"More harm has been done to our democracy by the demented anti-Clintinoids than the Clintons ever did."—Thers.
Fox News cut its teeth, took its first steps, and got itself as potty-trained as it's ever going to get developing its patented brand of biased, factless, oft-newsless, appeal-to-the-ugliest-nature-of-the-lowest-common-denominator attack journalism during the Clinton years, mostly by going after the Clintons.
And it's now been copied by nearly every other news program in America.
Things to Bear in Mind
Olmert Pile
The opening line to this WaPo article is truly a keeper:
Is Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert auditioning to replace Tony Blair as George W. Bush's new "poodle?"You're probably thinking that Ehud must've exhibited some serious ass-lickage to be crowned the new poodle.
He sure did.
In an interview last week with the Jerusalem Post, Olmert said that in all his years in public life, he did not recall “that America was led by someone as friendly since the days of President Ford.”Oh really? Tell you what, Ehud - when Paula Deen asks Bush to tape a sentimental cooking episode in Crawford, I'll momentarily redirect my ridicule from you to her. Heck, how could he even overlook Reagan in the friendly department? I don't think Ehud gets out much, which is clearly evident in his next jaw-dropping remark:
“He’s also a great guy,” Olmert added of Bush. “I know that people say all kinds of things about him. Gentlemen, he’s a graduate of Yale and Harvard. People don’t graduate from Harvard and Yale without wisdom and understanding of processes and domestic and international relationships. He’s a very wise man.”You read that right. See, Ehud, the only process Bush understands is that if your family is privileged and well off, you can do whatever the fuck you want. People don't graduate from Yale and Harvard for bragging rights that they got by as a C student.
Olmert can adore Bush all he wants. The more he does, the more ridicule he'll acquire on the world stage, and the more he'll look like an ass when the next administration comes'a'rolling in.
[H/T to ThinkProgress]
Teenage Wasteland
Gail Collins has yet another theory as to why Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire primary.
Everybody is going to have a story about why the gender gap erupted in New Hampshire, why female voters rallied to Hillary’s side after the horrendous week when she lost Iowa, was cornered in the weekend debate, told that she was unlikable on national television, and then teared up when a sympathetic voter asked her how she held up under it all. Do women Obama’s age look at him and see the popular boy who never talked to them in high school? Did they relate to Clinton’s strategy of constantly reminding her audiences that she’s been working for reform for 35 years? Barack’s not going to be able to top that unless he can prove he was an agent of change in elementary school.I've been a student of theatre for most of my adult life, especially the area of dramatic literature. I've focused on those plays that were written in what we call the post-war era, studying the works of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Robert Anderson, William Inge, the later works of Eugene O'Neill, and more recent authors such as Lanford Wilson. I've come to the conclusion that these authors are using the stage like a psychiatrist's couch; to tell the stories of their youth and childhood in an effort to recapture or make right the slights and traumas of that time in their life.
My own favorite theory is that this week, Hillary was a stand-in for every woman who’s overdosed on multitasking. They grabbed at the opportunity to have kids/go back to school/start a business/become a lawyer. But there are days when they can’t meet everybody’s needs and the men in their lives — loved ones and otherwise — make them feel like failures or towers of self-involvement. Clinton’s failed attempt to suck it up hit home.
The women whose heart went out to Hillary knew that it wasn’t rational. She asked for this race, and if she was exhausted, the other candidates were, too. (John McCain is 71 and tired and nobody felt sorry for him.) The front-runner always gets ganged up on in debates. If her campaign was in shambles, it was her job to fix it or take the consequences. But for one moment, women knew just how Hillary felt, and they gave her a sympathy vote. It wasn’t a long-term commitment, just a brief strike by the sisters against their overscheduled world.
Or it could just have been a better get-out-the-vote operation.
It makes for great theatre, and it reveals something about us as humans: we spend a great deal of our time as adults trying to rewrite the past. Those were the years when we are discovering the world and we are experiencing new things (not to mention the changes our bodies go through; we are literally going through a metamorphosis that would give Kafka a run for his money). They are amazing, scary, thrilling, and imprinting events, and very often what happens to us when we are twelve or sixteen will mark us, for good or bad, for the rest of our lives. It is no wonder that the advertising world focuses on the mythology of the perfect human form as being a curvaceous high school cheerleader and her well-muscled boyfriend with the perfect teeth and the cool car. So this has to be the explanation why the op-ed columnists like Ms. Collins or Maureen Dowd convey their observations in these terms. Not only is it a common denominator that just about every reader will understand, it taps into the core of our being. And when they talk about the shame of being the unpopular kid or just being not cool, and how that defines the terms of the perception of the candidates, everyone gets it. It's really easy to label each candidate based on the archetypes of high school: the nerd, the drama queen, the prep, the grind, the jock, the stoner, the slacker, the suck-up, and on and on.
So it isn't really any wonder why everyone who has something to say about the current presidential campaign and the interactions between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama or between her and her audience -- and how the voters respond to her -- are doing it in the terms that everyone identifies with and everyone, regardless of gender, socio-economic background, or sexual orientation understands: teenage angst. We may all be adults, but we think in the terms that made us what we are: the intense rivalries and nearly bipolar emotions that dominated our adolescence, and when the discussions turn into arguments and then flashes of temper and exasperation show up, it sounds more like a fight in the hallway rather than a dispassionate debate on how best to reform the tax code. The final irony is that when you are a child the one thing you want most in the world is to grow up, become an adult, and leave all the angst and trauma behind you...only to find out that once you do, you will spend the rest of your life trying to get it back.
It makes for good drama, but I'm not so sure it's the way to elect a president. The devolution of the discussion down to the point that it's getting ridiculous ("Hillary won because she cried") makes us forget that we're not electing the homecoming queen, and actually asking people in a serious poll who they'd like to have a beer with -- the allegedly adult version of who you'd like to be your best friend -- should not be the basis for whom we entrust with the nuclear launch code.
(Cross-posted.)
John Kerry Endorses Obama
Chris Cillizza has some ideas about what this means practically (email lists; remnants of a national operation), but, like Chris, I don't think it's ultimately going to matter very much. It'll be seen as a slap in the face to Edwards, since he was Kerry's running mate four years ago, but it's no secret that Edwards was pissed when Kerry conceded, so I don't think there's any love lost there.
Personally, I just think it's bad form for sitting senators (or reps) to give endorsements during the primary. It makes it harder for the party to present a legitimate united front behind the eventual nominee. But expecting the Dems to collectively be anything beside a fractured bunch of incorrigible doofs is probably expecting too much.
Actual Headline
Women's Support for Clinton Rises in Wake of Perceived Sexism
Bwahhhhhh!!! Perceived sexism. Stop, NY Times—you're killing me! PERCEIVED!!! Omigawd, ha ha ha ha ha!!!
Let's enter the Wayback Machine, shall we? Destination: Shakesville. Date: December 17, 2007. (i.e. 25 days ago)
Attack of the 50-Foot Vagina-American Who Thinks She's Got a Right to Be Equal to Her Husband and Shit(Click here to open image—showing Bill, at long last, finally assuming a higher profile in "his wife's" campaign, instead of that lowly position down by her feet he's been holding while the uppity bitch was off running her campaign as if it's her own—in new window.)
The New York Times' coverage of Hillary Clinton continues to be bloody disgraceful, outdoing itself yet again with another ridiculous image and barely concealed misogyny.
Or how about Destination: The New York Times. Date: January 8, 2008. (i.e. 2 days ago)
Mrs. Clinton bared her thoughts about the race’s impact on her personally, and her eyes welled with tears… Her eyes visibly wet, in perhaps the most public display of emotion of her year-old campaign… Mrs. Clinton did not cry, but her quavering voice and the flash of feeling underscored the pressure, fatigue, anger and disappointment… Mrs. Clinton has felt frustrated and at times rejected…It turns out the "Mrs. Clinton" of whom they speak isn't, in fact, a seventh-grade girl who's just been snubbed by the popular clique at school.
Or how about Destination: Shakesville. Date: January 9, 2008 (i.e. 1 day ago)
MoDo's thesis, as you'll surely recall, is that Hillary made herself a victim of the press, playing the damsel in distress, despite, I guess, what MoDo would argue is the totally fair, unbiased, and not remotely misogynistic treatment of Hillary. But, with neither an ounce of self-awareness nor a trace of irony, this is how her piece actually begins:Yeah, what a befuddling shock that people might be "perceiving" sexism—never mind that I could dig out dozens, if not hundreds, of examples just like these just from your own pages, that I could dig out literally thousands and thousands of examples from across the entirety of the American media since the campaign started, and that I could dig out I can't even begin to imagine how many (a nonillion?) from coverage of Clinton over the past 15 years.When I walked into the office Monday, people were clustering around a computer to watch what they thought they would never see: Hillary Clinton with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes.Nope, no sexism there among the witty banter of the measured, objective professionals at the Gray Lady. I'm sure that they think "crying works in relationships" for teh dudez, too, presume men to be incapable of regulating emotions while meeting with world leaders, and fail to regard as "human" all male candidates until they express an emotion that is then immediately deemed laughably inappropriate.
A woman gazing at the screen was grimacing, saying it was bad. Three guys watched it over and over, drawn to the "humanized" Hillary. One reporter who covers security issues cringed. "We are at war," he said. "Is this how she'll talk to Kim Jong-il?"
Another reporter joked: "That crying really seemed genuine. I'll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand." He added dryly: "Crying doesn't usually work in campaigns. Only in relationships."
This isn't a problem of "perception." This is a problem of actual. fucking. sexism.
Assholes.
Oops
In which Sully tries to accuse Hillary of sexism, but reveals his own:
Against The "Buddy System"Emphasis mine.
"I was laughing because you know in that debate, obviously Sen. Edwards and Sen. Obama were kind of in the buddy system on the stage. And I was thinking whoever's up against the Republican nominee in the election debates come the fall is not gonna have a buddy to fall back on. You know, you're all by yourself. When you're president, you're there all by yourself," - Senator Clinton on her two rivals for the nomination. Notice another subtle use of the gender card. We really are headed back to the 1990s.
What is it, I wonder, that makes Sully think the "buddy system" is just for men? He obviously didn't attend sleepover Girl Scout camp, or he would know that Girl Scouts always go to the outdoor loo in pairs, using the buddy system. Harrumph.
Big Tent Democrat at TalkLeft notes that the buddy system is used by the US Army, scuba divers, and firefighters, including, presumably, female soldiers, female scuba divers, and female firefighters. Ahem.
Or is it just the term buddy? That's not just for men, either, last I checked.
Or is he positing that it's necessarily a de facto use of "the gender card," because Hillary is a woman referring to two men? If so, that makes it pretty damn hard to refer to your opponents without playing the gender card when you're the only woman in the race.
Question of the Day
I think it's time we get away from all things politic and primary for like 5 minutes.
So here's the deal: Assuming that we accept reincarnation as a possibility, what kind of animal would you come back as?
I would like to initially come back as a mosquito living comfortably in Fox's studios and annoying as many people there as insectly possible prior to getting killed. For reincarnation #2, I would like to come back as a Great White Owl. I would look ridiculously cool, and know it.
For the Record
"Vagina Voting" is a euphemism for the profoundly misogynist argument advanced by overpaid members of our lazy and stupid national media which posits that women will want to vote for Hillary just because she's a woman. It treats women as a monolithic group (the foolishness of which is explained here, for a start) and necessarily presumes that women are failing to weigh with seriousness a candidate's policies, positions, and, presumably, even her party affiliation.
When a woman, as Kate did here, talks about Hillary's femaleness as a potentially deciding factor in whether to support her, it has nothing to do with "Vagina Voting." There's absolutely no reason to presume that an intelligent, rational, progressive woman who says she's leaning toward Hillary because she's a woman hasn't already taken into consideration all the political implications of that decision.
And if you are making that presumption—if you hear a woman you know to be politically astute saying, "I'm leaning toward Hillary now because she's a woman," and you say, "Well, choose her because she's got the best policies, not because she's got ovaries!"—you need to stop and ask yourself why you feel compelled to issue that caveat, despite its manifest insult to the intelligence of any woman at whom it is directed.
It's absolutely legitimate for Hillary's sex to be one's deciding factor, and no less legitimate than citing John Edwards being a millworker's son who knows what it's like to be working class as one's deciding factor. Though, strangely, no one accuses anyone of overlooking all his policies if they honor his background thusly.
Hillary is arguably the least progressive of the three Democratic front-runners (and I say arguably, because it's a mixed bag; she's more hawkish and corporate-friendly, but she's also got the most ethnically diverse campaign staff and the most women among both her paid campaign staff and senior staff of any Democrat in the race), yet it would be absurd to suggest that she could not reasonably be the first choice of progressive women (or men) totally irrespective of her sex, merely by virtue of people having different legislative—and cultural—priorities.
And given that women, the LGBTQ community, and people of color have been under assault from the GOP political machine for my entire lifetime and long, long before—and given that the Dems ain't always much better—it's the worst kind of condescending horseshit to suggest that the cultural priority of repudiating institutional misogyny by supporting the female candidate (of three pretty damn good candidates) isn't a legitimate or thoughtful position. There's a big goddamned difference between telling little girls they can grow up to be president someday when there's never been a female president, and telling them while holding up a picture of Madame President.
This issue is rich with nuance, and I don't think its complexity could be illustrated any more clearly than with this: When we do inaugurate our first female president, at long last, I will celebrate. I will cheer. I will blub.
No matter who she is, no matter what party, no matter whether I did not vote for her and never would have in a million fucking years.
And then I will set to work holding her feet to the fire just like anyone else.
Maude Bless America.
Weakly Standard
Via Wonkette: 
Though they backpedaled a bit on their website this morning, this stupid Weekly Standard cover is sitting on a shelf right now at a newsstand near you. It will be there for the rest of the week, in fact. This is exactly the kind of political astuteness that earned editor Bill Kristol a spot in the pages of the New York Times. We can’t read the story because it’s behind a subscriber wall, but we imagine it’s full of the same kind of masturbatory wishful thinking the headline suggests. If you do have access to this thing for whatever reason, please send it to us so that we might mock it further.Oof. I guess they were a bit too excited. Now they'll have to fend off tons of questions about their integrity in political reporting. And they'll probably complain that they're getting picked on, not having expected anything like a Spanish Inquisition.
You know the rest.
That's Just Sick
If you thought Fred Phelps and his band of harpies protesting at the funerals of dead soldiers from Iraq was as low as they could get, this story will recalibrate your sensors.
From the Toledo Blade:
BALTIMORE — The memorial service Tuesday for five members of a Maryland family killed by a wrong-way truck in a Toledo highway accident included some uninvited guests.Ugh. Just... ugh.
Three members of the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, known for protests at military funerals, demonstrated about a block from St. Luke Evangelical Lutheran Church, the site of the service.
The demonstrators said the deaths are God’s retribution against the community for a recent $11 million jury award against the Kansas group. A federal jury in Baltimore made the award in October to Albert Snyder, of York, Pa., who sued after the group protested his son’s military funeral in Maryland.
The community is going to “pay the price” for persecuting his group for preaching the word of God, said demonstrator Fred Phelps.
A mother and four children died in the Dec. 30 crash on Interstate 280 in Toledo, which police said was caused by a drunken driver.
I'm worried too, Ms. Steinem...
Crossposted from AngryBlackBitch.com.
This isn’t an easy post to write. I am a proud black feminist who holds a deep respect for feminist leaders and has done a lot of inner work to come to terms with feminism’s history with race and class.
Yeah, this is not an easy post to write…but a sistah’s got to do what a sistah’s got to do.
Gloria Steinem has an Op-Ed in the New York Times titled Women Are Never Front-Runners. I read the Op-Ed and I feel compelled to address it here.I highly recommend that you read the piece before you go on reading this post.
After reading Steinem’s Op-Ed I felt invisible…as if black and woman can’t exist in the same body. I felt undocumented…as if the history of blacks and the history of women have nothing to do with the history of black women.
When I read “Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter).” I felt both attacked and ignored at the same time.
I think of the women and men in my family who were not extended the protected vote until 1965. I wince at the lack of acknowledgment for the black women of Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery who had to march with their brothers in the 1960s to attain the vote because the suffrage movement abandoned them in a Southern strategy to get the vote in 1920.
And there it is again…that invisibility; like a brutal weight that I am so bloody tired of carrying.
When I consider Steinem's “So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?” I’m left confused.
What country does Gloria live in where race barriers are taken seriously? I’d love to know…shit, maybe I’ll move there. But I’m a black woman and this is America where none of my barriers are given more than a token consideration and I’ll present this Op-Ed as exhibit A in that argument.
Steinem goes on to say, “I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. That’s why Senators Clinton and Obama have to be careful not to let a healthy debate turn into the kind of hostility that the news media love. Both will need a coalition of outsiders to win a general election. The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.”
But this article is soaked in the fluid of competition. It reeks of frustration that I fear is born from a place of entitlement even though it is dressed in the language of the oppressed. And I’ll point out again, the suffrage movement progressed without racial or true class unity and many a sister were damaged by that division.
We should remember that, but first we have to know it.
What worries me is that Gloria bought that bullshit about Obama’s race being a unifying factor. C’mon now, these are early dates yet and campaign operatives have already taken a dip in the race baiting pool. Not for one second do I believe that the unifying power of Senator Obama’s blackness will not eventually collide with the same elegant condescension contained in Steinem's Op-Ed.
What worries me is that this is kind of article that makes some black women wary of feminism…wary of the sisterhood…because eventually, just give it time, it will all come down to black and white or women and men with black women vanished from the equation.
What worries me is the ease with which Ms. Steinem tossed out the insult of implying that Iowans, when faced with a black male candidate, went with that candidate because they are somehow more comfortable with black male leadership than female leadership. It begs the question how John Edwards failed to win by a landslide.
What worries me is that the author is frustrated that Obama hasn’t been accused of playing the race card for his civil rights references and feels that Hillary is getting a raw deal when she gets accused of playing the gender card. Let’s keep it real…Steinem is just frustrated about that race card because a black man is supposed to get called on that shit and she didn’t give permission for any rule change.
What worries me is the patronizing tone with which Steinem dismisses the choices of young women voters. Is it any wonder that young women pause before embracing the feminist movement? Steinem concludes that young women are not radical yet. Will she conclude the same of black women should Clinton lose South Carolina?
I agree with Ms. Steinem that we have to be able to say that we are supporting her, a woman candidate, "because she would be a great president and because she is a woman."
But we also have to be able to say I’m not supporting her because I’ve evaluated her and examined her resume without being labeled a victim or self hating or not radical enough or not feminist enough or easily dazzled by great oratory skills or more black than woman or just too darn stupid to do what Ms. Steinem thinks we should do.
Hey—Did You Know Hillary's a BIG GIRLY NARCISSISTIC CRYBABY?!
I cannot say this any more plainly: I unequivocally support 100% the Obama campaign's right to question Clinton (as well as any other candidate) on her commitment to the black community. The Democrats have taken their black constituency for granted for far too long; Obama has proven his mettle, having been a community organizer for years, and he has absolutely earned the right to mount that challenge, as far as I'm concerned.
But I am not giving the campaign a pass on burying accusations of Hillary's indifference to black voters within more misogyny.
Yesterday, I said it was incumbent upon Obama to directly address misogynist attacks on Hillary Clinton if he wanted women to believe that he would be their ally in the White House. Unless I hear a repudiation of his campaign co-chair intimating Hillary faked her (nonexistent) tears and of crying about "her appearance," even though she never cried "in response to Katrina," I am going to have a very difficult time believing that Obama is a genuine ally to women.
...there were tears that melted the Granite State. And those are tears that Mrs. Clinton cried on that day, clearly moved voters. She somehow connected with those voters.To paraphrase Kanye, Hillary Clinton doesn't care about black people.
But those tears also have to be analyzed. They have to be looked at very, very carefully in light of Katrina, in light of other things that Mrs. Clinton did not cry for, particularly as we head to South Carolina where 45% of African-Americans who participate in the Democratic contest, and they see real hope in Barack Obama.
… We saw something very clever in the last week of this campaign coming out of Iowa, going into New Hampshire, we saw a sensitivity factor. Something that Mrs. Clinton has not been able to do with voters that she tried in New Hampshire.
Not in response to voters -- not in response to Katrina, not in response to other issues that have devastated the American people, the war in Iraq, we saw tears in response to her appearance. So her appearance brought her to tears, but not hurricane Katrina.
Because she's too busy crying like a BIG GIRL about how she looks.
Jebus.
[H/T to Shaker Puellasolis, in comments.]
Revenge of the Old White Men
If there's one thing that nature has taught us, it's that any creature whose power is threatened will hunker down and fight to the death. And so it goes with Old White Men (entitilus rabidis):
No, Tom, I don't think your demonstration is necessary. I don't think we need any further evidence of the wealth and benefits that CEOs get to enjoy. I also don't think we need to know about the jobs corporations create, albeit overseas via outsourcing.Alarmed at the increasingly populist tone of the 2008 political campaign, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is set to issue a fiery promise to spend millions of dollars to defeat candidates deemed to be anti-business.
"We plan to build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed," chamber President Tom Donohue said. [...]
"I'm concerned about anti-corporate and populist rhetoric from candidates for the presidency, members of Congress and the media," he said. "It suggests to us that we have to demonstrate who it is in this society that creates jobs, wealth and benefits -- and who it is that eats them."
Regardless, the Lord of the Lobbyists will stop at nothing to protect the glory that is big business and release the hounds against those who would defile it:
Under a system Donohue pioneered, corporations contribute money to the chamber, which then finances attack ads targeting individual candidates without revealing the name of the businesses involved in the ads.Now that's the kind of go-getter attitude corporations like to see, right Tom?
No matter, Tom. You see, a lot of regular people can bite back too. And I have a hunch you're going to feel it, but good.
[H/T to the Muckraker, and supremely vampiric graphic by Liss]
In Which I'm Hugely Disappointed to Be Right
Last night, in the comments of Jeff's awesome Angry Women Back Clinton post, I said, "I'm frankly a lot less optimistic than you are that tonight's inspiring and refreshing and generally fantastic repudiation of institutional misogyny will last. It will raise its head again in this campaign. Mark my words. I'd bet money on seeing an example tomorrow."
Today:
Last night, Matthews said: "I give her a lot of personal credit; I will never underestimate Hillary Clinton again."
But by this morning Matthews had already forgotten his newfound respect for her. He said: "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..."
In good news, the other part of my comment was this: "That doesn't undermine what happened tonight, though. It was awesome. And it was worth a good few teaspoons."
Keep talking, Tweety, you misogynist wankstain. Underestimate her all the way to the White House.
[Thanks to Blogenfreude for passing that along.]
In which I Talk about Something other than Fat
I don't usually write much about politics, because there are so many bloggers out there doing it better than I could -- including every last one of my co-Shakers. But after last night, I need to talk about Hillary. So I'll just start by quoting people who do it better than me.
In a post that fanned the flames of my burgeoning crush on him (sorry, Al), Jeff Fecke said about Hillary's New Hampshire win:
Some will criticize this as misguided identity politics, but they’re wrong. Oh, it’s identity politics — women in New Hampshire and throughout the country recognized that Clinton was being attacked as a woman, and came to her defense. But it’s far from misguided.And in comments on Liss's post about why Maureen Dowd needs to shut up even more than usual today, we have this exchange.
It amazes me how strong Hillary has to be to deal with this sexist bullshit day in and day out... Last night I was watching "Hardball" and Tweety and Pat Buchanan were talking about Hillary "breaking down" while Rachel Maddow kept trying to interrupt, sputtering, "but why did no one make a big deal about Romney tearing up on at least three occasions during this campaign?" Seriously, it's this type of shit that just may make me vote for her. Perhaps that's what occurred to the women of New Hanpshire as well...
CC,Constant Comment sums up my feelings last night, and Nightshift sums up the debate I've been having with myself since Hillary announced her candidacy. Hell, since before she announced her candidacy. Almost two years ago, when I was still writing Pointless, Incessant Barking instead of Shapely Prose, and my blog had about 12 readers, I wrote this:
You've alluded to one of my concerns about Hillary: we may elect out of empathy a candidate we don't actually agree with on the issues. She's arguably the most conservative Democrat in the race judged by her policy positions.
OTOH, Liss has half-convinced me that HRC could advance the feminist cause more just by being president without regard for her policies.
I’m not saying there aren’t good reasons to dislike her. I’m saying there aren’t good reasons to despise her the way so many do–that shit is directly related to her being a woman who doesn’t know her place. A woman who has the gall to believe she deserves to apply for any job she’s capable of. A woman who knows exactly how smart she is and acts as if that should bloody well count for something. A woman who has not backed down in the face of more than a decade’s worth of brutal public criticism.If you click through and read the whole post, you'll see I actually said, in writing, "I would honestly rather see her go down fighting like mad than see a Democrat get elected." *cringe* I don't think that was really true then, and it's certainly not now, but that's evidence of how furious I got at all the "Hillary shouldn't run -- she's not electable!" bullshit that was around before she announced her candidacy -- and which continues, in some measure, to this day. Because it is and always has been incredibly difficult to separate legitimate criticism of her policies from the misogyny, conscious or unconscious, that drives so much anti-Hillary sentiment.
We don’t know what to do with a woman like that. We keep telling her what her place is, and the bitch just won’t listen! It makes a lot of people nervous. It makes me unutterably grateful. I hope like hell she gets the nomination, regardless of whether she wins. Sure, if she loses, they’ll say it proves you shouldn’t send a woman to do a man’s job; that’ll smart. But they’ll say that if she wins, too, every single time she makes a human mistake. They’ll say it, one way or another, every step of the way. What I admire so much about her is that she never, ever believes it. The power of that, of her simply staying in the goddamned game, is tremendous. And it’s something this culture needs to see a hell of a lot more of from smart, talented women.
Since the race got started, I've kept quiet about the part of me that really wants Hillary to go all the way. For starters, I think Edwards and Obama are both terrific candidates -- and yes, from a policy perspective, both of them speak more to my personal values. The day after Iowa, I was so pissed off at the way Edwards's second-place finish was being completely ignored by the MSM, I sent money to his campaign as a symbolic act -- the first time I've ever done that for anyone. But I am actually still undecided about whom I'll vote for on Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Tuesday, because the truth is, I would be happy with any one of those three winning -- and I'd also be disappointed by any one of those three winning, because it will mean the other two lost.
I would love to vote for a man who's vowed to stand up to corporations and fight for working people, and who always impresses me as being just about as genuine as politicians can get. I would also love to vote for a black man who has the ability to make me -- and a whole ton of other people -- feel hope, and a passion for the political process that actually matches our passion for the country that's been stolen from us by thugs. And I would definitely love to vote for a brilliant woman who's weathered decades of abuse from her opponents and is still standing, still smiling. I have reasons to vote for all three, and I have reasons not to vote for all three. As many others have remarked, it's an embarrassment of riches. And that's an incredible feeling.
But -- setting aside that I live in Illinois and thus a vote for anyone but Obama will be just another symbolic act -- I have to choose one. And I have not yet decided which one it will be -- just like a substantial percentage of voters in New Hampshire hadn't, as of two days ago. But you know what? If my turn to vote in the primaries had come yesterday? It would have been Hillary. No contest. For exactly the reasons Jeff talks about in his angry woman post, that CC talks about in her comment, that we've all been talking about since last night.
Which brings me to the other reason -- quite honestly, the main reason -- I've kept quiet about my love for Hillary: it's a terribly unfashionable thing to admit around the liberal blogosphere. She's the most conservative candidate! She sucks up to corporations! We don't vote with our vaginas! It's insulting to assume women will vote for her just because she's a woman! All true, don't get me wrong. And yet, I've still always kind of wanted to vote for her.
And that's mostly because she's a woman. And so am I.
As Jeff said, it is indeed identity politics -- but it's not necessarily misguided. The sexist shitstorm that's been raging around Hillary for the last week (let alone the last year, the last 15 years) just reinforces what I've felt in my gut all along: electing a woman president would be a radical, transgressive, transformative act, even if she's a relatively conservative candidate. Watching the stunned looks on the pundits' faces last night, hearing all the, "My god! How could we have gotten it so wrong?"s, was like Christmas for me, quite frankly. A good 20 percent of me would like to see Hillary get the nomination solely for the pleasure of watching Tweety lose his goddamned mind. No loftier reason than that.
In fact, Chris Matthews's Hillary hate, in particular, has been fascinating me -- and driving my secret cheers for her -- all along. Because it's not just that he blatantly hates and fears the concept of a woman president; it's that he seems so utterly baffled by it. You're telling me, there are people -- men-people -- who would honestly consider voting for a laydee? No foolin'? You're serious about this? But... I DON'T GET IT! She hardly smells like English Leather at all! That sense that he's just totally confused by all this -- a woman's running, and it's not actually some colossal prank -- affects me so much more than his nakedly sexist remarks or his desperate need to refer to every vote cast in America for Water Commissioner, Dogcatcher, or Homecoming Queen as an anti-Hillary vote.
It's not just that he doesn't think a woman's fit to be president; it's that he -- no doubt representing many American men -- still can't even fathom how that could be a real possibility. And that's the kind of thing that makes me want to pull the lever with my vagina. (Not that there's a lever anymore, but "fill out the scantron thingy with my vagina" wasn't as funny.)
At the end of the day, I -- like Hillary -- am a Chicago girl. Which means, among other things, that I am certainly not shocked and appalled by the very idea of a Democrat who sucks up to corporate interests. It also means I'm equally cynical and pragmatic when it comes to elections. I don't believe there will ever be such a thing as a candidate who truly represents my values, because anyone who truly represents my values would never go into politics. So I believe in voting for the person who, in my opinion, will do the most good and/or the least harm, and who actually stands a chance of winning.
I haven't yet decided if I think that's Hillary, out of the top three. But it damn well might be. And if she gets the nomination -- whether I vote for her in the primary or not -- I can tell you right now, my overemotional, girly ass is going to blub when I cast a vote for the first woman president. Because, even if it's not the thing that matters most to me in this election, you'd better believe it fucking matters.
It matters like whoa.
(Cross-posted.)
Shut Up, Maureen Dowd
Part wev in an Ongoing Series by Tart and me, named elegantly and succinctly by Tart, about the World's Most Obnoxious Feminist Concern TrollTM.
Wow. MoDo needs some spectaular amounts of Shutting Up for this one, which is mind-blowingly appalling even for the World's Most Obnoxious Feminist Concern TrollTM:
Yet, in the end, [Clinton] had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim, both of Obama and of the press.There's really not enough Shutting Up in the world to deal with that sputtered puddle of bile.
...At her victory party, Hillary was like the heroine of a Lifetime movie, a woman in peril who manages to triumph.
I could rant for a nonillion years on the patent lunacy of the assertion that Hillary Clinton has deliberately played the female victim, but instead I'll just note that it was not Hillary who called herself a She Devil and broadcast pictures of herself bearing horns, and it was not Hillary who published pictures of herself cast as a feminazi monster, and it was not Hillary who circulated an unflattering image of herself as purported evidence she isn't up to the rigors of the presidency, and it was not Hillary who designed a nutcracker in her own image, and it was not Hillary who diminished her own experience as attending tea parties, and it was not Hillary who, after a moment of candidly expressed emotion, turned it into a national story using dog-whistles once removed from "hysterical," and, well, you get my point.
Nonetheless, MoDo's thesis, as you'll surely recall, is that Hillary made herself a victim of the press, playing the damsel in distress, despite, I guess, what MoDo would argue is the totally fair, unbiased, and not remotely misogynistic treatment of Hillary. But, with neither an ounce of self-awareness nor a trace of irony, this is how her piece actually begins:
When I walked into the office Monday, people were clustering around a computer to watch what they thought they would never see: Hillary Clinton with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes.Nope, no sexism there among the witty banter of the measured, objective professionals at the Gray Lady. I'm sure that they think "crying works in relationships" for teh dudez, too, presume men to be incapable of regulating emotions while meeting with world leaders, and fail to regard as "human" all male candidates until they express an emotion that is then immediately deemed laughably inappropriate.
A woman gazing at the screen was grimacing, saying it was bad. Three guys watched it over and over, drawn to the "humanized" Hillary. One reporter who covers security issues cringed. "We are at war," he said. "Is this how she'll talk to Kim Jong-il?"
Another reporter joked: "That crying really seemed genuine. I'll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand." He added dryly: "Crying doesn't usually work in campaigns. Only in relationships."
And perpetuating the demonstrably false narrative that Hillary was choked up by the prospect of losing, when she was, in fact, speaking quite personally, revealingly, and, duh, emotionally about her candidacy, MoDo sniffs:
[I]t was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing.More irony: Hillary was also speaking with rueful disdain about those who treat politics as a game. I can only imagine her regret at those who treat it like a romantic comedy, where the object is not even winning, but forcibly conforming candidates to the part of the boy or the girl, only to use the stereotypes of the genre to demean them.
As Spencer Tracy said to Katharine Hepburn in "Adam's Rib," "Here we go again, the old juice. Guaranteed heart melter. A few female tears, stronger than any acid."
If they're the girl, that is.
