Posts Tagged ‘Hillary Clinton’
Which Greek Tragedy are Hillary and Bill Enacting?
I posted this on Huffington Post this morning in a fit of pique about how unfairly I think the public and the press judge Hillary Clinton while giving other candidates a free pass. For example, they criticized her concession speech after the South Carolina primary as not being gracious enough, yet uttered not a peep when Barack Obama left Nevada without giving any concession speech at all. Nevertheles, especially in politics, what is perceived is what is, and that she has to deal with that reality. Herewith, the column; check out the HuffPo version here if you want to have your breath taken away by some hostile comments:
Help me please: Which Greek tragedy would be the proper metaphor for the political narrative playing itself out before our eyes? If Hillary Clinton loses her presidential bid because Bill’s help has become so destructive to her campaign that it is alienating the press and offending African Americans (yes, he who was formerly dubbed “the first Black president”), that would be a tragedy of epic proportions. This is especially poignant, considering how strongly people expected his presence to be positive for her, not to mention a redemption for him.
Perhaps the specter of losing the nomination after being dubbed the putative front runner, or of gaining the nomination in a bitterly divisive nomination contest then losing the presidency, might be likened to a Pyrrhic victory.
Read MoreHillary: Get Over It So You Can Get On With Winning
I was going to call this “The Importance of Being Hillary,” but the Iowa caucus results seemed to call for something else. So I did a third “Memo re Hillary”, this time to Hillary herself telling her to “Loosen up, Girl” if she wants to win the next round of primaries. But do read the rest of it here and let me know what you think. Better yet, put a comment at the end of my commentary on HuffPo.
Deborah Siegel, posted an interesting analysis of women and men voters in the Iowa Caucuses on her Girl with Pen blog. I want to share it with you here too because dollars to donuts you’ll never see this information in the New York Times. It’s dated January 4 and the author is sociologist Virginia Rutter; the post title is “Who Votes Their Gender.”
Read MoreYou Looking at Me?
This is on Huffington Post, too. Some days it seems like journalists don’t have enough to do with their time so they create conflicts out of whole cloth as a form of entertainment. Fortunately for me, I make no claim to be objective. Let me know what you think. Better yet, go to HuffPo and put your comment there.
You know Hillary is no longer seen as the inevitable front runner in Iowa when Maureen Dowd (almost, at least till she gets to her punch line) writes something positive about her.
In response to the latest Drudge-Limbaugh-sexist bloggers’ echo chamber campaign to denigrate Hillary for—gasp!–looking like a 60-year-old woman, when men of that certain age or even—gasp again–older are seen as distinguished and wise, Dowd observed: “Women are still scrutinized more critically on their looks, which seem to fluctuate more on camera, depending on lighting, bloating and wardrobe.”
Read MoreWhy Oprah and Hillary are in This Election Together
Her exquisitely lacquered red nails clasp the lever confidently, six fashion-statement gold bangles punctuating her slender wrist. Though you can’t see the rest of her, if you read women’s fashion magazines, you might guess this is
the smart, sophisticated Marie Claire http://www.marieclaire.com woman.
There’s a good reason why the word “voting” is clearly painted under the lever, with an arrow pointing to it. This woman might well be one of the 35 million eligible women who didn’t vote in the 2004 presidential election. And single women http://www.wvwv.org , we are told by the article, are less likely to vote than their married counterparts.
Read MoreClinton, Couric, and Chris Matthews’ Sexist Spin
When it comes to Chris Matthews’s interpretation of Hillary Clinton’s words—any of her words—she’s damned if she yeas and damned if she nays.
After gloating that a new poll found Hillary losing in a matchup with any one of five Republican presidential candidates, Matthews later in the same program spun her November 26 interview with Katie Couric, in which–like any candidate with half a brain and a quarter of a spine–Clinton showed confidence in her ability to win the Democratic nomination.
Read MoreBang Those Pots and Keep This Movement Moving
Today is March 8, International Women’s Day 2006. But before getting into that, let’s think back to September 1995.
Spin the globe and stop the world on China.
It’s the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, where hugely ambitious and thrilling goals were set for improving the lives of women, and by extension their families and the world.
The official conference was in Beijing, but the much larger convocation of activists from nongovernmental organizations was literally stuck in the mud in Huairu, a suburb an hour’s drive from the city.
Thousands of us had arrived early on the morning of Sept. 6, to stand packed together under a roof of brightly colored umbrellas, jockeying for the few hundred seats inside the auditorium where then first lady of the United States Hillary Clinton was slated to give a speech.
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