I knew it was only a matter of time before Tina Fey played Sarah Palin. Her twisted, brilliant comedy writer’s brain must have exploded when she first saw a picture of McCain’s VP nominee. I mean, really, she’s note perfect (though I think Tina’s cuter, but I’m not exactly unbiased).
This clip, though, was better than I expected. By placing mock-Palin next to mock-Clinton, Fey and Poehler manage to both poke fun at both candidates and make several points about Palin. Most notably, that she is not Hillary Clinton. Also, that it’s bloody hypocritical for the McCain camp and supporters to cry sexism now.
Most importantly, though, they remind us that it’s NOT sexist to ask a female candidate about her positions and preparation for the job. That we had a qualified, smart, strong woman candidate and that this election shouldn’t be about choosing a woman for woman’s sake.
In this age of the utter failure of journalism to even approach doing its job properly, at least we have comedy. Yes, we have the blogosphere, but no lefty political blog comes even close to the audience of Saturday Night Live.
You know, some people have been moaning a bit that she took a few days to do it, but let’s just think about how long it took John Edwards to make up his damn mind to endorse.
So, in all seriousness and honesty: Thanks, Hillary Clinton. Thank you for running and for proving that millions of men will indeed vote for a woman. I disagreed with quite a lot about how you ran your campaign, but you fought hard and I can hope that you’ll fight as hard to defeat John McCain as you did to defeat Barack Obama.
I linked to a post the other day that suggested Hillary Clinton for a Supreme Court slot, and I must say that I like that idea. Her biggest weakness has always been her (perceived and actual) political nature–her willingness to pander, if you will. The Supreme Court doesn’t have to pander. It’s a lifetime appointment. Once she was confirmed, she’d be free to rule as she actually feels, and I do believe that underneath the hardened political animal we’d see the person that really does hold progressive beliefs. So that’s my two cents. Hillary for Supreme Court!!
So after getting my first official troll (and I’m assuming that this isn’t another incarnation of that girl from SC who still hates me for reasons I just don’t get), I have to think about my own reaction to this primary process.
All of us Obama people have been accused of being “sheep” and just in love with the way the man speaks. Being a white feminist, I’ve also been told that I’m disloyal to women and that I cannot be a feminist if I don’t vote for Hillary Clinton on top of that.
Even one of my friends was arguing with me last weekend that many people voting for Obama are voting for him for stupid reasons (as if millions of people in every election don’t vote for “stupid” reasons like which candidate they’d rather have a beer with). This of course insulted the hell out of me, since I like to think that I’m smarter than that and that my friends know me better than that.
At the beginning of the primary season, I made this chart for one of my other gigs. Did the research on almost every single candidate from each party running for president, and lined them all up next to each other and looked at it. While doing that research, I read the issue positions on each candidate’s website and looked at their voting records.
I was tempted by Bill Richardson, really, I was. But in the end he was an ineffective campaigner and money-raiser, and I’d like a Democrat to win in November, thanks. So I stuck with Barack, whose Dreams From My Father I read and loved and identified with. Whose policy proposals, particularly on foreign policy, were closest to what I myself felt. I don’t want any more saber-rattling. I want negotiation. I want understanding that other countries are not just “with us or against us.” (I want single-payer health care too, but only Kucinich was talking about that, and again, I’d like to win in November.)
But ANY of those Democratic candidates would get my whole support–which doesn’t mean just blogging, it means putting my money and my free time where my big mouth is and donating and volunteering and harassing those nice people who aren’t nearly as partisan as me–in November, because the shit we’re up against is scary. (See last post for reference.)
Hell, I love the idea of a woman president. But the nastiness of this campaign wore on me like it did everyone, and even though I am a white feminist who recoils at sexism like it’s a personal slap in my face, I just didn’t see the sexism as coming from the Obama campaign. Most of the people on the ground for Obama were women, young women of all ethnic backgrounds (and men, too, but I’d have to say that in my personal experience with several different offices, all but one has had a woman in charge).
By contrast, I did see race-baiting coming from the Clinton campaign, so much so that yes, at several points I joined the crowds of people saying they’d vote third party rather than for Clinton.
I think that by November I’d be over it, though.
I was pissed in 2004 when Howard Dean lost in the primaries. Pissed at John Kerry because of stories of push-polls that implied that Dean beat his wife or reminded people that Dean’s wife was Jewish.
But come November, I was on the ground a 12-hour drive from my home, helping Kerry win Pennsylvania (only for him to lose Ohio, and the race, but whatevs).
Because what we were up against was scary. I don’t like voting against things, really, I don’t. I’d much rather vote FOR someone that I believe in. But when it comes down to it, I’d like to keep my reproductive rights and maybe get some help with health care because as a freelance writer, my ass is screwed as soon as I leave my cushy (ha!) grad school. I’d like to get out of Iraq and have my friends home. I’d like to not see any more tax cuts for the rich that screw over broke people like me, and I’d like to go to the wedding of my gay friends.
So I know that some of y’all think us Obama people are sexist and sheep and stupid and mean and taking away the election from Hillary Clinton. I admit to some of the same feelings at times myself.
But I’d vote for her if she won. And I’d campaign for her and work my ass off to get her in office. Because it’s much more important now than it seemed back in 2000 when I voted for Nader, when I could barely see a difference between what George Bush was pretending to be and what Al Gore was pretending to be.
I want a woman president. I’m really hoping that Obama chooses a woman as his VP candidate. I think that could be truly revolutionary for this country. I think it’s amazing that the Democratic primary came down to a woman and a black man, and it surpassed all my hopes (frankly, I thought we’d end up with Edwards as soon as Iowa voted, and they proved me wrong and made me happy).
But we need to turn this country back in the right direction, and I hope that if Obama lost, I’d be able to look past my distaste for the race-baiting I saw and realize that we needed a candidate who believed in my reproductive rights, the rights of the GLBT community, who wants to get us out of Iraq and hopefully prevent future wars, who wants to give immigrants more rights (and maybe some fair pay too?) rather than throwing them out and bolstering xenophobia, who knows the difference between Sunni and Shiite, who wants to fix our broken health care system and invest in our schools. And that I would vote for and work for that candidate. Whomever he or she may be.
That this headline is attracting people who consider filling in an email address with “Obamazombie@sheepmail.com” and telling me I’m too young to know any better, followed by accusing me of only being annoyed by things because Obama told me to defending Clinton. Let me rephrase this, please.
Can you please give me a good reason why Clinton couldn’t find a better time period to reference than the assassination of a former candidate? While you’re at it, tell me a good reason why Clinton is a better candidate that doesn’t involve ephemeral references to “experience,” which is just as empty a word as “change.” And please stop with the bogus email that’s couched as an insult to me, because I’m just gonna keep on deleting them.
This is the most fucked-up thing I’ve heard this campaign cycle. And that is saying a hell of a lot, considering what we’ve already heard.
Bobby Kennedy, whose little brother Teddy was an early prominent supporter of Obama, and was just diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor.
Obama, who had to have Secret Service protection before a single state had voted because of death threats.
Obama, who just last week had to grin and bear it while Mike Huckabee made jokes at an NRA rally about him getting shot at.
Someone, please, try and rationalize this.
Not to mention that if god forbid anything does happen to Obama, the rumors that Clinton had something to do with it will be unbelievable. She better hope nobody so much as breathes on him wrong, now.
*When you put a real email and blog name on there instead of a bullshit one, I’ll print your comments. I put my real name out there for everyone to see–I expect at least an actual pseud outta people.
I have been remiss in my feminist duties not to call out Barack Obama for his “sweetie” comment. Like the earlier one about “the claws come out,” this comment was demeaning to women in general and should be condemned even by ardent supporters like myself.
I realized this last night when I was giving a friend hell for leaving his away message on AIM as “Women!!!!” This comment, which could be interpreted in different ways, nevertheless rubbed me the wrong way and I shouldn’t let Obama get away with similar things that, if said to me or about me, would have me requesting an apology. It’s obnoxious, and he should make a public statement.
However, I remain a supporter of Obama, and I would argue to people who point to this as the latest in a long line of perceived slights that have led them to swear they’ll vote for McCain, that they should ask themselves: is “sweetie” worse than “cunt”?
And of course, what about that other big-name sexist on the campaign trail?
Yes, I’m talking about Bill Clinton.
Sally Quinn of the Washington Post wrote a brutal column about Bill’s history and how he is Hillary Clinton’s own Jeremiah Wright.
Leaving aside Monica Lewinsky for a minute, shall we revisit Paula Jones? In 1999, Bill Clinton had to pay “$90,686 (U.S.) for testifying falsely in the highly publicized sexual-harassment suit brought against him by Paula Jones, the first time such a penalty has been imposed on a sitting president.”
“Ms. Jones, a former employee of the state of Arkansas, had argued that Mr. Clinton, then governor, had propositioned her in a hotel room in Little Rock in 1991. The case was dismissed before trial by Judge Wright in April, 1998, but Mr. Clinton worried that it would be reinstated by a higher court and offered to settle with Ms. Jones, who had sought far more in damages than she received.” (This is from the Globe and Mail in Canada. I don’t have a link ‘cause I got it through LexisNexis. Aren’t you jealous? Oh, and by the way, when they say propositioned, they mean “pulled his pants down and showed her his weenie.”)
And as Ms. Quinn pointed out, Hillary Clinton didn’t make public speeches denouncing her husband’s actions.
I and many others have argued that Bill Clinton’s infidelity is not any of our business. If he and Hillary are OK with their relationship, cool.
But sexual harassment is not OK, even in an open relationship. In a Christian Science Monitor article (also from LexisNexis,), I found this quote: “On one hand you can say if you are interested in the overall equality of women as a group you have to say ‘I would take Bill Clinton,’ ” says Nancy Dowd, a law professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “But his conduct has been so demeaning that he has set women back enormously.”
Another woman said: “’We, as a country, had the opportunity to come forward and make a statement that no matter what office you hold or what job you have you cannot sexually harass women and get away with it. Bill Clinton got away with it,’ says Linda Hitt Thatcher, a Landover, Md., lawyer who specializes in sexual-harassment cases.”
Fact is, back in the 90s we overlooked a LOT of shitty treatment of women in his personal life because he was far better for women politically than the other options.
And his wife overlooked it for reasons that are only hers and yes, none of my or any of your business.
But she’s still with him, and he’s still playing attack dog on the campaign trail, and I’ve still not heard any denunciation of his actions.
Sure, people can change. And I bet after the blow-up about “Sweetie,” Obama won’t be saying anything like that again. I hope he’s thought about why it was wrong and not just that he can’t say it in public because he’ll get called out in the blogosphere.
But let’s not get mortally offended over “sweetie” while forgetting Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey and even 21-year-old Monica Lewinsky.
Yes, Bill Clinton denied sexually harassing Jones and Willey. He also denied having sex with Monica Lewinsky before he admitted it. But it was easier to give him a pass then because he was a mostly pro-woman president, and the people accusing him were so vile. Hell, I was even nervous writing this, wondering if people were going to accuse me of being a right-wing shill.
But I’m not.
I’m just a young feminist who came of age under Bill Clinton and Lewinskygate, and while I think it was stupid for him to be impeached over it, it was not stupid for it to be an issue any more than it was stupid for Anita Hill to be an issue, and certainly not any more stupid than “sweetie” or “the claws come out.”
Footnotes:
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
July 30, 1999 Friday
Clinton agrees to pay $90,000 in Paula Jones contempt ruling U.S. judge’s fine for false testimony in sexual-harassment suit marks first time such a penalty has been imposed on a president still in office
ANDREW COHEN Washington Bureau
INTERNATIONAL NEWS; Pg. A19
Christian Science Monitor
February 24, 1999, Wednesday
Clinton’s role in heightening sexual-harassment debate
Warren Richey, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
USA; Pg. 2
Anyway, aside from the conventional wisdom that this is a “change” election and that’s why Hillary Clinton didn’t do better, there’s another reason that I find the “experience” claim problematic–and it’s got nothing to do with questioning the actual level of experience.
As Latoya at Racialicious noted, many of us younger people have been told we can’t do something because we’re too young. I’m 28 and look younger than I am, and when I was the manager of a large retail/rental bike shop, I constantly had to deal with people walking past me to look for “the person in charge.” When I had employees that were older than I was, I watched older customers consistently address them rather than me.
This gets worse, of course, when you’re a woman, and/or a person of color. Often you’ll be the first to do something, and you won’t have had the opportunities for “experience” that white men have.
Making the argument for Hillary Clinton one based on “experience,” as Gloria Steinem did, makes the argument not one that opens doors for all woman candidates, but opens doors for Hillary Clinton, because she can claim a very specific type of experience that only a few other women have–being married to the President.
Because Hillary Clinton’s “experience” that makes her “ready on day one” was not predicated upon her work as a lawyer or even really on her work in the Senate, but on her time as first lady doing diplomatic missions and the like, this doesn’t help the argument for any others who may come behind her.
We don’t want to argue that only women who have watched their husbands do something first are qualified. We don’t want to argue that women can only be president when they’re more “experienced” than the other candidates.
We want to argue that women can be president because they’re smart, have good policy ideas, and good judgment, not because they’ve served more time. Because most women in politics have served less time than the men. Most people of color have less time in politics than most white people. There are men in the Senate who were there when the Civil Rights movement happened, who were there when the “second wave” (see this link for some real dirt on the real “waves”) of the women’s movement happened and when women and people of color first started to get into positions of political power.
We haven’t had the opportunity to have as much experience. We have to fight to change that. Which means not more people with “experience,” because that claim is always going to favor the Ted Kennedys and Strom Thurmonds of this world. It means more new voices, more voices that have been historically excluded, more voices that do not have experience but have something more valid to consider: a different perspective.
Hillary Clinton could have chosen this path to the white house, and who knows? It may have gone better for her. Clearly, the swift falls of Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and my favorite, Bill Richardson showed that Democrats weren’t looking for experience. Yet the argument that I met on the campaign trail when people were voting for Clinton was constantly “She’s more experienced.” When you scratched it, though, they couldn’t tell you what experience specifically mattered to them, and it became clear that a lot of the time, “experience” meant name recognition, not any specific things that she’d done that made her more qualified.
And we certainly don’t want to go there, do we? Name recognition is still going to be harder for female politicians and politicians of color. Quick, name five Senators. Aside from Senator Clinton, how many people would name women? Who has higher name recognition, Teddy Kennedy or Barbara Mikulski? Joe Lieberman or Patty Murray? Harry Reid or Olympia Snowe?
Hopefully, it won’t always be that way. But for now, experience favors those who have been in power the longest. It is not the path to more women CEOs, more women Senators, more women governors. There is no other woman besides Hillary Clinton who can claim that she has the “experience” to be ready to be president “on day one.”
But there are a lot of women and people of color who have the smarts, the ideas, and the judgment to do so, and that’s what we should be basing our arguments on.
Of course, I won’t have completely unpacked my feelings toward Hillary Clinton’s candidacy until years after this whole mess is over.
So I just keep blogging things as they occur to me, and hope they illuminate to you and to me why I feel the way I do at any given time.
In making herself masculine, in using words like “obliterate” and “destroy,” in vowing revenge and declaring herself ready for that 3:00 AM phone call, in talking about her time shooting things with her father, Hillary Clinton has not only reclaimed the phallus and painted her (male) opponent as more feminine and thus less qualified (except when she wants to claim she’s more qualified because she’s a woman).
She has proved herself willing to kill.
Because the unnamed part of political power in America is that you have to be willing to kill.
Bill Clinton proved it in Arkansas when he executed a mentally retarded man while pursuing the presidency. John Kerry tried to prove it by continually invoking his military service and going hunting. Michael Dukakis looked like an idiot when he tried to prove it by riding around on a tank. And Dubya, of course, executed his own retarded convict.
And every feminist who recognizes the masculine/feminine, destroy/create binary, the difference between power-to and power-over, and thinks even in passing about state violence, should be disappointed and disgusted with this. Because as many people have said, the point of feminism should not be simply to put women in those positions where men have always been. It should be a starting point for a radical critique of power structures in general. At least, that’s my feminism.
Once upon a time–well, back in 2002–I took a course on Literary Monsters.
We read lots of lovely stuff that I don’t have lying around to reference right now (but if you want a deeper post on the subject, you can buy me this book, thanks). But the main gist of our study of texts like Beowulf, Interview With the Vampire, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest was seven monster theses that my professor outlined for us at the beginning of class.
I’ve watched this primary campaign go from a spirited competition into a mess where each candidate’s supporters firmly believe the other candidate is a monster. We’ve looked at the actual reasons for that, and I believe that especially with Hillary Clinton, but with Obama as well, the press portrayal of the candidates can be looked at through these theses. And yes, there’s probably a much longer paper in this, but what the hell.
1. The monstrous body is a cultural body.
Both candidates reflect our culture. The older woman, past being seen as sexual…the old queen and the wicked witch, simultaneously, as I said in an earlier post. And the outsider, the younger black man. Both of them arise from categories we know well, but are breaking those rules just by running.
2. The monster always escapes.
Over and over again we’ve thought this horrendous campaign was over, only for one candidate to stage a comeback. We’ve thought Clinton was done after Iowa, then Obama after New Hampshire and Nevada, then Clinton again after Obama’s post-Super Tuesday wins, then Obama again after Clinton won Ohio and the Texas primary and then Pennsylvania, and now…
3. The monster is the harbinger of category crisis.
Of course, they’re bringing on category crisis just by being a white woman and a black man running for President, and certainly by having defeated more typical white male candidates. Hillary Clinton has always been disconcerting–at first she was too masculine a woman, then she was too feminine, standing by her man. Now she’s both uber-masculine–”obliterate,” “if she gave Obama one of her balls…”–and feminine, when her angry supporters accuse Obama and his camp of sexism.
Obama, of course, is both American and not-American, black and white, masculine and feminine (at least according to Carville), rich and poor, elitist and community activist, and if you’d believe the crazies, Christian and Muslim.
4. The monster dwells at the gates of difference.
You see the fear of difference much more with Obama, especially with the reports of overt racism and the repeated cries that he’s Muslim despite Rev. Wright’s best attempts to remain part of the media cycle. Hillary Clinton’s problem is more that she is not different enough. Obama supporters hate her as part of the culture that they despise and reject–not alien, but all too familiar. But Hillary Clinton is still a woman, and still different.
5. The monster polices the borders of the possible.
Is it really possible for America to elect a (white) woman? A black man? And does some of the intense anger at the other side stem from the fact that it feels like not just a rejection of Hillary Clinton or of Barack Obama, but of all (older) women or all black Americans? How much change can America handle? And what ugly truths about ourselves do we have to confront in the process?
6. Fear of the monster is really a kind of desire.
Obama is too well-spoken, too charismatic, too seductive. We can’t have that. It must be bad because we can’t quite quantify it. And Clinton is too determined, she wants it too badly, how dare she?! But secretly, the need to over and over again reiterate what’s wrong with the Other candidate (yes, I capitalized that for a reason) is to remind ourselves that we don’t want it, we don’t want it, we don’t want it…
7. The monster stands at the threshold of becoming…
President?
Joking aside, one of the first ways that people learn to commit atrocities is by Othering the opponent, making them not just the enemy but something monstrous and not-human. Soldiers in Abu Ghraib, or in Nazi concentration camps, rapists, police who shoot an unarmed man or drag people from their cars and beat them, the people who killed Matthew Shepard or Brandon Teena or Sanesha Stewart. It always seems easier to do that when the hated person is already different in some visible way–female, black, Arab, gay, transgender.
So we have a presidential primary campaign, supposedly in the party of tolerance, the party that supports people who are women, black, Arab, gay, transgender, Latino, Jewish–at least more than that other party does. And we get this polarized mess, and I can’t help but wonder if this would be quite so angry if it were between, say, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards (it would be for me, because I’d be in the position of trying to care which one of them won when they both rub me the wrong way), or even Barack Obama and John Edwards, to say nothing of Joe Biden and Chris Dodd or some other grey-haired white men. To what degree does all that category crisis, those border issues, that Difference affect our view of the candidate we don’t support?
While we’re waiting with bated breath for the returns in Indiana to come in, I thought I’d write a little about sexism in the campaign.
Not the usual bit about sexism in the campaign, of course. That’s been done. Yes, Hillary Clinton has faced sexism. (And Racialicious has a great post about sexism and racism in the campaign that you should read.)
And that, along with the “obliterate Iran” comment, has made me lose any last bit of positive feeling that I had about her possibly being the first woman president.
I blogged before about why my feminism leads me to be critical of Clinton’s tactics and to support Obama.
Words have power. And the way they are used tells you something about the person using them. Hillary Clinton is not stupid. When she says “obliterate,” she knows the message that she’s sending and the person that she’s appealing to at least as well as Obama knows what he implies by saying “the claws come out.”
And Carville straight-up saying that Clinton has balls is just doing overtly what her campaign has been doing more subtly for months now. While he’s at it, of course, he’s attempting to emasculate Obama.
Aside from being troubling in its similarity to tactics used by the current administration, this crap bothers me because I feel that it confirms what I’ve felt all along: Hillary Clinton isn’t interested in pulling women up behind her, unless it’s when she can say it and get a few votes. She’s not out there trying to prove that women can be president. She’s out there trying to prove that she’s an honorary man and thus gets a pass.
Ariel Levy wrote about this phenomenon in Female Chauvinist Pigs, a book I both liked and found problematic. Levy wanted to site the problems with this phenomenon in “raunch culture,” but her strongest arguments were not against raunch itself but against the commodification of sex and against this very “honorary man” phenomenon–hence the title.
Like Margaret Thatcher and many other women leaders, Hillary Clinton spends lots of time trying to prove she’s got, as my father says, the “balls for the game.” And in an article in The Nation about the Pennsylvania primary, one man at least showed that she’d proved her point.
A construction contractor who gave the name Mike Giordano said he did not watch Obama’s speech on race after the Wright controversy broke because “I don’t listen to those people. They don’t make sense when they talk.” And he summed up the presidential contest this way: “They put a senior citizen for President, a woman and a black man. What do you got? Nothing. But that woman’s got balls.”
The greatest irony of this is that Hillary Clinton, back when her husband was running, was seen as way too powerful and emasculating, so much so that his (and her) approval ratings actually went up among men when rumors of his infidelity and sexual harassment charges came out. Stephen Ducat wrote about this extensively in The Wimp Factor So how is it that now she can get away with being that emasculating woman? Is it different now that she’s running for office herself, rather than as first lady, or is it going to play right into GOP hands for the fall?
Perhaps Clinton’s rhetoric works against Obama, who got my vote precisely because his language and that of his advisers appeals to my feminist sensibilities, but it won’t work against an actual war hero and certified White Guy, John McCain. It’s just one more example of her handing arguments to the Right while making arguments that do nothing for her against McCain.
I suppose the best thing I can say about this is that it allows Obama an easier time attacking the both of them. He can knock militarism and it hits both opponents. (And don’t get me started on the gas tax.)
And if the superdelegates are dumb enough to overturn the majority of the voters to hand the nomination to the person who’s headed right at every opportunity, they may well watch those voters defect to McCain–as well as watching those on the left, particularly the black voters who’ve been disenfranchised one too many times, vote third party again. (Cynthia McKinney, are you listening?) You can’t draw votes away from the Republicans by being just like them.
