Senator Clinton

Sorry, Gendered Criticisms Displace Substantive Ones

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2008-05-26 09:52

Quick follow-up on Sen. Clinton as the new Ralph Nader and why criticizing her, or anyone else, inside any kind of gendered framework reflects rather harshly on the critic and not really at all on her.

First of all, gendered criticism, even from progressives, is no small problem. Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors cites… more than a handful of sexist slurs from various, and nominally progressive, Democrats compiled by Erica Barnett

I’ve said it before–but because some Slog readers seem to still think I believe any attack on Clinton is a sexist attack, I’ll say it again: The misogyny from the media, from supposedly liberal blogger doodz, commenters on this blog, and just about everywhere during this campaign has been despicable. This kind of shit ought to be behind us: Hillary Clinton is a bitch. A big ol’ bitchy bitch. And a cunt. A “big fucking whore.” Fortunately, you can “call a woman anything.” She’s “Nurse Ratched.” She’ll castrate you if she gets a chance. She would like that. She’s a “She-Devil.” She’s a madam, and her daughter’s a whore. She’s frigid, and she can’t give head. She’s a “She-Devil.” A lesbian. A nag. When things get tough, she cries like a big dumb GIRL. In fact, she’s just that — a “little girl.” In FACT, she wants to “cry her way to the White House.” To be, ahem, “Crybaby-in-Chief.” That proves that she’s not tough enough. But she’s also not feminine enough. She’s “screechy.” She’s an “aging, resentful female.” She’s “Sister Frigidaire.” She really ought to quit running for President and stick to housework. She basically spent her entire times as First Lady going to tea parties. She’s a monster whojust won’t die. In fact, she really should just die. You can buy a urinal target with her face on it to express what you really think of her. OMG she’s got claws! She’s crazy. In fact, she’s a lunatic. She’s petty and vindictive and entitled. She’s a washed-up old hag. She’s “everybody’s first wifestanding outside probate court.” She’s a “scolding mother.” She’s shrill… shrill… shrill. She can’t take it when people are mean to her. She’s a “hellish housewife.” She’s Tanya Harding. She CAN’T be President, what with the mood swings and the menses.Any woman who votes for her is voting with her vagina, not her brain. Women only like Hillary because she’s a fellow Vagina-American. And because they vote with their feelings. Frankly, anyone who still thinks we need “feminine role models” should get over it and move on, already. Oh, and men who supporters are castratos in the eunuch chorus. You shouldn’t make her President because she wants it too much. She’s totally just banking on support from ugly old feminists. And she looooves to “play the victim.” She cackles! And cackles. And cackles. It’s like she’s a witch or something! She’s definitely“witchy.” And now you can buy her cackle as your ring tone. Her voice, too, is “grating”–like “fingernails on a blackboard” to “some men.” She’s hiding behind her gender. She isn’t a “convincing mom” because she’s too strident. She never did anything on her own. Her husband keeps her on a leash. She hates men. Her campaign is a “catfight.” She makes people want to kill themselves, is like a “domineering mother,” and is cold. And OMG she has boobies! All of which are reasons to hate her. (And boy, could I go on.)

Barnett said it here.

Ann Bartow adds, among other things, that gender insulting Clinton isn’t limited to Clinton!

And hey, guess what? Not being Hillary Clinton will not protect you. If Obama secures the nomination, the same sexism will soon find exclusive focus on Michelle Obama. She too is getting the Uppity Woman smack down. SheCodes at Black Women Vote discussed this in a general way...

Read the quote in context here.

Yeah, I haven’t been reading enough ‘winger opposition sources to be up on this but I think I’ve noticed opening salvos in supermarket-style tabloid venues like the front page of the National Enquirer and Mickey Kaus’s blog.

I’ll just repeat that as with all gendered aspersions they’re not just bullshit they’re distractions! For instance aren’t the almost exclusively male consultants Clinton employs and personally directs, let alone her husband, just as “castrating” as she is? Um, yeah, except men usually get called “rabid” or even just “aggressively partisan.” And isn’t it a bigger problem anyway that Clinton keeps picking such a pack of thumb-fingered, foot-shooting asshats and showboats to be her personal Karl Roves, John Yoos, Dick Cheneys and Charlie Blacks? Why yes, as a matter of fact it is.

The fact of the matter is that Hillary Clinton isn’t a bitch! She’s not “castrating.” She’s not a “cunt,” or a “whore” or “shrill”** or “witchy” or anything like it. She has a Ralph Nader-sized ego, yes. She’s got a divisive, Bush-doctrine-like 50%-plus-one approach to politics, yes. She’s got a Bush-like obsession with one-way loyalty and secrecy, yes. She’s got a (sorry Prof. Bartow) an egregiously lawyerly attitude towards what should count as evidence and what “opposing council” and “the jury” should be allowed to hear that may or may not be fine in court but kind of sucks in terms of electoral politics. But where’s the gender in any of that?

In fact the closest thing to a legitimate gender issue is that Clinton has a family member she’s using to blind the public, but not herself via conversation with her partner, “personal loans” derived from from unhealthily large “foundation” contributions. And that’s not really a gender issue at all, Senator McCain enjoys the same benefit with his partner, as would anyone else of any gender (or combination of genders) with legally recognized family privileges.

So! You want to be a twit about Senator Clinton’s gender fine but to do so is to deliberately sideline discussion of substantive issues. Conversely if you have substantive, legitimate concerns then don’t be a twit.

[** In fact one serious criticism of Senator Clinton is that, based on her campaign, she’s not “Order of the Shrill“ at all! —fl]

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Reflections On the New Ralph Nader Of 2008

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2008-05-23 16:30


Photo by Flickr user figleaf (me for once!) Used under a Creative Commons license.

1) If I stop looking at Senator Hillary Clinton for a minute I see a lot of really wonderful, actually powerful women in politics. Including all but one of my major national, state, and local representatives, all of whom are very experienced and highly qualified, and one of whom is only two impeachments away from the Oval Office. To say that Clinton is the epitome of women in power does a disservice to everyone else.

2) Fantasies of ‘wingers, and fears of supporters notwithstanding, Senator Clinton’s increasingly disgraceful behavior disgraces only her. Any more than, say, Ralph Nader’s behavior in 2000 disgraced only him and not all men (despite his end-stage macho antics), nor all citizen activists, nor all government watchdogs, nor environmentalist, and so on.

3) And speaking of which! People keep dragging gender into Senator Clinton’s antics. Besides being kind of thuggish (update: see also Ann Bartow) it’s a distraction from the real problem: She’s transforming herself into the Ralph Nader of 2008 — a previously admirable, personally likable activist who’s become toxically self-centered and self-righteous and no longer seems to care who gets hurt.

4) And speaking of which again! Just like Ralph Nader in 2000, Senator Clinton seems to be developing a hard core of supporters bent on sticking to her to the bitter end. Possibly enough to, as in 2000, influence the outcome of the election.** And here’s the deal with that: the kind of progressives who stayed home in a self-righteous huff rather than support Ralph Nader’s rival in 2000 are exactly the same kind of people who’ll stay home rather than “betray” what Senator Clinton “stood for” in 2008.*** And while I’m sure no one’s polling for this I really, really wish there could be a way to break out those who followed Nader down in 2000 to those who say they’ll follow Clinton down in 2008. It’s certainly worth asking her supporters one on one.****

[** Forget the relative handful of people who actually voted for Ralph Nader in the general election and, arguably (they argue it especially) had no effect on the outcome. Consider instead the millions more who stayed home, demoralized, because a long-term, respected icon condemned the future Nobel Prize winner as undistinguishable from George W. Bush and therefore undeserving of progressive’s votes. —fl]

[*** Update: Slightly edited. The original referenced the subset of Clinton supporters in, say, West Virginia and Kentucky who told exit pollsters they’d vote for McCain in the general one way or the other but especially didn’t want Obama to get the nomination. Generally speaking they’re not the sort who voted for Nader in 2000. —fl]

[**** And given the average age of the Senator’s hard-core support is similar to mine it might be fair to ask how many of them helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980 by protest-voting for independent candidate John Anderson as a protest against Jimmy Carter. I’m pretty sure there’ll be a lot of overlap there too. —fl]

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Qualifications Vs. Disqualifications For Office

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2008-03-10 15:54


Photo by Flickr user JimNtexas. Used under a Creative Commons license.

It’s probably no secret that I’m less enthusiastic for Sen. Hillary Clinton’s Presidential bid than I am Sen. Barack Obama. And while I do support Sen. Obama I also spend a lot of time wrestling with the question of would I support any woman candidate (yes, off the top of my head I’d cheerily support a number of them including Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire, my state’s senior Senator Patty Murray, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and it sounds like there are a number of other rising-star women Governors who either are now or soon will be wonderfully qualified and likely to get my support.) The other question, one that gets posed any time I go back to my paleo-liberal roots in southern Appalachia, is whether America, especially conservative America is “ready for” a woman president. As it happens, I said yes several years ago and now someone else has taken up the point.

Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker says, with a difficult-to-determine amount of tongue in cheek, that John McCain should designate Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to be his vice-presidential running mate.

If McCain really wants to have it all—to refurbish his maverick image without having to flip-flop on the panderings that have tarnished it; to galvanize the attention of the press, the nation, and the world; to make a bold play for the center without seriously alienating “the base“—then he can avail himself of a highly interesting option: Condoleezza Rice.

To deal first with the obvious: Rice may be “only” the second woman and the second African-American to be Secretary of State, but she is indisputably the highest-ranking black female official ever to have served in any branch of the United States government. Her nomination to a constitutional executive office would cost McCain the votes of his party’s hardened racists and incorrigible misogynists. They are surely fewer in number, though, than the people who would like to participate in breaking the glass ceiling of race or gender but, given the choice, would rather do so in a more timid way, and/or without abandoning their party. And with Rice on the ticket the Republicans could attack Clinton or Obama with far less restraint.

By choosing Rice, McCain would shackle himself anew to Bush’s Iraq war. But it’s hard to see how those chains could get much tighter than he has already made them. Rice would fit nicely into McCain’s view of the war as worth fighting but, until Donald Rumsfeld’s exit from the Pentagon, fought clumsily. And it would be fairly easy to establish a story line that would cast Rice as having been less Bush’s enabler than a loyal subordinate who nevertheless pushed gently from within for a more reasonable, more diplomatic approach.

Rice is already fourth in line for the Presidency, and getting bumped up three places would be a shorter leap than any of the three Presidential candidates propose to make. It’s true that her record in office has been one of failure, from downgrading terrorism as a priority before 9/11 to ignoring the Israel-Palestine problem until (almost certainly) too late. But this does not seem to have done much damage to her popularity.

Read the complete column here.

Jason Zengerle of The New Republic says of this proposal

...the more I think about it, is so cynically brilliant that I’m sort of surprised Hertzberg actually put it into print, lest someone in the McCain campaign take him up on it and ride it all the way to victory in November.

Zengerle says it here.

To be honest I’m not even sure it would be a cynical choice. As Hertzberg points out, all of Rice’s perceived political liabilities are actually major benefits inside her party. And her perceived social liabilities — her sex, her class, her race, her education, her speculated-about orientation — would or ought to be benefits to Democrats, feminists, liberals, and progressives. And goodness knows that compared to Senator Obama, let alone Senator Clinton, let alone Senator McCain, while you don’t want her within eleven time zones of the “red phone” during business hours (when she’d surely consider using it to launch simultaneous “preventative self-defense” wars against Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, China, Russia, and very likely France) there’s probably no one in government except possibly Dick Cheney who’s more qualified to answer it at 3:00 A.M.

And, without the least bit of irony intended, if recent defenders of Senator Clinton have been sincere in their belief that sex should trump character or policy, then they would surely be equally vocal in their preference for a ticket with Sec. Rice at #2 behind a very old Sen. McCain in very poor health to a vital if extraordinarily progressive Sen. Obama with.. any choice at #2 including possibly Sen. Clinton.

Speaking for myself, if the Republicans did select Sec. Rice (as I suggested they might several years ago) then I’ll say good for them for sticking with what’s really essential to their core values about Rice in their eyes — her cynical corporate corruption, her adherence to neoconservatism, her cold-war era Russian Studies education, her experience as the National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, her deft ability to coach unschooled, my-pet-goat-reading bumpkins through intricate preparations for war, her unwavering commitment to military adventurism, her willingness to accommodate communist China and excoriate communist Cuba — and ignore what’s really not very essential at all: her membership in classes, sexes, and races who’s bodies her party has raised itself to prominence by grinding under its wheels.

Of course I’d then turn around and work my ass off to elect a Democrat whether it was a less-qualified-woman-than-Rice Senator Clinton or a man like Senator Obama. But that doesn’t mean I think it would be a bad idea to nominate or elect a woman, just that it would be a very bad idea to elect Condoleezza Rice. (Or, if she continually insists on taking pages from Karl Rove’s playbook, the otherwise eminently vote-worty Senator Clinton.)

But yes absolutely, if even conservative America ready for a woman President the question of “whether” has been resolved and now it just boils down to a matter of who.

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Still Just As Classy Ten Years Later

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2008-02-18 09:42


Photo by Flickr user chrisdonia. Used under a Creative Commons license.

After my little parenting-instinct tirade last evening I suppose I ought to feel better about David Kurtz of TalkingPointsMemo note that, unlike ten years ago, backers of the Dirty Reds confined their jokes to opposing candidates instead of their children…

A throwaway line in a Politico piece on this weekend’s RNC “winter retreat” for major donors at Los Angeles’ Beverly Wilshire Hotel:

Plenty of lowbrow Hillary Rodham Clinton jokes were tossed around at the three-day event, but of highest concern was the notion of Obama seizing the Oval Office in a contest against presumptive GOP nominee John McCain.

I guess it just goes without saying that Republican officialdom and their fat cat backers toss off “lowbrow” jokes about Clinton, even in a public setting like an official party event.

Read the quote in context here.

...and I suppose that if by “lowbrow” the Politico reporter meant Sen. Clinton was mocked for, say, her retarded, Republican-like, strategy-distorting unlimited cost-plus fee structure for her campaign consultants, or her Giuliani-like strategy of narrowly targeting a few big-state late-season primaries and neocon-like failure to plan how to win those big states, or her family’s disturbingly Cheney-like fondness for secrecy and paranoia, or her choice at least during her primary campaign to surround herself with generally we-need-to-be-hawkish-so-no-one-notices-we-never-wore-a-uniform foreign policy advisors, perhaps it was their instinctive distain for those who earn rather than inherit their millions. If so then… whatever, those are the sorts of qualities I’d poke fun at if I were running against her, and they’re certainly qualities I’d poke fun at their candidate for (with considerably greater justification!)

However I suspect the jokes are not about policy or procedural differences. I think instead that Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon had the best analysis for the New Red Menace’s disquiet about Senator Clinton that drives their desperate, “iron my shirts” attempts at humor: she’s charismatic, she’s got sex appeal, she’s an evidently very happily married and heterosexual feminist, all of which just breaks their saliva-flecked scripts about powerful women (let alone powerful feminist women.) In which case those “lowbrow” jokes were almost certainly more of the same.

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Pronouncing Gender and Patriotism: Tearing Up vs. Tearing Down

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2008-02-02 14:20


Photo by Flickr user lissalou66. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Even though it’s old news now I’ve been meaning to blog about this for more than a month. A class assignment on gender, status, and power as it relates to presidential candidates is as good an excuse as any.

The funny thing about that “Hillary Clinton cried“ thing last month is even right after it happened you sort of had to dig to learn what she was saying when she did.


Photo by Flickr user lissalou66.
Used under a Creative Commons license.“I just don’t want to see us fall backward as a nation. I mean, this is very personal for me. Not just political. I see what’s happening. We have to reverse it.”

I don’t want to sound all goopy, or old, but when I was growing up we didn’t call that “gender,” or “weakness,” we called it patriotism.

It’s what the old guys in their old uniforms, sometimes with an empty sleeve pinned up, did in the middle of their speeches on Veteran’s Day, on Memorial Day, and on the 4th of July, when the enormity of what they’d done, or the enormity of what needed to be done welled hot inside them, and they’d have to stop for a moment and look up blinking, and you’d look around at the grownups around you and see the eyes of other old men, World War I vets my grandfathers’ ages, and younger men, World War II vets my father and uncles’ and neighbors’ ages looking not all that different.

And if they mentioned it at all, when children my age would ask “why’s that man crying” we were never told, “They’re not being ready for the Presidency.” Instead we were told that was love of country.


Photo by Flickr user lissalou66.
Used under a Creative Commons license. So anyway while I don’t intend to vote for Senator Clinton in this month’s caucus, to the extent anyone, man or woman, says “Hillary crying” makes her somehow unfit is actually saying far less about her than they are about their own connection to their country.

Me? I guess if it’s good enough for those who cared enough to fight and win World Wars I and II then I guess it’s good enough for any Presidential candidate you care to name.

Not that there’s anything magical about military service or militarism, and chickenhawk conservative squalling to the contrary there are only casual links between militarism and love of country. In fact I will support Senator Clinton’s opponent, Senator Obama, in my state’s upcoming primary because I believe he’s far more steadfastly opposed the kind of “fear-of-wimpiness” adventurism that conservatives so often confuse with patriotism and love of country. But from the bottom of my heart I’m thankful that at least one White House contender understands what it takes to love his or her country till it hurts.

—-

Note: When I grab illustrations for posts I tend to make up sort-of-related sets of keywords, check the “creative commons only” box, and take whatever looks like fun regardless of context. In this case I wanted to quote the text from photo caption at the top.

This man, Doug (who I later met) changed what Veteran’s Day now means to me in the matter of 2 hours. He personally thanked each group of men and women walking in the parade, some individually. He saluted, he welcomed home those who have been home for decades, he wept and wiped tears from his eyes more than once. He later thanked me for my service in the Army as well. I, in return, thanked him for his and told him how his actions welled tears in my eyes too.

Source: Flickr user LissaLou66

Rest my case.

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