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Poring through Michael Calderone's "Top Ten Media Blunders of 2008" in the Politico, it was hard not to notice how many of his favorite Fourth Estate screw-ups had to do, in some obvious or oblique way, with sexism purportedly making its way into the press. You've got the whole Hillary-in-New-Hampshire episode, in which Hillary wept and the media's subsequent mockery mobilized women voters on her behalf (or so the mythology goes); you've got MSNBC's choice to hand its election coverage over to Chris "She-Devil" Matthews; you've got the "Obama's baby mama" Chyron on Fox; and you've got the David Shuster pimp-Chelsea Clinton thing—along with the questionable coverage of two alleged Big Macher mistresses, Vicki Iseman and Rielle Hunter.
You could make the case that all the media's stumbles over sexism should alarm women, but I wonder if the opposite isn't the case. It shows how sensitive we've become to the various pitfalls inherent in covering women. (And, well, maybe too sensitive, but that's another debate.)
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My beloved Liz Lemon—er, I mean Tina Fey—isn't the only one suggesting that Sarah Palin's focus has shifted from 2008 to 2012. Today, trying get a jump on the post-election story before the polls even open, much less close, a host of politicos are placing their bets over who will emerge from the broken GOP as the next to be (unofficially) crowned party leader.
When John McCain chose his running mate, he was rightfully lambasted as cynical for passing over experienced insider men for an accessible outsider woman. In the end, he was right on one count: that a swath of the American public—though one which perhaps may not be wide enough to elect him tomorrow—felt so disenfranchised by the people who hold power in this country that they would line up behind someone who reflected and could articulate their own proud feelings of ordinariness. (This profound cultural conflict—rooted deep in issues of education and economics—will require far more systemic thinking than the fuzzy feeling of "unity" Obama hopes to usher in tomorrow and beyond.) Where McCain may have been wrong—and this is big—was in his perception of this election as a game of identity politics.
People have talked plenty about whether Obama is a post-race candidate for a post-race America. I've generally taken issue with that notion—and should he be elected, my heart positively swells with the notion of the descendant of slaves raising her children inside the White House. But by the same flawed token, did Sarah Palin become a post-gender candidate for a post-gender America? Of course, Palin has certainly worked her gender in this race: from that flirty wink and sky-high Manolos to her uber-mom positioning. But like Obama's race hasn't been the totalizing meta-narrative of his candidacy, neither has Palin's gender, and just as this hasn't been an election year for single issue voters, it hasn't been one for single-identity ones either, despite what pundits may have predicted from the outset. We entered this race all aflutter about our first female presidential candidate. We're ending it considering the next one with hardly a shrug about her gender.
While I am hardly a Palin fan, and for myriad reasons shudder to imagine how she might develop with the next four years to study up, the fact that neither her supporters nor her detractors seemed to make a big deal about a female commander in chief (remember those days?) suggests that in unexpected ways, we've come a long way during this long march to Election Day.
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This link is to the utterly bizarre video tribute by Hillary Clinton to Heather Mills—the mentally unbalanced newly ex-wife of Beatle Paul McCartney. Hillary, in a kind of zombie mode, gives a unified field theory tribute to Heather. In this four-minute accolade, Hillary credits Heather, in part, for New York's recovery from Sept. 11, Hillary's decision to introduce an anti-landmine bill, and Hillary's knowledge about life that we must "just enjoy every single minute of this beautiful gift that we've been given." She ends by saying, "God bless you, Heather." (The judge in Heather's divorce case has a somewhat different take on Heather's qualities, saying she is a self-aggrandizer with a tenuous relationship to the truth and an "explosive and volatile character".) The only explanation for this artifact I can come up with is that in a little-known episode Hillary was forced to make this tape while being held hostage by Heather, which must have been a far more perilous situation that Hillary's trip to Bosnia.
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How great would it be if Client No. 10 was Bill Clinton?
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Dahlia’s right that last night’s debate was conciliatory and eggshell-tiptoeing to an almost comic degree: After you, my dear Alphonse. But it was a relief to have a break from last week’s victim-of-oppression sweepstakes (which was approaching its nadir in the press as well: did you all see Lorrie Moore’s bizarre op-ed scoffing that feminism has had its day in the sun?)
As someone with a really sad-looking desk of my own, I was also charmed by Obama’s admission of an inability to keep track of paperwork without the aid of a staff. But I’m not sure I agree with Melinda that this moment was an unalloyed mark in his favor. Those harboring doubts about Obama’s youth and relative inexperience, or wondering how he’ll flesh out his rhetoric with action, may not be soothed by the news that he’s not a detail guy, no matter how low the stakes. And after eight years with a leader whose “vision thing” has tended to take precedence over the reading-the-newspaper thing, voters may believe that a single piece of paper (like the August 6, 2001 PDB) can be very important indeed.
Clinton leapt at the chance to exploit this moment of candor by pointing to Katrina as an example of a top-down management debacle: “You have to be able to manage and run the bureaucracy.” But I don’t think her own response to the biggest-flaw question was completely disingenuous. Wasn’t her confession that she can be impatient about change, and “sometimes come across that way,” a not-so-veiled admission that her personality can be her own worst political enemy? Wasn’t she saying, in essence, “Fine, I’m pushy”?
Edwards, on the other hand (who I thought performed wonderfully in the January 5 debate) seemed strained and defensive, going out of his way to mention the word “mill” every 30 seconds: “My father was a mill worker.” “I grew up in a mill town.” “I really wish my opponents could be ground up in some type of mill.” His response to Russert’s question about strengths and failings was pure hogwash, the stump-speech equivalent of “I poop rainbows”: “I sometimes have a very powerful emotional response to the pain I see around me,” he said, before segueing into a story about, surprise, a laid-off mill worker. Still, all three candidates were Hamlet-like models of introspection compared to our current president, who, asked at a 2004 press conference to name a single mistake he’d made in office, inadvertently revealed more about himself in his answer than any of the three candidates did last night: “I’m sure something will pop into my head here … you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I’m not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.” Four years later, he still hasn’t thought of anything.
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