Posts Tagged ‘Barack Obama’
Why Hillary Will Lead More Women To Partake in Politics
Like Kristen said in her post at Girl With Pen, “Now That The Dust Has Settled (Sort Of)”, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for president is still fascinating to ponder. I was recently asked to write an article on the topic for the ILF Digest, the journal of a think tank I’ve been a fellow of (I find this terminology amusing, but have never come up with an acceptable alternative—can you?) for some years. It won’t be published for a few weeks but I’d like to share an excerpt here because takes up where Kristen’s questions were leading:
Despite many problems with sexism in the culture and media that made themselves self-evident during Hillary Clinton’s campaign, there are even more reasons to be optimistic that Clinton’s presidential run will be a net plus in motivating women to enter politics. I predict a sea change in women’s participation in politics up and down the ticket and in non-elective political roles as well, for these reasons:
Read MoreMESSAGE TO OBAMA: CHANGE YOUR VIEW TO “OBAMA FOR WOMEN”
Unity symbols abound on the Democratic side of the presidential campaign these days. Barack Obama writes a personal check to help retire Hillary Clinton’s campaign debt; the two appear together, smiling, in Unity NH. He phones Bill. Fundraising events coming up in NY will find them together raising money for both Obama’s campaign and to pay Clinton’s debt.
Week before last, I attended a breakfast where boldface New York Clinton supporters were invited by Women for Obama to bridge their candidate preference chasm. Perfect giant strawberries and mini-muffins remained untouched on their silver platters in the dining room, while former Random House scion Bob Bernstein’s elegant Upper East Side living room fairly burst with highly caffeinated women. Gloria Steinem, iconic Hillary endorser who had already publicly thrown her support to Barack, urged us in her ever-optimistic way to support Obama in the “interest of our best interests.”
It was a tough and impassioned group, three groups actually. Some were quite ready to support Obama because, as someone said, “the alternative is unthinkable”. Others, too bruised or bitter to do otherwise, urged Hillary for vice-president. I count myself among those strong Clinton supporters who know Obama needs not just our votes but also our enthusiasm for victory. This meeting didn’t get me there, and since then the candidate himself hasn’t helped his own cause.
Read MoreThe Democrats’ Cow Pasture
Today’s the big day when the Democrats will find out whether they can effectively get out of the pasture of cow patties they created for themselves without either stepping in too many or causing a stampede among the supporters of either
Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Check out this very thorough analysis Anita, a reader of Heartfeldt placed on another post.
The Democratic Party leaders voted on Aug. 25, 2007, to sanction Florida Democrats for moving the date of their presidential primary to January 29, a week before the February 5 date which the party’s rules had set as the official start of primary season. They excepted the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary which have traditionally been the earliest–no one wanted to tamper with that little bit of presidential election theater even though it gives two small states way more influence in framing the narrative of the race than they deserve. Then in typical Democratic party fashion, they allowed South Carolina and Nevada to go early in the interest of geographic and ethnic diversity. New Hampshire’s state law requires them to hold their primary at least a week earlier than any other, setting off another series of oscillating primary date debates.
To make a long story short, it began to look something like the old children’s game of placing hands over hands into a tower and moving whoever’s hand was on the bottom to the top of the tower with increasing velocity until everybody disintegrates into a writhing pile of bodies on the floor. Michigan retaliated by moving their primary to January 15, and they were sanctioned accordingly.
Read MoreMedia Matters: So Now the Press Tells Candidates When to Quit?
This article from the media watchdog organization Media Matters is such a well documented analysis of the media’s current push for Hillary Clinton to exit the race for president that I wanted to share it in full. Regardless of which candidate you support, you can’t help but be aghast by how the echo chamber reverberates through and by the political media. The piece lays bare the process by which a narrative gets floated, then picked up widely from the New York Times to the local radio talk show, then beaten like a drum until it fills all the airwaves and leaves no room for a different point of view. And in this case, the narrative has a distinctly sexist tinge; all the better that a man, Eric Boehlert, wrote it. So no one can say the author is just being paranoid. Read on…
So now the press tells candidates when to quit?
History continues to unfold on many levels as the protracted Democratic Party primary race marches on, featuring the first woman and the first African-American with a real shot at winning the White House.
Here’s another first: the press’s unique push to get a competitive White House hopeful to drop out of the race. It’s unprecedented.
Looking back through modern U.S. campaigns, there’s simply no media model for so many members of the press to try to drive a competitive candidate from the field while the primary season is still unfolding.
Until this election cycle, journalists simply did not consider it to be their job to tell a contender when he or she should stop campaigning. That was always dictated by how much money the campaign still had in the bank, how many votes the candidate was still getting, and what very senior members of the candidate’s own party were advising.
In this case, Howard Dean, the head of the Democratic National Committee, said he was “dumbfounded” by public demands for Clinton to drop out last month. (He now wants one of the candidates to quit after the final June 3 primary.) Yet lots of pundits have suggested that in a neck-and-neck campaign in which neither candidate will likely secure the nomination based on pledged delegates, Sen. Hillary Clinton must drop out before all the states have had a chance to vote.
I realize the political debate surrounding the extended Democratic campaign remains a hot one, with people holding passionate opinions about the delegate math involved and what the consequences for the Democratic Party could be. I’m not weighing in on that debate. I’m focusing on how journalists have behaved during this campaign.
And the fact is, the media’s get-out-now push is unparalleled. Strong second-place candidates such as Ronald Reagan (1976), Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson, and Jerry Brown, all of whom campaigned through the entire primary season, and most of whom took their fights all the way to their party’s nominating conventions, were never tagged by the press and told to go home.
Read MorePennsylvania Station 2008
Pennsylvania was clearly going to be either the semi-finals or the finals in this game. Looks like the semi-finals are headed into overtime. And that’s a good thing.
In the pre-internet old days of backroom politics, the party powerful would long ago have taken these two candidates into the proverbial smoke-filled room and knocked heads together until the smoke cleared and they struck up some kind of deal that resolved which one would be the party’s nominee.
Today, we have a much more transparent, much more participatory, much more democratic-with-a-small-d process.
The superdelegates are the closest thing the party has to the backroom now. Clearly, if they continue their trend to supporting Obama, then Clinton is sunk even though she won Pennsylvania. Quite likely they’ll ultimately go with whoever they perceive as a winner. Yesterday it was Obama. Tomorrow it could be Clinton, for three reasons.
Read MoreWhy Would a 14-Year-Old Feminist Support Hillary?
Thanks to Deborah Siegel who blogs at Girl With Pen for this inspiring article, written by Samantha French, age 14, and a student at Writopia Lab, a writing enrichment program located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It’s always intriguing to learn how political opinions are formed, and this young women clearly has a mind of her own–and better yet, she talks publicly about what she believes.
As we all know, the buzz around America’s college campuses is Barack Obama and how he represents change for America. According to the media, he has overwhelming appeal to the country’s so-called “youth.” And it’s true. The phrase “yes we can” is being inhaled faster than pot brownies and Jell-O shots at a frat party. However, what the media seems to be consistently ignoring is the opinions of the country’s real, good old-fashioned, disenfranchised youth: high school students. Who are almost unanimously pro-Hillary.
OK, so I’m dreaming.
As a female freshman in Bard High School Early College, one of New York’s more liberal high schools where nearly two-thirds of the student body are females, there is not huge support for Hillary, which makes me sad. Many people at Bard, both male and female, support Obama because they are “tired of the Clintons” (a notion which they have obviously been fed by their parents. Think about it: the last time a Clinton was in office they were eight at the very most).
At first, I agreed with them. My dad’s a die-hard Obama supporter and so are a lot of my friends. But the turning point came for me when I saw how upset and truly devoted Hillary was to the race after her defeat at the Iowa caucus. The moment that the cameras revealed her sad eyes, I realized that I was seeing in her something rarely seen in any presidential candidate: a human being. While my father continued to be very pro-Obama (re-recording Twisted Sister’s “I Wanna Rock,” titled, I Want Barak,)—and put pressure on me to agree with him—I felt a connection with Hillary after that night.
Read MoreBarack’s Hubris
Oh honestly. At 9:53pm Barack Obama called John McCain to congratulate him on winning the Republican primary and tell him he looked forward to running against him in the fall. Now that’s hubris way beyond the confidence Clinton exuded in the famous Katie Couric interview when she said she’d be the Democratic nominee and was excoriated by the press. OK, Chris Matthews, are you going to notice and beat up on Obama?
Read MoreSuper Tuesday 2PM
I’m blogging today for RH Reality Check. I’m on pins and needles thinking about the Super Tuesday presidential primaries–what they mean to our country, what they mean to me as an individual, what they mean to the future of my children and grandchildren, and indeed the world. Right now, at 2pm, I can take the large and long view:
Our daughter Donna called this morning from Phoenix, excited to tell us her letter-to-the-editor of The Arizona Republic had been published. Incensed by pejorative e-mails circulated by a conservative friend about the religious and cultural implications of Barack Obama’s middle name “Hussein”, she’d decided to speak out against the racism.
We congratulated her and then asked if she and her husband had voted yet. “We early voted. He was for Edwards. I voted for Hillary,” she said. Then she paused. “But now I kind of wish I’d voted for Obama.”
There ensued one of those intense family conversations going on in households across the country today, hashing out what each of us likes, dislikes, and worries about with each candidate, predictions about the various possible match-ups in the general election, and what the polls and pundits are saying.
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