That Gabrielle Giffords, a Congresswoman and John M. Roll, a Federal Judge were shot today, in a district especially marked as a target by Ms. Palin and by a Republican Candidate in the same district, reminded me of this vintage bit of Republican rhetoric, spoken by Catherine Crabill, the Republican Party Nominee in the 99th House District of Virginia.
zazzle.com offers some great last minute suggestions
The cherished Megan Carpentier engages in a discussion about Palin @ bloggingheads:
(via)
In New Orleans today, McCain explained his opposition to the bill by claiming it “opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems.” Later in Kentucky, he added that instead of legislation allowing women to fight for equal pay, they simply need “education and training“.
Jezebel on Vice Presidential Candidate Palin and on the difference between chosing A woman or FOR women.
Sarah Palin was selected by John McCain today to be the second woman in our country’s history to run for the Vice Presidency of the United States. She’s going to attempt the break the glass ceiling that Geraldine Ferraro first cracked back in 1984, which is a cool thing on some level. But it does raise the question raised by the primaries already once this year — is it more important to vote for a woman, or to vote for a candidate that represents the issues of importance to women?
Because — as EMILY’s List’s Ellen Malcolm notes — Sarah Palin is hardly the latter. She opposes reproductive choice and marriage equity. She’s a member of the group “Feminists for Life,” which is dedicated to eliminating reproductive choice in this country. She is a big promoter, like McCain, of so-called “consumer-driven” health care, in which the government would eliminate the tax breaks companies get for offering health insurance (and thus your company’s financial incentive to pay for yours) — despite the fact that, as Gloria Steinem pointed out, women are far and way the larger users of our health care system. No one yet knows if she supports the Lilly Ledbetter pay equity bill, but she certainly hasn’t spoken about it in the last year and, given that the head of her ticket opposes it, it’s a fair bet to say she wouldn’t fight for it.
Michael Cohen gives advice to Obama
Mr. Obama must convince skeptical Americans that he can serve as commander in chief and be trusted with the nation’s highest office. Change and relatively unknown candidates — not to mention ones with Hussein for a middle name — can seem scary. Therefore, it’s critical for Mr. Obama to orient his message of change in universal and shared American values. Just as Kennedy spoke in the metaphoric imagery of the American frontier and Reagan evoked Franklin Roosevelt and the “greatness” of America’s past, Barack Obama must continue to cast his personal narrative as a quintessentially American story of opportunity and the realization of the American Dream.
Brooks on the Wiederkehr des Immergleichen
McCain started with grand ideas about breaking the mold of modern politics. [Now] McCain and his advisers […] are running a much more conventional race, the kind McCain himself used to ridicule.
The man who lampooned the Message of the Week is now relentlessly on message (as observers of his fine performance at Saddleback Church can attest). The man who hopes to inspire a new generation of Americans now attacks Obama daily. It is the only way he can get the networks to pay attention. […]
And the inescapable fact is: It is working.
Judith Warner watches pro-choice and pro-life activists revisiting Roe vs. Wade in a push for Obama’s attention and concludes
“What we are waiting to hear from Barack Obama,” Campolo [a democratic pro-life activist] said on Tuesday, “is that he … sees this as a moral issue and an issue of conscience.”
Let’s hope Obama doesn’t take the bait. Or better yet: let’s hope that, as he seeks out new religious allies (the problematic Jeremiah Wright becoming a much more distant memory), he pushes hard to redefine the moral high ground in the abortion rights debate. Sanctifying life – without care for the living — is little more than a morality play.
We talked about different perceptions of female anger here, and here is a matching post @ Jezebel
Most of the criticism thrown at Hillary Clinton was that she was too mannish somehow — similar to the way in which similar criticisms were levied at Margaret Thatcher later in her career. What is it about standing up to men that makes a woman “mannish,” and why is that a bad thing? To the contrary, while Clinton may have worn pants the entire campaign, she made it a point to eschew the black pantsuits for which she had become known in Washington for ones in a variety of jewel tones and earthy colors. Her hair was always impeccably colored, it was rarely out of place and a relatively flattering cut. She never forewent make-up or jewelry like certain bloggers I see in the mirror every morning, and I have, more than once, seen her in a pair of cute kitten heels that I coveted. But, still, “mannish” was how she was tarred. If she’s mannish, I’d hate to see what women would have to do to be considered womanly.
Kristol, who is a huge idiot, reprimands Obama
More striking is Obama’s sin of omission. In the rest of the speech, he goes on to detail — at some length — the “so many ways to serve” that are available “at this defining moment in our history.” There’s the Peace Corps, there’s renewable energy, there’s education, there’s poverty — there are all kinds of causes you can take up “should you take the path of service.”
But there’s one obvious path of service Obama doesn’t recommend — or even mention: military service. He does mention war twice: “At a time of war, we need you to work for peace.” And, we face “big challenges like war and recession.” But there’s nothing about serving your country in uniform.
It can’t be that the possibility of military service as an admirable form of public service didn’t occur to Obama.
Nooooo.
And later:
[…] He felt no need to remind students of a different kind of public service — one that entails more risks than community organizing. He felt no need to tell the graduating seniors in the lovely groves of Middletown that they should be grateful to their peers who were far away facing dangers on behalf of their country
Nor did Obama choose to mention all those college graduates who are now entering the military, either for a tour of duty or as a career, in order to serve their country. He certainly felt no impulse to wonder whether the nation wouldn’t be better off if R.O.T.C. were more widely and easily available on elite college campuses.
Um. He didn’t, did he? I wonder why. *coughs*
And Kristol finishes with this:
Obama failed to challenge — even gently — what he must have assumed would be the prejudices of much of his audience and indulged in a soft patriotism of low expectations.
Thank God for softness, I say.
The Wall Street Journal reported back in March that some women were worried that “the resistance to Senator Clinton may embolden some men to resist women’s efforts to share power with them in business, politics and elsewhere.”
It’s a reasonable fear. Every fizzy triumph of feminism I have covered — Geraldine Ferraro’s selection, the Anita Hill hearings, Hillary’s co-presidency — ended up triggering awful backlashes. In the end, feminism sputtered out as a force.
Hillary has brought back that old feminist religion, at least for now.
Clinton is very much a product of the generation that accepted a certain amount of humiliation as the price of progress. […] She would never let her daughter, or anybody else’s daughter, think that she quit because things got too tough. And she never did. Nobody is ever again going to question whether it’s possible for a woman to go toe-to-toe with the toughest male candidate in a race for president of the United States. Or whether a woman could be strong enough to serve as commander in chief.
Her campaign didn’t resolve whether a woman who seems tough enough to run the military can also seem likable enough to get elected. But she helped pave the way. So many battles against prejudice are won when people get used to seeing women and minorities in roles that only white men had held before. By the end of those 54 primaries and caucuses, Hillary had made a woman running for president seem normal. […]
For all her vaunting ambition, she was never a candidate who ran for president just because it’s the presidency. She thought about winning in terms of the things she could accomplish, and she never forgot the women’s issues she had championed all her life — repair of the social safety net, children’s rights, support for working mothers.
Once again, listening to Clinton, who says that she alone can deliver the white worker vote, the part of the vote, she maintains, that really counts, it’s then-and-now time:
“He’d be a fine President,” they say, But of course he can’t possibly win.”
Why not?
Well, […] their reasoning appears to be rooted in the hazy idea that the people who could make McGovern President – that huge & confused coalition of students, freaks, blacks, anti-war activists & dazed dropouts – won’t even bother to register, much less drag themselves to the polls on Election Day.
Maybe so…but it’s hard to recall many candidates, in recent history, who failed to move what is now called “The McGovern Vote” to the polls if they actually represented it.
from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72
In light of current discussions in this year’s primaries, especially as far as they concern Obama’s (the ‘Change’ candidate) problems to really sway blue collar voters, the following passage from Thompson’s campaign notes from 1972 struck me as oddly interesting:
“I’ve always thought that the blue-collar vote had to be a source of his strength. […] It always seemed to me that McGovern – not as the anti-war candidate but as the ‘change’ candidate – would appeal more to Middle America than to any other group. They’re the ones with the most to gain from change and they’re the ones who get screwed by the way we do business in this country.”
from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72
Maureen Dowd points to a fascinating, -if saddening- case of (overcoming?) race and gender and the consequence of that.
Barack Obama is going to get down if it kills him.
[…] Checking out what the vets were drinking, he announced, “I’m going to have a Bud.” Then, showing he’s a smart guy who can learn and assimilate, he took big swigs from his beer can, a marked improvement on the delicate sip he took at a brewery in Bethlehem, Pa.
Obama is also doing his best to impress hoop-crazed Hoosiers with his passion for basketball. On Thursday night, in shirt and tie, he took on an eighth grader named Aaron at a backyard picnic in Union Mills in an impromptu game of P-I-G. “You know, he’s tough,” Obama laughed about his 14-year-old opponent. “He’s like Hillary Clinton.”
The lioness of Chappaqua is hot on the trail of the Chicago gazelle, eager to gnaw him to pieces, like a harrowing scene out of a George Stubbs painting.
Proclaiming that the upcoming elections in Indiana and North Carolina would be “a game changer,” Hillary and her posse pressed hard on their noble twin themes of emasculation and elitism.
Cherry-bombing the word “pansy” into the discourse, Gov. Mike Easley of North Carolina said Hillary made “Rocky Balboa look like a pansy.”
Paul Gipson, president of a steelworkers local in Portage, Ind., hailed her “testicular fortitude,” before ripping into “Gucci-wearing, latte-drinking, self-centered, egotistical people that have damaged our lifestyle.”
James Carville helpfully told Eleanor Clift of Newsweek that if Hillary gave Obama one of her vehicles of testicular fortitude, “they’d both have two.”
and later
Obama, on the other hand, may seem esoteric, and sometimes looks haughty or put-upon when he should merely offer that ensorcelling smile. But he is very well liked by his Secret Service agents, and shoots hoops with them. And I watched him take the time one night after a long day of campaigning to stand and take individual pictures with a squadron of Dallas motorcycle police officers on the tarmac.
It must be hard for Obama, having applied all his energy over the years to rising above the rough spots in his background, making whites comfortable with him, striving to become the sophisticated, silky political star who looks supremely comfortable in a tux. Now he must go into reverse and stoop to conquer with cornball photo ops.
Reading HST’s 1972 campaign notes, I have to think of remarks as in this Dowd column. Here’s Thompson on covering Ed Muskie:
That scene was pure Nixon – so much like a pep rally set at a Young Republican Club that I was reminded of a conversation I’d had earlier with a reporter from Atlanta. “You know,” he said. “It’s taken me half the goddamn day to figure out what it is that bothers me about these people.” He nodded toward a group of clean-cut young Muskie staffers at the other end of the car. “I’ve covered a lot of Democratic campaigns,” he continued. “But I’d never felt out of place before […].”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “It’s obvious – and I’ve finally figured out why.” He chuckled and looked at the Muskie people again. “You know what it is?” he said. “It’s because these people act like goddamned Republicans! That’s the problem. It took me a while but I finally figured it out.”
from Hunter S. Thompson’s incredible Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72
At 8:24 pm the Obama people sent out: “BREAKING: Obama Overperforms Among Catholics and Wins Protestants.” That claim was somewhat difficult to reconcile with the note I received at 9:28 from the opposing camp: “FYI: PA Religious Exit Polling – Clinton wins Catholic, Protestant and Jewish Voters.” This was followed at 10:38 by the rather un-Christian “FYI: Dallas Morning News Religion Blog: “Hillary Clinton whups [Barack Obama in the Largest Categories]”
Leaving the claims about Protestants aside for now, let me confirm that Clinton did in fact carry Catholics by a bruising 68% to 32%. This statistic is lending credence to a growing chorus of analysts who say Obama has a problem with this constituency.
We will, undoubtedly, be discussing this at length in coming weeks. Permit me to briefly float one explanation for this state of affairs. I wish to claim–and I stress this is a first-go hypothesis–that Obama fares poorly among Catholics for the same reason that Huckabee did. Namely, these Americans are put off by Protestant presidential candidates who go too heavy on the Faith and Values stuff.
Admittedly, my hypothesis runs into difficulties when we recall that Catholics gave the majority of their votes to George W. Bush in 2004. Then again, strange as it may sound, Bush’s rhetoric was rarely as relentlessly Christ-y as that of Huck and Obama.
Alice Walker offering her well-reasoned two cents on Obama, Clinton and Whiteness. I’m glad to’ve been able to read it.
I made my first white women friends in college; they were women who loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered. That, for instance, at Sarah Lawrence, where I was speedily inducted into the Board of Trustees practically as soon as I graduated, I made my way to the campus for meetings by train, subway and foot, while the other trustees, women and men, all white, made their way by limo. Because, in our country, with its painful history of unspeakable inequality, this is part of what whiteness means. I loved my school for trying to make me feel I mattered to it, but because of my relative poverty I knew I could not.
I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see him. Cannot see what he carries in his being. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans –black, white, yellow, red and brown – choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.
When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required. Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves. […]
But most of all I want someone with the self-confidence to talk to anyone, “enemy” or “friend,” and this Obama has shown he can do. It is difficult to understand how one could vote for a person who is afraid to sit and talk to another human being. When you vote you are making someone a proxy for yourself; they are to speak when, and in places, you cannot. But if they find talking to someone else, who looks just like them, human, impossible, then what good is your vote?
It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs. Clinton (I wish she felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as “a woman” while Barack Obama is always referred to as “a black man.” One would think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.
I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking, person to person, with any leader, woman, man, child or common person, in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks. I cannot see the same scenario with Mrs. Clinton who would drag into Twenty-First Century American leadership the same image of white privilege and distance from the reality of others’ lives that has so marred our country’s contacts with the rest of the world.
And yes, I would adore having a woman president of the United States. My choice would be Representative Barbara Lee, who alone voted in Congress five years ago not to make war on Iraq. That to me is leadership, morality, and courage; if she had been white I would have cheered just as hard. But she is not running for the highest office in the land, Mrs. Clinton is. And because Mrs. Clinton is a woman and because she may be very good at what she does, many people, including some younger women in my own family, originally favored her over Obama. I understand this, almost. It is because, in my own nieces’ case, there is little memory, apparently, of the foundational inequities that still plague people of color and poor whites in this country. Why, even though our family has been here longer than most North American families – and only partly due to the fact that we have Native American genes – we very recently, in my lifetime, secured the right to vote, and only after numbers of people suffered and died for it.
When I offered the word “Womanism” many years ago, it was to give us a tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in brutal ways. But neither are we inclined to follow a black person, man or woman, unless they demonstrate considerable courage, intelligence, compassion and substance. I am delighted that so many women of color support Barack Obama -and genuinely proud of the many young and old white women and men who do.
Imagine, if he wins the presidency we will have not one but three black women in the White House; one tall, two somewhat shorter; none of them carrying the washing in and out of the back door. The bottom line for most of us is: With whom do we have a better chance of surviving the madness and fear we are presently enduring, and with whom do we wish to set off on a journey of new possibility?
John McCain’s saucy mother says her boy was always a scamp and a hell-raiser. And one of the senator’s great charms is that he wore those appellations proudly.
So it was quite disheartening Thursday to see a McCain spokeswoman telling The Associated Press, in a story about how Cindy McCain helped her husband’s political career bloom with her multimillion-dollar fortune from the family beer business, that the senator is a virtual teetotaler.
“Senator McCain rarely, if ever, drinks alcohol,” Jill Hazelbaker averred.
McCain’s pals know him as a man who enjoys libations of vodka with little green cocktail olives. Over the years, at dinners with reporters, I noted he had the habit of ordering one double vodka and sipping it slowly. And there was that famous Hillary-McCain Estonian drink-off in 2004, when Hillary instigated a vodka shot contest and McCain agreed with alacrity (even though he later offered a sketchy denial).
Maybe now that he’s the presumptive Republican nominee, his campaign wants to put his vices in a vise and sanitize the wild side of the man whose nicknames in high school were “Punk,” “Nasty” and “McNasty.”
*cracking up*
Gail Collins on current issues in the primaries:
It was probably inevitable. The historic contest between a woman and an African-American for the presidential nomination is now all about white men.
[…]
Courting them is extremely tricky. It’s not like you can promise that under your presidency, more white men would be appointed to the Supreme Court.
The wonderful Maureen Dowd last week:
Pressed about race on a Philly radio sports show, where he wanted to talk basketball, he called his grandmother “a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, well there’s a reaction that’s in our experiences that won’t go away and can sometimes come out in the wrong way.”
Obama might be right, but he should stay away from the phrase “typical white person” because typically white people don’t like to be reminded of their prejudices. It also undermines Obama’s feel-good appeal in which whites are allowed to transcend race because the candidate himself has transcended race.
Well said.
Nicholas D. Kristof in a recent column pointed something out which should be pointed out time and again, but strangely enough isn’t:
Much of the time, blacks have a pretty good sense of what whites think, but whites are oblivious to common black perspectives.
This is applicable not only to blacks and ‘whites’ in America, it’s of course something that describes most majority/minority constellations in the West. An interesting area where this is applicable, as Archbishop Williams has pointed out in his thoughtful speech, is in Western discussions of Islam, terrorism, the Enlightenment etc. The sheer refusal to view an issue from the minorities’ point of view has taken on an aggressive shape when it comes to talking about Muslims.
The passive ‘not listening’ has slowly but surely turned into an aggressive droning on and on over increasingly loud voices of protest. This is not simply speaking: it’s preaching. It’s applying ideas such as ‘secularism’, freedom of the press, etc., which could be applied to many different disquieting events, to only this single religious group: Muslims. It appears as if something needs to be talked out of existence, something so alien that the usual rational discourse doesn’t appear to be appropriate any more.
The vehemence with which this version of ‘not listening’ is carried out is shocking sometimes to the humble writer of this blog. Yes, as a reasonably well read person, one is used to racist diatribes, but the fact that, these days, these diatribes, hateful in content and righteous in tone, are coming from educated, smart persons, sends shivers down my spine. These are the people who, for better or worse, make politics. If they are conquered by hate, where is this society headed? I’m worried.
Prof. Patterson in the NYTonline on the questionable red phone ad of Ms. Clinton’s:
I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.
The ad could easily have removed its racist sub-message by including images of a black child, mother or father — or by stating that the danger was external terrorism. Instead, the child on whom the camera first focuses is blond. Two other sleeping children, presumably in another bed, are not blond, but they are dimly lighted, leaving them ambiguous. Still it is obvious that they are not black — both, in fact, seem vaguely Latino.
Finally, Hillary Clinton appears, wearing a business suit at 3 a.m., answering the phone. The message: our loved ones are in grave danger and only Mrs. Clinton can save them. An Obama presidency would be dangerous — and not just because of his lack of experience. In my reading, the ad, in the insidious language of symbolism, says that Mr. Obama is himself the danger, the outsider within.
Did the message get through? Well, consider this: people who voted early went overwhelmingly for Mr. Obama; those who made up their minds during the three days after the ad was broadcast voted heavily for Mrs. Clinton.
Almost two months ago, in a Slate commentary, Hitchens drew our attention to the Clintons’s questionable behaviour with respect to race:
How can one equal Bill Clinton for thuggery and opportunism when it comes to the so-called “race card”? And where does one even start with the breathtaking nastiness of his own conduct, and that of his supporters, in the last week?
Not the most recent piece of news but here you go anyway: the fabulous Michael Chabon endorses Barack Obama.
In related news, Jack Nicholson endorses Hillary Clinton.
It’s not yet clear which prejudice will infect the presidential contest more — misogyny or racism.
Well. I have written on this topic thrice before. This is a difficult issue. Both the racial as well as the gender divide appear to be at work here and both blacks as well as women have repeatedly complained of expectations of loyalty to Obama/Clinton based on their gender/race. For those weirdos who think like that the situation of black women appeared to be particularly fascinating. CNN reports
Within minutes of posting a story on CNN’s homepage called “Gender or race: Black women voters face tough choices in South Carolina,” readers reacted quickly and angrily.
Readers want media to focus more on the candidates and how they feel about the issues not their gender or race.
Many took umbrage at the story’s suggestion that black women voters face “a unique, and most unexpected dilemma” about voting their race or their gender.
CNN received dozens of e-mails shortly after posting the story, which focuses largely on conversations about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama that a CNN reporter observed at a hair salon in South Carolina whose customers are predominantly African-American.
[…]
An e-mailer named Tiffany responded sarcastically: “Duh, I’m a black woman and here I am at the voting booth. Duh, since I’m illiterate I’ll pull down the lever for someone. Hm… Well, he black so I may vote for him… oh wait she a woman I may vote for her… What Ise gon’ do? Oh lordy!”
For a while it appeared as if voters were divided along two tough lines of bigotry, so that, for instance, analysis seemed to show that whole ethnic or racial groups could be expected to vote for/against Obama because of his race and because of his race only. see for example this early February analysis:
Yesterday’s primary voting laid bare a profound racial and ethnic divide among Democratic voters, with African Americans overwhelmingly preferring Sen. Barack Obama and Latinos largely favoring Sen. Hillary Clinton.
In this discussion Bill Clinton’s infamous remarks fit squarely:
Clinton reminded reporters out of the blue that “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in ’84 and ’88. And he ran a good campaign. And Senator Obama’s run a good campaign here. He’s run a good campaign everywhere.”
This is of course as close to a slur as Clinton could allow himself to get. And everyone noticed the inappropriateness of this remark and of similar remarks, even Internet comedians mostly stayed away from that, unless the souce was downright hostile to Obama’s campaign. Putting down Obama because of his race wasn’t permissible.
However, it seemed easily permissible to riff on Hillary’s gender. Comparing her to Tracy Flick, for example, as in this collage, or discussing endlessly the degree to which Hillary Clinton is feminine enough and whether her tears have won her New Hampshire, and no, it’s not suddenly a better idea just because the Clintons embraced it themselves after winning. In case you’re interested, here‘s a piece that explains the difference between the polls and the surprising outcome.
If this post sounds confused, well, that’s because the whole issue has become really strange. On the one hand the racist hatred that tricks even pollsters and then, on the other hand, stuff like this:
In a webcast, prestidigitator Penn Jillette talks about a joke he has begun telling in his show. He thinks the thunderous reaction it gets from audiences shows that Hillary no longer has a shot.
The joke goes: “Obama is just creaming Hillary. You know, all these primaries, you know. And Hillary says it’s not fair, because they’re being held in February, and February is Black History Month. And unfortunately for Hillary, there’s no White Bitch Month.”
This last quote, as well as the quote at the beginning of this muddled post is taken from an insightful article by Maureen Dowd, which doesn’t answer that question though.
So. Where are we? To clear this up: no, I am not telling people to vote for the person who is most discriminated against. That’s absurd.
No, this is about the astonishing extent to which misogyny has become a part of our culture. Or (to turn again) is it about misogyny? To a certain extent, sure. Many of the journalistic instincts, how to ‘explain’ results best, are more or less sexist and insulting. Yet, as Stanley Fish has pointed out here and here, Hillary Clinton-hating contains elements of sexism but is an all-out attack on her person and that of her husband. So, isn’t it about sexism after all?
I am, again, not so sure. The fact that she has become such a widely hated person has to do with anti-Clintonianism that simmered still in the public. However, that does not explain the vehemence, the furor, which accompagnies these Anti-Clinton attacks these days. It just doesn’t. I say her gender is not the only but it is the central part of Hillary-bashing. And the worst thing about this is the fact that it is not recognized as offensive, especially compared with racism. Dowd relates an interesting anecdote:
Elaine Sirkis, 77, an Obama supporter, confided that she just isn’t sure she’s ready for a woman president. Betty Conway, 83, a Hillary supporter, confided that she just isn’t sure she’s ready for a black president.
As Conway walked away, Sirkis smiled sheepishly. “I’m sorry,” she told Berman sweetly about her friend. “She’s a bigot.”
I am pretty sure that this situation is not reversible. Isn’t that sad? Misogyny is still normal, a smaller offence, good clean fun, as they say. Boys will be boys. Ah doesn’t it make you want to puke?
Ah. This is the first entry I had written with respect to this topic and I notice I promised to elaborate when more sober. Well, that’s obviously not going to happen tonight, no sir. But I did find a short but interesting and very readable op ed in the NY Times, which I will shamelessly quote the best parts of now, but do please read the whole piece, as the author’s making some more valid points fully worth your attention.
Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House. This country is way down the list of countries electing women and, according to one study, it polarizes gender roles more than the average democracy.
[…]
So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.
[…]
But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.
What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.
What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.
What worries me is that reporters ignore Mr. Obama’s dependence on the old — for instance, the frequent campaign comparisons to John F. Kennedy — while not challenging the slander that her progressive policies are part of the Washington status quo.
You, my dear readers, see me equally worried about these things. Of course, the author’s simplifying the situation, race has played a major role for instance in discussions of Oprah’s involvement in the campaign. But it’s an op-ed, not an academic essay. And broadly speaking, she’s right. And we do have cause for worry.
PS. Fresh off the NYT Caucus blog which I’ve been monitoring tonight while reading and drinking are these oddly fitting statements:
Our colleage, Michael Powell, sends this in from Clinton HQ: “In the end, the tear was almost a galvanizing moment. It shook a couple of voters of their mental fence and solidified others in support of Mrs. Clinton. Elaine Marquis, a receptionist from Manchester, went back and forth, but she was leaning to Mrs. Clinton when that moment came. Someone asked a personal question and the candidates eyes misted. “I think it was absolutely wonderful,” Mrs. Marquis said. “Women finally saw a woman. Perhaps a tough woman but a woman with a gentle heart.”
Jim Neilsen, a 68-year-old retired sociology professor, has been in the Clinton camp for months. He said that voters are finally seeing a woman who has real emotions. “It did not bother me, I loved it,” he said. “I was moved.”
PPS. Even fresher off the same blog, please look at this picture. It could very easily be used as an illustration of the op-ed, couldn’t it?
Lately, what with a woman running, and Oprah making a pitch for Obama and discussions of Clinton’s male behaviour in the discussions, the gender asoect has become sort of intriguing. I will write (mostly quote) more about this in the following days. See for instance, today’s NY Times:
The politics are complex; even as rival campaigns seek to peel away women’s votes from Mrs. Clinton, they are often careful to acknowledge and pay tribute to the broader significance of her candidacy. “Women, I think, should take pride that Senator Clinton is running, the historic nature of her race,” Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said in an interview Thursday. “That’s a genuine sign of progress.” He said he tried to convey to his two daughters every day “that you’ve got the same opportunities and shots as everybody else.”
But he quickly moved on to make the case that the candidate’s sex is not, and should not, be the deciding factor. Women, he said, “can look at a whole series of issues and know, ‘You know what? This guy’s going to fight for us, partly due to biography.’ Because I know what it’s like to be raised by a single mom who’s trying to work and go to school and raise two kids at the same time, doesn’t have any support from the father. These are issues I’m passionate about.”
Moreover, he argued, his leadership offers the best prospects for delivering on that agenda.
The gender factor is rarely addressed head-on by Mrs. Clinton’s rivals.
More tomorrow when I’m more sober.
shigekuni. 
