Sleepwalking Through the Campaign
Ehrenreich, Barbara
Flip Side Barbara Ehrenreich Sleepwalking Through the Campaign Just a year ago the hot question was: Is America ready for a black or female President? As the campaigns wear on, the question has...
...True, there was the whole faux "cleavage" issue, and the occasional whack-job who writes to enlighten me about Clinton's bisexu-ality or Chelsea's true daddy...
...As the campaigns wear on, the question has shifted to: Can America survive the tedium of its black and female candidates...
...I just wish I could work up the same degree of enthusiasm for Hillary as my friend Katha Pollitt, who recently told The New York Times: "If people don't stop saying incredibly sexist things about Hillary Clinton, I may just have to vote for her...
...Obama, for example, hasn't turned out to be any more challenging to white America than reruns of The Cosby Show...
...We make our Presidential candidates campaign for two years at a stretch...
...Trying to say nothing to offend, she ends up saying nothing to inspire or even inform...
...But the "hellish housewife" comment does not make Hillary a feminist martyr, nor does it make me any more willing to listen to her, either now or for the next five years...
...Take a normal person and subject him or her to month after month of trail mix and chicken Caesars, sleep deprivation, and the constant need to be "on," smiling and handshaking, sixteen hours a day, with no solitary moments of reflection, no walks in the park, no escape into thrillers, and what do you get...
...Her website is www.barbaraehrenreich.com...
...Hers is known as the "flawless" campaign, but no one in it seems to be able to turn off the endlessly triangulating tape in her head...
...Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of "Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy...
...But what are these incredibly sexist things...
...Now I'm all for having literary editors, poetry editors, and the like commenting on our political process, but the "nagging housewife" image is not only a sexist stereotype—it's about fifty years out of date, stemming from an era when most married women were financially dependent on their mates...
...Like the others, he has refrained from noting that Giuliani, in addition to being a cellphone exhibitionist and a 9/11-abuser, presided over a New York City police department famed for its torture and killing of young black males...
...Dowd apparently approvingly quoted Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, saying that Clinton is "like some hellish housewife who has seen something that she really, really wants and won't stop nagging you until finally you say, fine, take it, be the damn President, just leave me alone...
...And Obama, though far more engaged and humanlike, risks ending up with another Ambien candidacy...
...Every time she opens her mouth, her flat, monotonic voice lays out yards of opaque white gauze, muffling any possibility of discourse...
...But it's Hillary who is causing the citizenry's heads to pitch forward and collapse on their chests...
...Where does she stand...
...So yes, America is ready for a black or a female President...
...He was slow to pick up on the Jena 6 case and never showed up at the rally—although, to be fair, neither did Clinton or Edwards...
...A golem, the artificial, man-like creature of Kabbalistic lore, a personoid incapable of normal responses...
...Over here, and a little to the side, and maybe a few steps to the right...
...Then—in of all places, feminist Maureen Dowd's column—I found a genuinely sexist comment about Hillary...
...Part of the problem is structural...
...Just be sure to wake us up when it happens...
...Besides, male politicians are never likened to stereotypical husbands, even though some of them can be equally hard to dislodge from the recliner in front of the TV or, as the case may be, the Oval Office...
Vol. 71 • December 2007 • No. 12
