“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.” Having “found her voice” in yesterday’s surprising comeback in New Hampshire, and with the politics of gender clearly coming up aces, Senator Clinton continues with the new winning theme. Buddy system? Sigh…It doesn’t exactly put the b in subtle, does it? Well, this approach seemed to backfire with the “six guys against one strong woman” debate spin of a few months ago. And I can’t say I much prefer Clinton, the skewerer of false hopes and purveyor of the “reality check.” Still, one hopes these blatant appeals to identity politics get dropped relatively soon, and that the Obama campaign doesn’t get caught up in the same game in South Carolina. It’s usually a depressing and polarizing business.
In another interview with FOX News today, Senator Clinton gave her own view of the Reverse Muskie. (By the way, how dismaying is it that this random moment of lip-quavering ended up being the defining moment of New Hampshire 2008? Now we’ll have to relive this bizarre non-story every four years. And it wasn’t even Clinton’s first semi-tear of the campaign — That was on Day 1 of the The Hillary I Know campaign retooling, back in December. It’s a strange world sometimes.)
In any event, her take on the moment: “Maybe I have liberated us to actually let women be human beings in public.” Um…ok, a few things here. First, in keeping with XX Factor’s Rachael Larimore’s recent observation that “Obama is the ‘we’ candidate; Hillary is the ‘me’ candidate,” this is a remarkably self-aggrandizing I-statement. (Let’s see, there’s Seneca Falls, the Nineteenth Amendment, ERA, The Feminine Mystique, the founding of NOW…and the Reverse Muskie? One of these things does not belong.) Second, it must be said: “Liberated” — a word with special import for the older women voters who put Clinton over the top in New Hampshire — seems all too likely to be another unnuanced stab at the dog-whistle, niche politicking that inspired “buddy system.” Third, it would seem the general consensus — not just from the invidious mainstream media but from Clinton supporters too — that, far from smashing down a previously impenetrable social barrier by showing emotion, Senator Clinton just did what everyone’s wanted her to do all along. Part of the reason for Barack Obama’s wide-ranging appeal, and that of John McCain on the GOP side, is that they almost always seem like human beings in public. I really don’t think this is simply because they’re afforded more luxury in the public eye as men. (Case in point, the late Ann Richards.)
By the way, to the men out there: If y’all are feeling left out of the moment, fear not: Chris Matthews may have set us back several generations, but Mitt Romney’s been out there carrying the torch for our own public humanity (as it seems to be defined these days.) Although, thus far — in Iowa and New Hampshire at least — he has not been greeted as a liberator.
Update: “No woman is illegal“? Oh, please. That doesn’t even make any sense.
“I really don’t think this is simply because they’re afforded more luxury in the public eye as men.”
So, is there *anything* that could be done to or said about Hillary Clinton that you would acknowledge as rooted in gendered expectations or sexism? Or is that just not possible with her, as far as you’re concerned?
Of course. It’s an obvious example, but those two yokels screaming “Iron my shirt” in New Hampshire was a disgusting display of sexism, and the type of thing no male candidate would have to deal with in a million years. Of course, that’s an easy one. I’d presume you’re asking me about subtler (and thus more pernicious) examples of sexism at work in views of Clinton.
Look, Med, I’m not Stephen Colbert — I *see* gender, and I’m not arguing that we’ve somehow risen above it into a post-sexist Utopia, as you characterized it in an earlier post. But, I do think — in this instance — a lot of the readings of recent events in New Hampshire that emphasize gender issues working against Clinton are significantly overstating the case. And, worse, they’re now being used by the Clinton team (and supporters such as Gloria Steinem — I refer back to the Tim Noah piece) to suggest that women who don’t back Clinton are lousy feminists.
I think it’s pretty shameful, really. It’s appealing to the worst kind of identity politics, and it’s the type of easy appeal I’d argue that — thus far — Obama has not been making — or at least, has not been making so nakedly — with regard to race (To answer the flip side of your question, I think racial expectations and racism exist too, but I think they *also* haven’t played nearly a big a role in the race thus far as one might expect — In fact, so far the racism of note appears to be as relatively neglible as the sexism we’ve seen (Those ironing asshats notwithstanding, in the latter case.)
Now, first, I want to make a very big qualifier. The general — indeed, almost universal — reaction among women to the coverage Clinton suffered in New Hampshire indicates that there’s obviously something about it I’m just not seeing. But I don’t think this has as much to do with me not *getting* the fact that sexism exists as the fact that I *never* watch television news or punditry anymore, so I have very little clue — if any — of what’s being said by the non-print MSM. (I do occasionally watch Meet the Press or ABC’s This Week on Sunday morning, I guess, but that’s about it.) So Chris Matthews could be wearing an apron or putting on blackface for all I know — I just don’t follow the television blathering. (In fact, in the age of the Internet, I’m sorta surprised that so many people who do find Matthews and his ilk so reprehensible seem to know everything they ever say or do. Turn off the TV, y’all.)
That being said, on their face and discounting the MSM echo chamber, which I can’t really speak to, there are several moments of recent note that I think have been viewed through the prism of gendered expectations, when I think they don’t really apply. Please tell me where and when I’m off-base here.
1. The Debate. This has apparently been seen as — and Clinton is now encouraging this notion — the male candidates ganging up on the one woman. I do not believe this is the case, or that it was rooted in sex at all. What happened was Clinton attacked Obama first — as she should, he was the frontrunner — and then for one reason or another Edwards didn’t see fit to join in, and went after Clinton instead. (At which point Obama just backed off, because he could. Was there even a moment when Obama sent a salvo Clinton’s way that wasn’t a response to one of her attacks? Well, maybe one, and we’ll get to that in a second.) So, you’re a John Edwards supporter. Do you think, when attacking Clinton, he was motivated by the boys’ club “buddy system”? Or did he just decide for one reason or another that that was the best political strategy for him at that moment?
2. “Likable enough.” Ok, first off, I’ll concede that asking Clinton about her likability was a stupid MSM-type non-issue of a question that tend to get asked more of women candidates then men (Although they do do this sort of state-of-the-horse-race thing to everybody, men and women. George Stephanopoulos is notorious for it. Governor Dean, people say you’re unstable; Senator Dodd, the polls say you can’t possibly win., etc. etc.)
That being said, here was a moment where Clinton tried to use the gender card to her advantage. Could you imagine a male candidate — I believe I referred to it as Clinton’s “I’m Just a Girl” act — answering the question as she did? Senator Obama — catastrophically for his New Hampshire results, it turns out — was less than gracious about playing along, and something he could’ve said to any male candidate with impunity came across to many as a loathsome stab at Senator Clinton. Of course, Clinton knew this when she started the beaming routine, and it worked perfectly.
As I said in my original post, given that she’d called Obama a pro-life drug-using false hope peddler for the past week, I can see why maybe he wasn’t chomping at the bit to play nice at that moment. But the fact he was meant to play nice at all is a good case of Clinton using gendered expectations as a shield against legitimate public criticism. (This is what I think Maureen Dowd was getting at in her column below. Clinton is very quick to use the gender card in her defense when there’s a chance available — Can you say Obama has done the same with race in any debate?)
3. The Reverse Muskie. Now, again, I saw that it happened, I watched it on Youtube, and I read some articles about it online, but I have no real clue what the TV pundits had to say about Clinton’s much overstated moment of sorta choking up. It seems many of the comments were loathsomely sexist. I can’t vouch for this, but I do think that some of the comments that were perceived as loathesomely sexist were not, really. I’m referring here mainly to Edwards’ response, which was originally a no-comment that he then disastrously followed up with “politics is a tough business” or somesuch. (This is what garnered him an Orc Award from Salon’s Rebecca Traister.) Again, I’ll put the question to you as an Edwards supporter. Was this the candidate’s latent sexism coming to the fore? Or was it a poor choice of words, one that looks considerably worse when applied to a female candidate?
(An aside: There’s a certain irony here that Edwards came off as the main bad guy in the debate and the reverse Muskie: Of all the *male* candidates, John Edwards is — so far — the one who’s had to deal with the most “gendered expectations” garbage. From the $400 haircut to Ann Coulter calling him a “faggot”, Edwards has been getting the “not a real man” routine from a lot of (mostly right-wing) comers.)
Now, the sort of tear itself. Again, don’t know what Chris Matthews said, and, as I said below, I kinda wish it hadn’t become a 1-day story anyway, much less the defining moment of New Hampshire. But I really do think the spin — and the reason people, particularly the MSM, were interested — was that the campaign of the former frontrunner, deemed inevitable for over a year, seemed like it was absolutely falling apart. (In fact, as I said in my own post on the subject, even more noteworthy than Clinton’s tear was *Bill* Clinton’s ranting and raving like a homeless man in his despair.)
Perhaps I’m naive, but I really think the story here was not (and never should have been anything more than) the Big Bad Media made Clinton cry, but that the Inevitable Frontrunner had been Brought Low. This goes back to what I said in our discussion the other day, and why, again, I think Clinton’s sex partially saved her here. Could you imagine if any male candidate had been considered the inevitable frontrunner for over a year, had lost the Iowa caucus badly, and then had a moment such as Clinton’s, two days before what looked like another double-digit blowout in NH? Again, he’d have been rode out of town on a rail.
Now, you mentioned earlier that you thought Clinton was being rode out of town on a rail by the MSM. I’m inclined to agree, but this is — again — not because of her sex. Go back and look at the coverage of George W. Bush, the inevitability candidate, after McCain trounced him in NH in 2000. (I’ve got some of it here at the old Bradley news archive.) Heck, go back and look at the coverage of Eugene McCarthy after embarrassing LBJ in NH in 1968. Politics has been covered as a horse race from time immemorial, and when the “inevitability” candidate gets badly beaten in a primary or caucus (remember, Clinton came in third), it’s a HUGE story. In short, the story was the Clintons, those miracle comeback kids who’d once staked a claim on youth and hope, had surprisingly hit the End of the Road against a new candidate with (1992-style) Clintonesque appeal. That was the story, and it’s *always* breathlessly covered by the MSM, no matter who, or what sex, the candidates in question are.
And remember, as I discovered to my amazement last night when pulling up the Mitt crying story from the GitM archives, this wasn’t the first time Clinton had choked up during the campaign, or that I’d mentioned it on the blog. (I’d completely forgotten about it.) She did it on December 17, the day the new The Hillary We Know campaign was wheeled out. This, obviously, barely made a dent in the newscoverage at all, so it’s hard to argue that it was the sheer fact of a woman crying — or being liberated to be a human being in public, to use Clinton’s description — that propelled the coverage the second time, so much as the seeming metaphor it offered for the state of her then-nosediving campaign.
(Speaking of gendered expectations, I thought the question that prompted the tear (and, people tend to forget, the anti-Obama remarks that followed immediately thereafter) was another question that men just don’t get asked. It’s hard to imagine Edwards or Obama being queried, “How do you do it?” But that’s neither here nor there.)
4. “Calculating.” Again, it already seems clear we disagree on this, but I don’t see descriptions of Clinton as calculating as rampant sexism at work. Some candidates have an air of authenticity about them. Barack Obama and John McCain are two. Ann Richards, Jennifer Granholm, Nancy Pelosi, and Diane Feinstein are four more. Some candidates have an air of inauthenticity, or calculation, about them. Al Gore and John Kerry are two. Hillary Clinton is another. I mean, seriously, how often did I call Gore calculating back in the day? The reason people use calculating to describe Clinton is not because she has ovaries, but because her campaign tends to move like a battleship (from the Inevitability Candidate to The Hillary We Know, for example) and everyone can see it turning. I mean, how would you describe Clinton? I guess Ted offered up Nixonian below, which admittedly may work better and is free of any possible gendered reference.
Med, we began this with you asking me, “is there *anything* that could be done to or said about Hillary Clinton that you would acknowledge as rooted in gendered expectations or sexism? Or is that just not possible with her, as far as you’re concerned?” (And I appreciate the question, because I’ve wanted to talk about some of this since it all went down.) I guess here’s where I ask the same of you. Is there *anything* that could be done to or said about Hillary Clinton that you would acknowledge is *not* rooted in gendered expectations or sexism? Or is just not possible with her, the first female frontrunner in US history?
When you read it like that, it looks like an overstated gotcha question. Of course, there are all kinds of things you could say about Clinton that don’t involve gendered expectations. But, that’s why the question of sexism (or racism)’s influence here has the potential to get ugly, to my mind. It shortcircuits discussion immediately — you just don’t like Clinton/Obama because you’re sexist/racist — and gets people stuck in the realm of physical characteristics rather than the content of our next president’s character. That’s why I posted today about “buddy system” and “liberated” — Given the quality of candidates, to my mind, identity politics is a sad road for the Clinton camp to go down, and a really awful way to go about rallying the troops.
Again, to reemphasize: This is not to say that sexism doesn’t exist. It’s to say that sexism, to my mind, isn’t playing the role that’s being ascribed to it here. When a frontrunner makes a misstep, he or she becomes a punching bag in the newsmedia. It has *always* been thus.
Hear hear, Kevin.
I wrote “Nixonian” even before I read the Maureen Dowd article, so when she refers to Hillary Clinton’s “whiff of Nixonian self pity,” it underlines for me just how much Monday’s Muskie Moment was Checkers Speech-esque (a speech that also rallied supporters and caused opponents to gag).