Posts Tagged ‘Hillary Clinton’
WHY WOMEN NEED TO LEARN HISTORY’S ELECTION POWER LESSON
Like many women who identify themselves as feminists, Kathleen Turner and I are divided in our presidential candidate pick. We spent 18 months collaborating on her just-released memoir, Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles.
During that time, we talked about politics quite a bit, because she sees herself as an activist as well as an actor. I rolled my eyes last summer when she announced to me that she’d decided to support Barack Obama and was going stumping for him in North Carolina’s August heat.
I thought it a naïve choice, but Obama had the good sense to invite her to a meeting with a few prominent women and had asked directly for her support. She’d been impressed, as I was when I first met him soon after his 2004 election to the U.S. Senate. And like many people, I was thrilled that the Democratic candidate lineup looked more like America, whereas Republicans were still mired in cookie-cutter white male political hegemony. Nevertheless, it seemed at the time that Hillary Clinton was surging to an unassailable lead for her party’s nomination, so I didn’t need to press too hard on Kathleen to join me in supporting her.
REALITY SHIFTS AND “TRUTH” WITH IT
Read MoreHOPE IS STILL NOT A METHOD
Americans seem to like the message of hope better than we like the message of experience these days. But you know, there used to be a popular sex education film called “Hope is not a Method.” And that’s true about running a country too.
Can anybody deny that Hillary Clinton, who speaks of experience and from experience, is judged more harshly than Barack Obama who speaks of hope? There are so many examples trivial and profound but here’s a trivial one that is symbolic of all of them: I noticed that in the New York Times today, there was an effusive compliment for Michelle’s “athletic build”. In the photo you see she has large thighs.
Now, Hillary’s large ankles have been excoriated in the most vicious manner more political pundits than MSNBC can shake a stick at.
What’s the difference? It’s simply that Barack Obama and everything about him, including his wife, represent the new new thing. Further, he lives in a cloud of good will because he has not had time or inclination to make enough tough decisions that would cause him to make enemies. Even though he’s from Chicago, my sense of him is that he hasn’t a clue what he’s in for during a general election and then governing. Hillary unquestionably does.
Read MoreWhy Patti not Mark?
From today’s Washington Post report on the resignation of Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle: “But for all the efforts to expand the operation, Democratic strategists said the Clinton campaign remains opaque, even to those on the outside willing to be helpful. “They have more walls around them than you’ve seen in many castles,” said one prominent Democrat.
So can anyone tell me why was Patti Solis Doyle moved out when it should have been Mark Penn who was given the boot? His leaden instincts on message and campaign strategy, as evidenced by how poorly he has served her in his own media comments, are Hillary’s biggest albatross.
Hillary is so great at connecting with people when she loosens up and goes with her own instincts. That ability is the basis of Barack’s charm. She whizzes past him when it comes to grasp of the issues and specific policy measures. She needs to loosen the consultants’ corset that has been binding her campaign in harmful ways, starting with Penn.
Read MoreIS AMERICA GETTING SWEPT AWAY BY OBAMA-HYPE?
Have you ever been in a meeting where the group was on deadline to make a decision, but had been unable to reach consensus on which direction to go? What happens next? Nine times out of ten, someone comes up with a different idea than the ones you’ve been hashing around for hours. Everybody gloms onto it, and so do you, because you are desperate to place that important phone call, go to lunch, or you’re just plain worn down from arguing.
So whoever picks that perfect moment to throw out his or her idea becomes the hero while everyone else gets swept away in that new new thing, whose dazzle is untarnished by the imperfections of solutions that have been over-analyzed.
Leadership experts say this process usually results in the worst decisions. Doesn’t it seem to you as though many people are swept away by Barack Obama’s enormous charsma and dazzling star power?
Read MoreWhat’s Up to the Women?
It’s the quintessential difference between Republicans and Democrats. I don’t mean beliefs or legislative platform. I mean their ability to coalesce around a candidate and move forward expeditiously to get him or her elected.
Super Tuesday came and went without a resolution to who will be the Democrats’ standard bearer, while John McCain’s ascent to front-runner status was aided by the Republicans’ winner-take-all-delegates primary rules. The Democrats–we both love then and hate them for this characteristic–are more, well, democratic. So they have a complex if not downright Byzantine, proportional formula for awarding delegates to their nominating conventions.
Which brings me to the importance of women in this election this year. Check out the state-by-state breakdown in Women’s e-News today. Women are the majority in the population, even more so the majority of voters because a larger percentage of women then men actually cast votes. And this year, the intersection of race and gender has made the breakdown of how women cast their votes more volatile than ever, as African American women–a pivotal Democratic constituency–are choosing to vote for Barack Obama in epic proportions, as high as 80%.
Read MoreMIDNIGHT AT THE PING PONG PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY
Ping . Vermont’s presidential primary with its 15 delegates split 9-6 is called as expected for Obama.
I’m watching CNN and thinking about my first and only Texas precinct convention, in 1972. I’d learned from the League of Women Voters how my natal state’s Byzantine primary system worked, and I’d decided to participate from the ground up. As I recall only a few dozen people showed up; we met in someone’s living room; consequently, though I was a first time attendee I was elected to attend the county convention. I did attend that convention, but realized it would be impossible for me to participate further because of family obligations. So despite the friendly county judge who offered to put my name in the hopper for the state convention (that’s how it was done and probably still is), I declined.
Just as the predominantly Democratic Texas I grew up in changed its stripes to majority Republican (I allege that after I left for Arizona, the state went to hell) the current Texas Democratic party rules in which 2/3 of delegates decided in voting primaries and 1/3–the superdelegates—decided in precinct conventions or caucuses could well have changed over the years. But some fundamentals stay the same.
Pong. Early in the evening John McCain was declared the far and away winner in Ohio and Texas.
Republicans don’t have to pretend to be democratic. They understand elections are about gaining or retaining collective political power. That’s their big advantage. The Democrats turn themselves inside out trying to look democratic while in actuality their convoluted rules shore up the entrenched power of the party operatives as much or more than the Republicans. Their pronouncements express their egalitarian principles but their results tilt toward the political machine.
The Republicans will fall in line behind McCain, just as McCain sucked it up, accepted Bush’s hug and carried his water after being viciously assaulted by the Bush-Rove disparagement machine in 2000, and just as Mike Huckabee submitted himself graciously after the Texas numbers put McCain’s delegate count over the top and sealed him as the Republican presidential nominee.
The Democrats, says pundit Paul Begala, want to fall in love. More than that, I think, Democrats want to believe they are voting for the best ideas and ideals. And they love to put a fine comb through the arguments about who has them in purest form.
Read MoreSuper Tuesday 5PM
For the last few days, the internet has been buzzing with impassioned presidential endorsements by feminists, many of whom have been in or even leading the movement for decades and others who are the bright young voices of the present and the future. This extraordinary piece of cultural criticism by Robin Morgan is my personal favorite.
Seems the women of America have found their voices concerning whom they do and don’t support, thank you very much.
So where then does Andrew Sullivan yes, the conservative (though gay and hiv positive—put those together with “conservative” for an amazing oxymoron) pundit get off in his thinly veiled misogynist attempt to instruct feminists on how to vote?
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.
Read MoreCitizen Jane Tells Us How to Clean Up
Last night’s presidential debate on CNN was some of the best theater I’ve seen (watch clips). It had everything–a room packed with celebrities there to see our hottest political performers, snappy scripts well delivered, a spectacle much like top flight tennis players volleying at the height of their game, lights-camera-action.
Finally! Wolf Blitzer opened with the question that I’ve been giving the answer to since the campaign begain when he observed that Obama and Clinton look like the American dream team. It wouldn’t have been too seemly to ask who’d be on top, but the implication was obvious. They both gave the only answers they could, which was to say how much they respected one another and “here’s why I should be president”.
Obama is better with facile phrasemaking and people love that; nevertheless, Clinton got the best line–and biggest laugh–of the evening when asked whether the Bush-Clinton sequence should continue, she said “It might take a Clinton to clean up after a Bush again.”
Read MoreSpeak Up Some More on Hillary
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it with the snark about Hillary Clinton, judging things about her they would never even notice in a man.
But when you are the first anything, you’ll never be seen with an unjaundiced eye. In the end, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is a giant step toward normalizing the idea of women running for highest office. Until then we will continue to be barraged with misogynist Chris Matthews rants and websites selling Hillary Clinton nutcrackers.
Fortunately, as a counterbalance and a ligher touch, in the February MORE.com forum online, Deborah Siegel, author of Sisterhood Interrupted, asked women (generally 40 and up) who have themselves accomplished many firsts to weigh in on what a Hillary presidency might look like. Says Deborah, ” The forum is richer than the squabbles that dominate the news, and I feel it’s so very important to inject some fresh takes into the public conversation.”
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