African Americans, Women, Workers: on feminism and misogyny in the primary campaign
Stansell, Christine
TKINK BACK to a year and a half ago, to spring 2007, when this all began. Despite Hillary Clinton's advantages in connections and money going into the primaries, those in the know cited a...
...Nor does he seem to understand the legitimate concerns of Clinton supporters, who are asking for a party that is strongly committed, not incidentally committed, to women's rights as a basic democratic struggle...
...In their anti-politics they are aligned with a strain of elite liberalism (going back to George McGovern's campaign and, before that, Adlai Stevenson's) which despises the sweaty pols and looks for the knight in shining armor who will clean things up...
...Would they have supported her against John Edwards...
...She was detail-oriented, not masterful...
...To venture into the blogosphere and not too far into it, to the likes of the Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and even the New Republic Web site—was to step into an alternate universe, where a Mistress of Evil and her attendant warlocks and Southern strategy wizards faced off against a Superhero...
...THE TERMS of condemnation were so intense that even the estimable Katha Pollitt, usually alert to the terms on which ordinary women engage politics, was silent...
...feminist opponents saw her in reverse as an unrepentant hawk—an ultranationalist, as I heard from one colleague—who would continue Bush's disastrous foreign policy...
...Representatives...
...But it wasn't only the right-wing hoi polloi...
...and Obama's viability after Iowa made it feasible...
...Most of those women—in the universities, journals of opinion, and on the editorial pages—did turn out to dislike Clinton...
...It's this that makes me wonder whether fear of McCain will be enough to push women to the polls or whether many Clinton supporters will just sit it out...
...But with the depth and extent of women's support undeniable, complaints started to bubble up about her supporters, too...
...it's coded in the DNA of 1960s women's liberation: the contempt for an equivocating, weakwilled, racist Democratic Party and a mistrust of liberalism as a shill for the ruling class...
...it is that so many leading feminists and prominent women had so little to say about the most appalling public outbreak of misogyny in recent memory...
...Men, too, responded to her grit and tenacity...
...Nor has anyone asked them questions DECISION ' 08 since Obama clinched the nomination...
...Inside the Beltway, Clinton also had major support from women...
...Like the rest of the left, feminists see political officeholders (except for the renegades and gadflies) as unprincipled, self-interested, and DECISION ' 08 incapable of creating meaningful change...
...and that postfeminismwhich is to say inertia—will reign...
...Gloria Steinem's tough piece, "Women Are Never Front Runners," in early January was the last notable proClinton commentary to appear...
...We heard a lot about the twenty-somethings who thrilled to Obama's candidacy...
...After March 1, her female support soared to a ten point spread-54 percent to 44 percent...
...She should have left Bill years ago...
...Going into the primary campaign, everyone knew about the "women's vote": it's been materializing since the 1980s, when women migrated to or stayed with the Democrats, while men moved to support Ronald Reagan...
...Clinton's solid stance on feminist issues—abortion rights (identical to Obama's) and universal health care and gay rights (to the left of Obama's)—did not put off blue-collar whites and Hispanics, male and female, who were supposed to be conservative on social issues...
...Recognizing Clinton's qualifications for office and resenting the denigration of those qualifications, female voters marched into the voting booths...
...Does he understand how serious these attacks were or how injurious the legacy is for everyone...
...Never an eloquent speaker she always looked like she'd rather be at her desk Clinton's victory speech in Ohio movingly evoked the experience of Americans teetering on the edge: unemployed college graduates, single mothers, laid-off blue-collar men...
...A gender gap among blacks in the early winter virtually disappeared by spring, with black women lining up for Obama in equal numbers to men...
...She was too ambitious, a flip-Hopper, a trimmer, an opportunist...
...They have little patience for, and even less respect for, the arts of realpolitik, maneuver, and compromise...
...And they have continued to like her, even after she conceded, forming a major stumbling block for Barack Obama...
...But their numbers in this year's primaries were unprecedented, increasing threefold: from under eight million in 2004 to more than twenty-one million in 2008...
...The public humiliation of Clinton went over the top, first at the debate when the likability question popped up—did Clinton's personality turn off voters...
...The pro-choice organizations stayed carefully neutral, although in a surprise move orchestrated from the top, NARAL Pro-Choice America came out for Obama in May, touching off consternation among members and state chapters...
...All these opinion writers are entitled to their positions...
...Obama's Support Missing were ordinary African American women...
...Jonathan Chait in the New Republic disparaged the paradigmatic Clinton supporter as "the suburban empty-nester who can't find stylish clothes for herself at the mall"—compared to "the plight of a black man living under Jim Crow" (in Chait's mind, the paradigmatic Obama voter resided in a time warp...
...Only Jeff Toobin had the presence of mind to point out that Democratic white women were the most reliable liberal bloc in the entire party, bar none, including on race issues...
...With two months to go, I deeply hope so...
...It was women who made the DISSENT / Fall 2008 n 3 5 DECISION ' 08 difference, voting for her by two to one...
...The campaign's decision to give Hillary Clinton a major slot and, most of all, her show-stopping speech calling for unity have for the first time since June given her supporters a place to go...
...For women too young to remember anything about Bill Clinton's administration except the Monica Lewinsky scandal, it was Washington politics, not the Republican Party, that was the problem...
...But as to why, against predictions, women were turning out in such large numbers for Hillary, there was little information...
...It seems not...
...In 1992, women were the margin that pushed Bill Clinton over the top...
...Ratchet the whole situation down a number of notches, turn it into an issue of who was getting promoted, and Clinton might be consulting a lawyer about suing for sex discrimination...
...Despite Hillary Clinton's advantages in connections and money going into the primaries, those in the know cited a multitude of reasons she would fall flat on her face...
...I thought no one was going to say anything," was a common response, so ubiquitous in the public eye were the feminists supporting Obama...
...Blue-collar women are "dropoff' voters...
...THE ANTIPATHY between longtime feminist allies, co-conspirators, and friends hardened into Us and Them, exacerbated by female opinion-makers in the press...
...In the battleground states and beyond, she learned to play to the crowds and the crowds gave back...
...As the hostility to Hillary intensified, she changed...
...These women made up a bloc that no one had counted on...
...It was the beginning of an electoral chemistry that no one, including the candidate her36 n DISSENT / Fall 2008 self, had anticipated...
...Several days later, with defeat hanging in the air, Clinton was asked about the strains of the campaign and she teared up...
...But Obama was a pro-choice candidate, the Chicago pol who presented himself as the white knight, above and beyond politics as usual...
...We don't know much about them because, as is often the case when women do something unexpected, no one bothered to ask them questions...
...She's Not Likable By now the "sexism" charge is an old chestnut in the annals of this campaign...
...For the first time in American history, the desire for a fair deal for women—symbolized by this particular woman—migrated out of feminist 34 n DISSENT / Fall 2008 identity politics into a presidential campaign and won the interest of a huge portion of the electorate...
...Women don't like her," the pundits declared with relish...
...They changed the electoral map...
...They didn't like her even more than men didn't like her...
...The campaign took on an uncanny resemblance to any number of companies and institutions where a woman is told that her own personality deficits are the reason she didn't get the position...
...Toxicity levels soared...
...Right now the campaign seems to assume that, Chicagostyle, the votes are his for the taking, and that he need take no particular care to reach out to Clinton's women, or, for that matter, to Clinton's men...
...As we know now, women liked Hillary Clinton, very much, and they poured work, money, and excitement into her campaign, their enthusiasm mounting as the months passed...
...In April and May, derisive talk that had flourished on the right-wing talk shows migrated to respectable venues and settled in...
...Raised in an era that oddly combined real progress and right-wing political hegemony, young women had little of their mothers' romance about a woman in the White House, nor did they have their mothers' belief that Clinton's competence and experience could do much to put the country back on course...
...From her cleavage to her feminine handwriting (silly) to nepotism and dynastic privilege (never seriously raised during the younger Bush's campaign), Clinton was fair game...
...A recent speech by Obama on equal pay for women was welcome, but it has to be balanced against his remarks on late-term abortion (the new battleground for Roe), which are troubling, to say the least, as is the political strategy of wooing evangelicals that underlies them...
...The real concern is that some of them won't vote at all...
...Struggling to explain Clinton's steady lead and what the exit polls were showing about her support from women, they hit upon "racism," gravely debating whether the "Bradley effect" was at work and essentially concluding, without a shred of evidence, that it was...
...In the face of the Jeremiah Wright revelations, Barbara Ehrenreich went into print endorsing an 38 n DISSENT / Fall 2008 exposé of Clinton's Senate prayer group as the hidden hand of a right-wing conspiracy, "the sinister heart of the international right," with Clinton functioning as the Angela Lansbury of Capitol Hill in an updated Manchurian Candidate...
...What is the substance, and what exactly happened...
...A fast-food marquee advertised HILLARY SPECIAL 2 FAT THIGHS WITH SMALL BREASTS LEFT WING...
...In the popular vote, this divide cannot be reduced to whites against minorities, since Hispanic support for Clinton confounds that tidy explanation...
...Gail Collins, too, long a cunnning defender of women and parrier of sexism, treated the wave of misogyny as if it were a sideshow...
...Yet neither Obama, his aides, his supporters, nor the Democratic National Committee condemned the misogyny...
...The sequence was one with which millions of women identified, including, I daresay, any number in New Hampshire...
...Journalists in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio seemed to have limited their work to calling out at the rallies, "Anyone here a racist...
...CHRISTINE STANSELL is Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor of American History and the College at the University of Chicago...
...Nor did Clinton by and large attract the postfeminist young, who were drawn to the semiotics of the new in the Obama campaign: Obama's much-hyped outsider status, the generational change he claimed to represent, and the chance to vote for a black presidential candidate...
...Women were one...
...Even when Clinton conceded, she had retained the endorsements of thirty-five female members of Congress to Obama's twenty-six...
...To feminist-minded women, the chatter was irritatingly familiar...
...The Republican ascendancy diluted this long-standing animus, especially in regard to the urgency of electing pro-choice candidates...
...In Chicago, I heard a young woman refer to "Hillary Clinton's racist rants" the audience of Democrats nodded sagely...
...Despite the carping about likability, Clinton is nothing if not personable as a campaigner, warm and skillful at making people feel that she responds to them individually...
...Once the campaign got rolling as a popular-culture phenomenon, they were also attracted to each others' enthusiasm...
...Good government seemed an oxymoron...
...And amazingly, the main body of the feminist intelligentsia—writers and academics— showed no interest in this unprecedented phenomenon...
...At the end of January, Obama's landslide in South Carolina, fueled by ginned-up but devastating racebaiter charges completed the defection of blacks from Clinton...
...and seven of twelve black female U.S...
...Overall, they cast 57 percent of the votes...
...They not only disliked her-not just opposed—they loathed her...
...her funny, feisty side came out...
...As for educated professional women—like those who signed on to Feminists for Hillary— responses vary...
...Indeed, the opprobrium from the left was not always distinguishable from that of the blogs...
...Feminists see good politics as a grassroots affair, preferably with politicians absent...
...Plenty of women fit that description...
...The dreadful election detritus already in circulation proliferated: the Hillary nutcrackers popped up in airport gift shops, bumper stickers sported slogans such as, HILLARY CLINTON—JUST LIKE YOUR EX-WIFE BUT BITCHIER...
...Mostly, the candidate remained the scapegoat...
...All the old Clinton conspiracy stories resurfaced, this time from the left...
...African American women counted for almost a fourth of the female support Obama did have: among white and Hispanic women, 60 percent went for Clinton, 35 percent for Obama...
...Sexism trailed Clinton's campaign from the start in the form of objections voiced, observations made, jokes cracked, and gossip circulated— the sorts of things that have never been said about a man running for president...
...It was the moment when sexism went public...
...What was more remarkable, her candidacy, which started out carefully distanced from feminism and gender issues, over time unintentionally brought feminist ideas about fair treatment to the center of the campaign...
...On CNN, National Public Radio editor Ken Rudin compared the senator to Glenn Close's murderous character in Fatal Attraction...
...Over the next six weeks, Obama and Clinton fought each other to a draw...
...Hispanic women voted for Hillary by a remarkable 69 percent to 30 percent...
...Women who detested Bill Clinton's behavior in the Lewinsky scandal and, more important, despised his welfare policy (this last was the most common objection I heard) abandoned his spouse's ship...
...It isn't their support for Obama that I rue...
...Gays were a hidden factor...
...Her book on the history of feminism, 1792-2002, will be published by Random House next year...
...Under attack, she got bigger, not smaller...
...The reasons seemed to mirror in reverse the reasons the right disliked and loathed her...
...As of this writing, the feminism of the campaign remains unexamined, occluded by charges that it consists of little more than "whining" and special pleading on the part of Clinton's supporters...
...They think they can win without them...
...But it was subtle and in its idiocy, vaguely comic...
...For once, fair treatment for women was something DISSENT / Fall 2008 n 3 7 DECISION ' 08 men were willing to sign on to...
...But from another angle, Clinton's women were frumpy overweight losers, salving their psychic wounds with religion...
...It wasn't second thoughts on election day but the events of the preceding week that led to the upset and turned a heated battle into a Network moment for millions of women— "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore...
...The press and the pundits clamored for her to withdraw, but the ranks of female supporters grew as Clinton again flummoxed expectations and secured a lock on Hispanic and blue-collar voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania...
...It rang a bell...
...experienced, maybe, but not charismatic...
...For Clinton voters, reading the morning papers and watching the news turned into a grim trudge across hostile ground with artillery trained on you...
...Not coincidentally, the Ohio win set off a misogynist frenzy...
...The media turned out to be wrong about a lot of things...
...Left feminists have never been especially sympathetic to professional politicians...
...The media piled on, contemptuous of the cold calculation behind "Clinton's tears" or (alternatively) the pathetic weakness...
...When Clinton uncharacteristically crumpled—"that hurts my feelings"—Obama jumped in to offer the smug judgment that she was "likeable enough...
...DECISION 08 Aftermath Obama may not have been able to cut into Clinton's core support, but he could have prevented the lines from hardening if he had spoken out against the sexist onslaught...
...The exception was the New York Times's endorsement of Clinton on January 25, rare in its even-handed discussion of both candidates...
...On the MSNBC coverage I watched that night, the panel of experts flailed and bumbled as the returns came in...
...The Women's Vote Nothing like this has ever happened with female voters...
...They just don't get it," a Washington insider told me...
...Many more, like me, are good Democrats, and try to muster hope for the party, especially as Clinton herself has pitched in...
...A chorus of naysayers screeched and brayed from major newspapers, networks, liberal journals, and cable shows calling for her to drop out of the race...
...After the New Hampshire primary, a New York Feminists for Obama petition signed by hundreds, including a number of high-profile academics and writers, showed that among the intelligentsia, the Obama trend was something like a stampede...
...It was the likability effect, not the Bradley effect, which operated in New Hampshire, and it unleashed a new dynamic in the campaign...
...In January, before the tide turned, Pollitt was the one feminist in the Obama campaign to denounce the sexism of media coverage...
...The stiff, controlled, pant-suited woman loosened up at the podium...
...McCain supporter Alex Castellanos on MSNBC defended a column that called Clinton a "white bitch," insisting that "some women are named that and it's accurate...
...For everybody who works hard and never gives up, but is knocked down and counted out," she vowed, this victory was for you...
...They vote Democratic, but they are pressed for time and they have child care problems, and so they don't always vote...
...Overall, as of this writing on the final day of the Democratic Convention, Clinton women are fired up...
...With Obama's victory in the Iowa caucuses and polling data pointing to a repeat in New Hampshire, the press and the pundits were gleefully preparing for Clinton's comeuppance...
...If the only ethical stance was to "speak truth to power" and to "push from the left," then Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had spent the last decade inside the Democratic Party, close to power and seeking more power, was inherently suspect...
...Will there be more outreach from Obama, a turn to a different math on the part of his strategists, and a clearer articulation of a commitment to women...
...They were "privileged white women" (forget the Hispanics...
...A talented, experienced woman with a no-nonsense grasp of the importance of hard work and "details" was being invidiously compared to a younger man whose career she had helped to promote...
...The Professors and the Writers What happened in the run-up to the New Hampshire primary was prejudicial treatment, pure and simple, but feminist writers and intellectuals mostly kept quiet...
...White and Hispanic workingwomen were the core of the coalition she built...
...and leaving it at that...
...Yet two weeks later, on Super Tuesday, Hillary won the big states— Massachusetts, California, and New York...
...A colleague on a recent historian's panel summed up the indictment: Hillary was no different than a man, by which she meant, one of those men, the kind who chair congressional committees and ensure there's a budget line that benefits their constituents...
...the joke went the rounds, with Andrew Sullivan and Representative Steve Cohen (D-TN) joining the fun (Cohen retracted his quip...
...But the hostility goes deeper...
...But it was predictable...
...Maureen Dowd became so hysterical in her obsession with Clinton's perfidies that she wrote herself out of democratic discourse into a liberal equivalent of hate speech—"over the line," the public editor of the New York Times would judge her columns several months later, slapping her wrist as the dust settled...
...Instead, New Hampshire voters turned out in record numbers to give her a three-point lead in the final tally...
...A few die-hards are calling for a boycott of the election...
...She was endorsed by the big feminist organizations: the National Organization for Women, the National Women's Political Caucus, and Emily's List...
...Hillary moved them...
...Hundreds wrote back with relief at the chance to sign on and break out of the isolation they felt...
...Bill Clinton was tolerated, just barely, because of his pro-choice stand and the hatefulness of his right-wing enemies...
...Obama's swashbuckling approach was more cinematically persuasive, promising that with his special combination of savoir-faire and virtue, he could summon up postpartisan superpowers to make the right wing go away...
...The surge came in part from the campaign's length and intensity, but nonetheless it brought in female voters as never before...
...The speculation that substantial numbers will defect to McCain has so far proved to be wrong . These are loyal Democrats who stayed with the party in the leanest years...
...Their preference was marked, an eight-point spread: 52 percent for Clinton, to Obama's 44 percent...
...that the women's movement will be reduced to a shell of itself...
...She still lagged behind in the delegate count...
...so far as I can see, lesbians supported Clinton heavily (there's no polling data on the gay vote...
...in 2000, they went for Al Gore over George W. Bush by an eleven-point margin...
...DISSENT / Fall 2008 n 39...
...narrow, not commanding...
...The right viewed her as a feminist (feminazi) peacenik, who would emasculate the nation's defenses...
...On newspaper opinion pages, in journals of opinion across the liberal spectrum from the New Republic to the Nation, and on popular Web sites like the Huffington Post, one was hard put after January to find a word of support for Clinton or, barring that, any interest in the fact that women did seem interested in supporting her, after all...
...David Axelrod is said to be calculating with a different math, gambling on augmenting Obama's "new" Democratic coalition of blacks, young people, and well-to-do white liberals, not on securing the "old" Democrats who supported Clinton...
...Their absence was a big loss in terms of morale, political breadth, and sheer numbers...
...Among Obama's feminist supporters, it was common to deny or ignore it by invoking the supposed racism directed at Obama...
...But the editorial page was at odds with the Op-ed page, where, with the exception of Paul Krugman, the columnists lined up against Clinton...
...But even as she grudgingly allowed that Clinton's campaign had legitimacy, she spoke of holding one's nose at the woman, "a centrist Democrat, a believing Methodist, a people-pleaser, a trimmer"—in short, a political hack...
...Black women have always supported black advancement when it was feasible...
...The animus came from two directions...
...Still, shortly thereafter, when fellow historian Ellen Dubois and I circulated a Feminists for Clinton statement to gather what support there existed for Hillary in our circles, we discovered an important constituency yearning to be visible...
...Leaving aside the congressional representatives, few prominent black women remained in Clinton's camp: exceptions who went on record were the ever independentminded writer Michele Wallace, the artist Faith Ringgold, and the poet Maya Angelou, whom Hillary pressed into service...
...Given the polls from the fall, most likely...
...But the worry is that women will once again be shunted aside as less deserving in their aspirations, less politically interesting or salient, less important...
...In regard to her personal characteristics, they were identical: trimmer, opportunist, calculating, selfseeking, maker of despicable marital decisions...
...She didn't deserve to be where she was...
...If she can set aside the last months, we remind each other, surely we can...
...Once the race-baiter slurs against both Clintons began to circulate, it was all but impossible for Hillary to hold black women...
...Obama may not...
...Cunt" was also treated as witty badinage, although the newspapers at least drew the line there...
Vol. 55 • September 2008 • No. 4
