering woman was supposed to be poetry enough. Could it be that there's too little sexism among voters to make that fly?
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I also read Gloria Steinem's NYT op-ed on Hillary and sexism twice because I hoped on the second reading I wouldn't find it such a load of hooey (and I admire and am grateful to Steinem for her pioneering work as a feminist). Her opening thought experiment -- try to imagine a woman with Obama's biography being elected to the U.S. Senate -- is ridiculous. As she mentions, Obama was a lawyer, community organizer and state senator before being elected to the U.S. Senate. This is very similar to the pre-Senate biographies of Sens. Patty Murray of Washington, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Susan Collins of Maine and others. Gloria, how about this thought experiment: Imagine a lawyer who worked for a middle-sized law firm in a small, Southern state, gave up his career to do important volunteer work while his wife had a prominent political job, then decided he'd like to get into electoral politics himself, by starting as the senator from New York, a state where he never previously resided. Yes, it's hard to imagine. You can take either Obama's and Hillary's biographies and say it's absurd that someone with such a thin record of political accomplishment would consider themselves presidential material. But despite racism and sexism, the public has taken Obama and Hillary as serious presidential candidates, unlike more experienced choices such as Sen. Joe Biden or Gov. Bill Richardson.
Sure, we live in a world that is still full of racism and sexism. But I agree with Dahlia that Iowans went for Obama over Hillary not because Americans won't elect a woman president, but because they liked him better and resented her robotic sense of entitlement. Had they preferred Hillary, everyone would now be concluding that racism is more ineradicable in our society than sexism.
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I didn't find Gloria Steinem's op-ed nearly as gentle a nudge as Meghan did. In fact, she walked in and gave me whiplash: I do not want to be made to feel like a traitor if my vote is not gender-based. She says "I'm not advocating a competition for who has it toughest'' but—just like my kids, who always preface their most offensive remarks with "no offense, but...''—that's exactly what she is doing. And in the process, I'm not sure she's doing her candidate any favors. I have argued endlessly that Clinton's negatives were never about gender. And as Dahlia suggests, this election may not even tell us much about who has it toughest.
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Emily, Melinda and Meghan. All of you offer compelling observations about how the smoke pouring out of the feminist brain today, and yet I have to disagree.
I read Steinem’s op-ed twice this morning; the first time because I agreed with her so wholeheartedly, and then again because I am paid to cock my head and scowl. And so here is where I must part company with Steinem’s premise: I think in comparing the ways in which gender, as opposed to race, holds a candidate back in America she has factored out the single most important thing Obama brings to the table. It’s not just that he’s inspiring or charismatic or an agent for change or any of the bullet points we’ve affixed to him. It’s that he is unchanging, and forgive me but—authentic—in ways she simply is not. She somehow managed to earn this presidency on the merits, without ever showing anyone who she really was.
The real contrast between Obama and Clinton lies not in this who’s-carrying-a-greater-burden sweepstakes. It’s that he figured out how to transcend labels and she tried to do so by turning herself into an android. In the end, it seems to me, Obama faces easier sledding today not because its easier to be a black man in America than it is to be a woman, but because he’s modeled—and rather beautifully—how much simpler it is to be yourself than to become a piece of precision machinery, comprised of polls and talking points.
Maybe Steinem is right that a woman with even Obama’s sizzle would have been toast from the get-go. But I am not sure that he and Clinton are the best markers of that competition. I’d have liked to see a woman in this race who’d had Obama’s innate confidence and openness. That would have been a fight worth watching ...
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I thought Gloria Steinem's op-ed in the New York Times today performed an important service: It aptly—but gently—reminded us that it’s really hard to talk about sexism in this country. Partly that's because most of us, as Steinem points out, don’t like to hear about it. After all, so much has changed for women since the 1960s—Hillary Clinton was at one point the Democrat’s front-running nominee!— that it can seem monomaniacal to keep track of the myriad ways that women don’t have equal stature. But this reluctance to acknowledge sexism as real can be carried to absurd extremes. And yesterday provided an all-too apt example of Steinem's point: After Hillary was heckled by guys who crudely cried out “Iron my shirt” at one of her campaign stops, USA Today published a piece whose headline read, “Clinton responds to seemingly sexist remarks.” (The body of the piece continued to refer to "seemingly" sexist remarks.) If these comments were only “seemingly” sexist, I wonder what, exactly, indubitably sexist remarks would sound like?
This ginger approach to talking about sexism—this uncertainty about whether sexism is even real—is hardly unique to USA Today (as Steinem reminds us). And I think that’s partly because so much of the sexism we deal with now is latent and almost unconscious, leaving many of us, even women, with a mish-mash mush of confused attitudes, like the ones you describe, Emily. So I think Hillary’s emotional speech at the diner yesterday is going to speak to a lot of women voters, who will find in its clarity a relief from the exhaustion of trying to sort out what they really think or feel about this female presidential candidate.
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Our feminist heart strings are really being pulled, aren't they? Hillary welling up yesterday (which I agree with your take on, Melinda), Gloria Steinem reminding us that women candidates still face big meaningful obstacles that men don't—even black men—and this clip from a Clinton campaign event in which she had to contend with some idiot screaming "Iron my shirt!" I've heard three smart women say in the last few days that they are thinking and thinking again about Hillary's candidacy. That is a good thing. However we all end up voting, and whether or not that choice comes down to our feelings about gender and inequality, all of this bears much more attention and analysis. I feel like I'm only beginning to sort through my own reactions. But at the moment, what's paramount is a feeling of gratitude toward Hillary, for going first, which is never easy and in her case is looking awfully thankless.