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I'll be very curious to see if this dust-up affects Hillary's poll numbers—and my hunch is that it won't. It's pretty minor, so perhaps not much of a test, but my bet is that she'll maintain her huge edge among women voters. In the personal realm, we're often hard on each other: Studies like the one you mention, Meghan, reflect women's judgment of each other as well as men's judgment of them. But of Hillary, maybe many of us are becoming more forgiving. We know she has a lot of role expectations to straddle.
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Ruth Marcus has a smart piece in today’s Washington Post about Hillary’s decision to play the gender card. I think she is spot-on. Hillary is so far above this sort of gender-grousing, it actually diminishes her to retreat to it. Barack Obama called her on it this morning, saying that “it doesn't make sense for her, after having run that way for eight months, the first time that people start challenging her point of view, that suddenly she backs off and says, "Don't pick on me."
In one sense it’s not fair. For most Americans, Hillary’s gender will be the main lens through which she is judged. Everyone is “reading her” as you say, Meghan, as a woman. And yet each time she reads herself that way—by referring to herself as a “girl” or unleashing a little cleavage—we all go bananas. I think Marcus is right to suggest that Hillary is at her post-feminist best when she uses her girl power to show strength, but lets down the team when she reaches for it as a victim. Still, it’s a double standard wrapped up in a double standard. A double standard squared?
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In the NYT this morning, Gail Collins' column is all about Hillary's toughness. Collins reams Clinton for the substantive answers she gave during Tuesday's debates, but gives her style points for holding her own while "being yelled at by six men." "They began piling on from the first question. She took it all and came out the other end in one piece. She’s one tough woman. Kudos."
Meghan, you pointed out that Hillary gets called a pretender, and wondered if that's because she's striving to be a manly-girl. Collins' column is another phenomenon: Hillary gets points for being tough precisely because she's a woman. Those cross currents will probably be with us through the election; their relative strength could determine whether she wins. I wonder, though, if Hillary's reputation as a pretender has another origin. I believe her toughness. It's empathy that I have trouble feeling from her to the same degree.
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If we need any reminder that it's not easy to be the first popular female candidate for the American presidency, it arrived Monday in the form of an announcement by the AP that Hillary Clinton was leading in yet another poll. This one? The candidate likely to make the "scariest" Halloween costume. Some 37% of the respondents to the survey chose Hillary as their front-runner. (Giuliani was second, with 14%. More key details here.)
The fright-mask news arrives roughly a month after it was announced that Clinton had led in a Pew poll asking respondents about the relative "toughness" of the various candidates: In it, some 67% of Democratic-leaning voters said that Hillary was the first candidate who came to mind when they heard the word "tough." By comparison, only 39% of Republican-leaning voters thought of Giuliani when they heard the word "tough." (Yet he was considered the "toughest" Republican candidate.) All this might seem to be good news for Clinton: after all, over the past year, she has labored hard to burnish her "tough" persona, so as to stave off the perception that a woman--and a Democrat, to boot!--would prove soft on matters of foreign policy. It'd be easy to think that it had finally paid off.
But I've been wondering all this time whether a "tough" backlash was on its way (maybe just because I've been reading Susan Faludi's flawed but sometimes piercingly insightful The Terror Dream). And just last Friday a crucial American institution paved the way for said backlash. In a segment entitled, "Is it OK for women to cry" -- pegged to Ellen DeGeneres' on-air breakdown--the Today Show broadcast images of Clinton giving a speech and shaking hands and confidently pronounced that many people think "that she is too stoic, that she doesn't reveal enough of herself"--on its way to elaborating on the communicative benefits of crying in public. If media coverage of the last election was filled with accusations about girlie-men, will this one be full of talk about manly-girls? Let's hope not. In the meantime, here's an article that briefly discusses the latter group (scroll down); apparently we see them as "pretenders." Sound like a familiar critique of Clinton?
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