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I can't believe I'm going to get between Chris Matthews and a punch, but I don't think he's a Hillary hater at all; here is a recent clip of him describing her as sweet, sexy, delightful, charming and on and on... Unlike Meghan, he even called her mellifluous! And at the time she was elected to the Senate, saying she got there thanks in part to some post-Monica sympathy votes was no more controversial than complaining about partisan gridlock in Washington. Here, for instance, is an ABC News story quoting a pollster on Hillary's favorables: "In the impeachment scene, Clinton emerged as a much more favorable person during the period in the victim role.'' Here is Harold Evans, opining in the Guardian in the middle of the Senate race that Hillary needed to remind women just how awful they'd felt for her as a wronged woman, and fearing that she might lose unless she played the victim card again: "Hillary has a problem with women, just the kind of women you would think she would attract. She has slipped from a 50% approval rate among women in 1998, during the Monica affair, to 44%...Suburban women could give Rick [Lazio, her lame opponent] the Senate seat. It is puzzling. So many of them look and talk like Hillary and think more like her than Lazio on abortion and guns and education.'' Sound familiar?
Here, too, is a BBC story about how voters were won over anew after mean Tim Russert brought up Monica in Clinton's Senate race debate with Lazio. A debate in which her opponent lost a ton of support by crossing the stage to hand her some nonsense pledge or other - a move that women in particular saw as threatening and way out of line. So where did anyone get the horrible, sexist idea that New York voters - women in particular - liked Hillary Clinton better specifically as a result of her husband's philandering? Sorry, but from New York voters who cited it as a factor at the time.
If we're obsessed with HRC -- and lots of people are -- it's because she is so endlessly complex that there is always another layer. (Although she has also on occasion made me think of that Sondheim lyric about another complicated woman, from the Follies song Ah, But Underneath: "Sometimes when the wrappings fall, there's nothing underneath at all.'') I hesitate to say this, because I see that Slate is running an ad for the paperback release of Carl Bernstein's A Woman in Charge, and I never want to let it be said that I wrote anything that pleased an advertiser. But of all the Hillary books I've read over the years - and oh, there have been many - this is the one that taught me the most. It convinced me that some of that feeling that we don't ever really know her is not only a function of her obfuscation -- though there's that, too -- but might also come from Hillary herself not knowing which version of her persona is really really real.
We all have our contradictions, of course, but there she was, the president of the Republican Club at Wellesley, attending the Republican convention in 1968 in some official capacity or other, and then, for good measure, sneaking downtown in Chicago with a girlfriend to hang with the anti-war protesters at the Democratic Convention that summer, too! Anyone who thinks she's posing when she espouses some pretty conservative views just doesn't know much about her. Which is understandable, because there is so much biographical ground to cover, and I sometimes think there have been so many Hillary books because she is Zelig meets the Three Faces of Eve; it's hard to believe that everything she's lived through happened to just one woman. It's wildly unfair to call her just another lawyer from a middle-sized city who also did volunteer work: She darn near single-handedly saved Legal Services from Ronald Reagan when she chaired the LSC in the early 80s. Then again, for every "wow, she did that?'' there seems to be an "oh no, she did that, too?'' It's kind of rich, for example, for her to deplore the politics of personal destruction when, according to Bernstein, she pushed hard during the '92 campaign to go after Poppy Bush as a....(supposed) philanderer!
So it's typical that while on the one hand she's the right-wing's prototype Feminazi, it's also true that her feminist credentials have been questioned throughout her adult life. Even now, she is hardly universally beloved by right-thinking, left-leaning women; Jane Fonda went so far as to call her "a ventriloquist for the patriarchy with a vagina and a skirt.'' She is not a sister plagued by self-doubt, though, as far as I can tell, even when she might ought to be. Which is one reason she hasn't found her voice -- as an orator, anyway. A friend of mine who is in Democratic politics herself and supports Clinton says the senator is just not breathing right. She told Hillary's people this, too, ages ago, and offered to give her a free breathing lesson that she claimed could have solved the problem in 40 minutes. But, Hillary's peeps thanked her for the feedback and never got back to her. Until this week, I think Hillary liked her voice fine the way it was.
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Anne,
The larger question about Hillary-as-beneficiary-of-Bill is fair game, and I want to say more about it in a second. First, though: what was creepy about Matthews wasn't that he was saying Hillary benefited from a form of nepotism (maritalism?); it was that he was saying we could elect her only because we felt sorry for her. Which seems creepier and nastier to me.
But on to the larger question about what, exactly, the nature of Hillary's accomplishments is--something that's been troubling me these past weeks. Like you, I'm sometimes bemused by the eager championing of her candidacy by feminists; you'd think feminists would want the first female presidential candidate to have a very different C.V. (And I'm sure many do.) I think you're right, we probably would never have heard of Hillary if Bill Clinton hadn't picked up his saxophone and started campaigning all those years ago. Yet if you stop and think about it, the issue is a little more complicated. Because one important (and unanswerable) question is: Would we have heard of Hillary if she hadn't married Bill Clinton? After all, she presumably shaped her career largely around his ambitions and his talent, and part of the deal they struck seems to have been that when the time came, he'd use his influence to support her. You could take the hard line and say that lots of talented women of her generation chose NOT to get married precisely so they wouldn't find themselves in her shoes. And I can understand that. Or you could say she shouldn't have settled so early into the role of just supporting him. But whatever the case, it would be important, I think, to acknowledge how difficult it is in within a marriage, even now, to insist that a husband's choices should be shaped by a wife's ambitions, rather than vice versa. You could still conclude that she just doesn't have real credentials, and that parlaying Bill's power into her own is creepy. Even so, it's a conundrum the men in this race didn't have to face -- just it proved a benefit they weren't able to take advantage of.
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Totally agree that the Bradley Effect is a bogus explanation. Also that the racism vs. sexism competition and one-upsmanship is ick and should end now.
That's about all I'm sure of today, though, because mostly I'm busy feeling torn. On the one hand, I love this from the inestimable Andrew Sullivan:
[P]art of me is happy to see two candidates forced to battle it out in a long slog. We find out more that way. They grow more. More people get a say. That's a good thing. ... I also feel little compunction in recognizing that Clinton did have something of a personal breakthrough in the last few days. The brittle exterior cracked. What was beneath is more human and less calculated. She was forced to explain from the heart why she really wants to win. People responded. As they would. ... Nothing worth winning comes easily. But Clinton is learning from Obama as he has from her. And both are growing as a result. This is a good thing.
On the other hand, I'm worried about what Clinton is going to do next. If Julia is right, and Hillary's authenticity quickly calcifies, then she'lll need to do something else to win. And that could mean going on a racism vs. sexism tear, or in some other way going after Obama in a way that will make the party as a whole come out looking terribly. This I fear. Especially because of the Hillary-Knows-Best arrogance that you nailed, Rachael. I get that presidential candidates have to convince themselves that they are utterly necessary to the nation, because of their egos and the hell of campaigning. But Hillary's sense that she and only she among the Democrats will make a good president reminds me of the worst of the first Clinton era—the sloppy self-aggrandizement, the embittered bunker mentality, the wasted opportunities and screw ups. Spare us.
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Meghan,
Chris Matthews was more interested in being nasty than being right. But isn't there something to the fact that the reason Hillary's a US Senator, the reason she's a candidate for president...is the fact that her husband was president at all? Reverse the first paragraph of that Gloria Steinem article again and ask yourself this: Imagine a talented man who falls in love while at Yale law school student and decides to follow his wife to a very provincial city - Little Rock, say - where he makes a decent but hardly national reputation for himself. Then he follows his more important wife to Washington, where for eight years he works as a full-time spouse. Is such a man qualified to be a senator, let alone president? I know that this is the old reductive narrative, I know we all know this, and I know it's reverting to the basic facts, but personally I find the fundamental presumption of Hillary's candidacy impossible to get away from.
The thing I don't get about Hillary, and never have, is why she is championed by feminists like Steinem. To me, a woman who owes her fame and reputation to her husband - and we would never of heard of her, a Little Rock lawyer and the governor's wife, if it weren't for his own New Hampshire surprise -doesn't inspire, however smart and talented she may be. I can see that there would be other reasons for New Hampshire women to vote for her, but because she's a role model for women? I don't get it.
For the record, I'd also like to note that everyone I know, even the most apolitical, is suddenly talking about American politics. Personally, I've found it hard to care deeply about the primaries, which always seemed to be months away. But—pathetically, predictably—now I'm gripped, absolutely gripped, by the whole thing, am even scouring YouTube for the latest soundbites. There's an actual race! There are interesting issues! Sexism! Racism! I can't be the only one out there who feels that way - might this be the election that gets the non-voters out to vote?
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We all knew Chris Matthews was no Hillary-lover, but what he said on air this morning takes the cake: "The reason she's a U.S. Senator, the reason she's a candidate for President, the reason she may be a front-runner, is her husband messed around. That's how she got to be Senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn't win it on the merits. ... " Nice. As Greg Sargent points out, what's egregious about this statement is that Matthews went right back to offering a reductive narrative about what voters do or don't like about Hillary. No wonder the commentators at MSNBC were so surprised when Hillary took the lead yesterday; they assumed all the undecided voters would go heavily for Obama, because they wanted it to happen that way. And now they are suggesting the Bradley effect is responsible. I agree with Juliet: I don't buy it. Like Emily Y, I'm hoping the commentators figure out by the next primary that they need to start offering up some more sophisticated analysis of just what is taking place.
via TPM.
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Now that Hillary's won New Hampshire everyone's falling all over themselves to ascribe racism as the cause —just as if she'd lost it would vindicate the view that Americans (unlike Brits or Germans) are fundamentally sexist. But I agree with Juliet that the New Hampshire result wasn't because in the privacy of the voting booth people won't vote for a black man. In the end, it was a close race between a woman and black man. If sexism and racism were the voters' secret vices, wouldn't we be talking about the stunning John Edwards' comeback? I hope we aren't going to have to listen to the sexist/racist dirge every time Hillary and Obama swap wins. Whoever gets the nomination, New Hampshire voters will have made her or him or her a better candidate. It would have been bad for either Hillary or Obama to feel she or he was the anointed one.
I agree with XXers that Obama's speech was better than Hillary's. I wanted more from her than plodding bromides. (And speaking of style [and sexism], I will dare to say it—was anyone else distracted by her jacket? Did she pull a Scarlett O'Hara and fashion a victory outfit out of the drapes at the hotel?) But I found myself surprised by how moved I was by McCain's speech. I had written him off months ago as a gutsy, erratic, cranky guy whose moment had passed. But he has shown courage in standing by the war and the surge. (The Washington Post had an interesting editorial noting that none of the Democrats at the last debate were willing to recognize the progress the surge has brought.) And of all the candidates last night, McCain was the one who acknowledged something that people may not want to hear: that the new president will face not just recalcitrant insurance companies, but a world full of violent enemies.
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So, I did it. I made myself watch Hillary's post-victory speech. (Alas, Julia beat me to the punch with the post-speech review.) Unfortunately for her, she spoke after Barack Obama. He was his eloquent, soaring self, making references to those who blazed a path for him and sweeping everyone up and carrying them along. Clinton's speech, while not "unbearable"—a description bandied about after her second-place finish in Iowa—sounded like a mundane stump speech in comparison.
Aside from their different oratory styles, there was one important stylistic difference that becomes painfully apparent in the his and hers transcripts: Obama uttered the word I three times—including when he said "I want to congratulate" Hillary. Mrs. Clinton? More than 20 times. Obama is the "we" candidate; Hillary is the "me" candidate. Even when she says something mildly stirring—"This campaign is about people. It's about making a difference in your lives. It's about making sure that everyone in this country has the opportunity to live up to his or her God-given potential," for example—it all comes back to her: "That has been the work of my life."
Clinton critics like to describe her as power-hungry, but I don't know if that's the source of all the self-referencing. She's long given me the impression that she believes she knows what's best for me, for all of us, and we'll like it whether we like it or not. And no amount of humanizing or not-quite-weeping over coffee with the girls can get me past that.
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Dahlia
argued yesterday that Obama is appealing because it's simpler "to be yourself
than to be a piece of precision machinery." At the outset of Hillary's victory
speech last night, she claimed to have had an epiphany along these lines: "Over
the last week, I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice." The
crowd roared, and I was moved, too. I'm undecided still, but leaning toward
Obama (even though he seems a little windy) because I think he has a better
chance in the general election. When I heard Hillary's opener, I was
momentarily convinced that her Iowa loss, the debate dust-ups, and the Diner
Sob--and the seemingly positive voter response to all of it--had delivered us a
new Hillary, one who can win: open, honest, authentic. But then the speech
rolled on, and as the crowd subsided it became possible to hear the clanking of
her political apparatus as it shifted from the Experience setting over to To-Thine-Own-Self-Be-True:
"very full heart", "we all spoke from our hearts", "politics isn't a game", "this
campaign is about people". A calculated pitch to show how authentic and
uncalculated she is!
I'm happy about the New Hampshire results. It's great
Democrats will have more time to make their decision. But I don't think Hillary
the Authentic will be convincing for long.
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With all due respect to Chris Matthews, and a few of Slate's very own pundits, I don't buy the theory that the "Bradley Effect" explains why Obama lost New Hampshire—that voters "lied" to pollsters to seem progressive.
Here's why, via Marc Ambinder: "the pre-election polls did NOT overstate Barack Obama's support. He averaged 36.7%, according to Mark Blumenthal's compilations," which is just under his actual piece of the pie—37 percent (with 95 percent of precincts counted).
So, what happened? The people who said they would vote for Obama probably did so, and undecided voters chose Hillary. Big whoop.
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Some analysts have been arguing that many of the actual differences between Clinton and Obama are a matter of style rather than substance. But, wow, is that stylistic difference.... substantive. Watching the two candidates speak last night you couldn't escape it. Obama is all cute optimism checked by quasi-gravitas. His way of ducking his head and looking down at the end of sentences makes you feel secure and cozy inside; it suggests an untapped inner power. Never mind that his speech doesn't say very much at all, built as it is on repetition and rousing rhetorical flourishes about hope and affirmation. Hillary says more, but she continues to seem so ill at-ease; watching her try to play cool gal, making shout-outs to supporters as the applause died down, simply made me uncomfortable.
I wonder if the biggest difference comes down to their voices. (Not their speaking styles.) Obama's is round and full and open. But Hillary always sounds as though she's not quite inhabiting hers- as if she is stuck using what some scholars call the "false voice," where the throat constricts. At other times, she seems as though she's trying to speak in a lower voice than is comfortable for her. I don't think this is a small point. As Anne Karpf points out in her fascinating book, The Human Voice, a lot of how we judge people's derives from what their voices subconsciously convey to us. She points out that over the past 50 years women's voices have deepened to a pitch closer to men's--a pitch we associate (if I recall correctly) with trustworthiness and power. (Margaret Thatcher's voice, Karpf notes, "lowered by 60Hz, or about half the normal difference between a female and a male voice" while she was Prime Minister.) Watching that clip of Hillary's "emotional moment," I was most struck by how natural her voice sounded. She said she finally had found her true voice. Was it the way her voice sounded, as much as anything she actually said, that might have spoken to voters?
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Back when that book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten came out, I thought about how everything I needed to know I learned in my 92 years of dating. And as it turns out, those lessons hold up pretty well in political life, too, in that chemistry and timing trump reason and a common goal more often than we'd like to admit.
Political life does not always mirror the real thing, though: If New Hampshire were an employer and Hillary Clinton a job candidate, she would have been out of contention the minute her eyes filled with tears during the interview. As those Sex and the City women (thank you, Trailhead) and every flesh-and-blood XX knows, men can throw phones and wastebaskets across the office and that's cool, but a woman who lets a tear fall is toast.
Which really might explain - sorry, but the instant Conventional Wisdom does occasionally get it right -- why women who could relate rode to Clinton's rescue last night. In future contests, I'm guessing Obama will refrain from gratuitous, way-beneath-him swipes like "You're likeable enough, Hillary.'' But that still leaves her with the same problem Al Gore had in 2000: What about Bill?