Tuesday, February 12, 2008 - Posts
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Hillary Clinton lost women in both Virginia and Maryland tonight, and not by a little; nearly 60 percent chose Barack Obama. (Or Oback Barama, as former Maryland Rep. Kweisi Mfume just called him on MSNBC, which I'm sure made all those who've ever mispronounced his name feel better.) So, does that mean we're not her human firewall? Yes, it does, and here's why: Black women were supposed to be her biggest fans—remember the whole "women with needs" narrative?—only, they aren't. The new, amended story line is that, well, at least white women are squarely with Clinton—but even there, her 55 to 45 advantage tonight was an Al Gore-sized gender gap, not a yippee, a woman to vote for at last margin.
I don't think the point is that women are not responding to her the way African-American voters are responding to Obama—though that is true—but that no demographic is responding to her as it is to him. The guy won every income group, the Catholic swing-voters everybody said he'd have trouble with, independents by a mile, and Latinos. Which is a blow to identity politics but not, as I see it, to women; on the contrary, isn't it a testament to how far we've come that just because she is a woman doesn't mean she's automatically our woman? Yesterday, when a friend of mine said she didn't understand how any woman could decide not to support Hillary, all I could think was that that made no more sense to me than if she'd said she didn't understand not voting for the white person.
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Since the Iowa caucuses, I've been feeling the Hillary tug. Most of the women I've talked to in the last couple of months have felt it, too: Even if they weren't sure they'd vote for Hillary, they were rooting for her on some level. They wanted her to make a strong showing. They didn't want the girl who worked hard to lose willy-nilly to the guy who waltzed in. Those feelings must have helped bring more women than men to the polls in state after state, almost always in favor of Hillary.
But you know what? The tug doesn't feel the same to me now. I wonder if that's true for other Democratic women who could have gone either way, too. If Obama's margins are wide enough to carry women in Maryland and Virginia and D.C.tonight—and so far, according to the exit polls, he has the majority of women in Virginia, by a lot—maybe this shift will help explain why. Hillary has been an excellent first for us. No one else could have done what she's done, with all her aplomb and professionalism and seriousness. But she doesn't have to be the nominee, or the president, to have come through. She hung in there past every other contender, save one. She made it to the finals, the last round, overtime—whatever sports metaphor you want to use. I don't mean to suggest that she's done. But if she loses for good in the next weeks or months, she loses with dignity and heft and heart. And she'd leave us feeling, in a way I know I've never felt before, that a woman can be elected president. We already owe her. We'd owe her for that, too. Even if we don't owe her, or give her, our votes.
Read more posts about Hillary's losses in Maryland, Virginia, and D.C.
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Wow, Rachael. Kudos to you for highlighting the McCain Blogette. That is quite a campaign artifact. Like mother, like daughter, eh? That little anime silhouette in the corner wearing nothing but BRIGHT RED heels and a tank top, a certain part of the anatomy lit up by the glow of the laptop. A BBF named La-Toria, a la Paris and Nicole. Dozens of viewer letters from girl-fans saying some version of Wow! This is an awesome Web site! or You definitely bring a brighter side to your father's campaign!!! Dozens of links from boy fans saying some version of "Is she smoking hot?" (referring to Meghan of course) And the other sister, the adopted one with the braces and the scared look onstage, conspicuously absent.
I remember when Karenna Gore did campaign dispatches for Slate, and they were, as one McCain Blogette fan says, "refreshingly authentic." They were funny and ironic and just short of telling tales out of school. This Meghan McCain blog is something entirely different. It's like a poll-tested perfect shout-out to the MySpace generation. A little Ramones, a little Wonkette, a little Hannah Montana, some candid family pics and short, grainy clips from a cell-phone video.
Poor Chelsea. Earnest 4eva :(
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Coming in late to the "pimped out" conversation, I know, but I had a revelation while checking out Meghan McCain's blog. I wonder if the perception that Chelsea is being used by Hillary's campaign (like Dahlia, I need my job, so I'm not using the p-word) comes from what kind of work Chelsea is doing for the campaign, not the mere fact that she's out there at all. (And I want to say before I go on that I totally agree with Hanna's point that of course kids campaign for their parents.)
Chelsea is making phone calls and giving speeches (kinda boring ones, if I read Melinda correctly). Meanwhile, John McCain's daughter is telling us that "Riding on the plane for 5 hours to San Diego felt like: Rufus Wainwright's ‘Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk (Reprise),' " and "Having such a rockin' Super Tuesday felt like: Michael Jackson's ‘Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough.' " She intersperses photos of rallies and campagin stops with goofy pictures from her travels and talks about her love of fashion and going to In-and-Out burger. The clear message is that she's an otherwise normal twentysomething who loves her dad and thinks he will be a great president—there's so much visible warmth and enthusiasm. She's reaching out to young voters without making it seem like work.
I'm not so far removed from my 20s that I've forgotten that there's a difference between being 23, like Meghan, and 28, like Chelsea. But just because Chelsea is a successful, mature young woman shouldn't mean that she should have to stand up in a business suit and pumps and tell us how fiscally conservative her mom is. A recent piece from the Boston Globe—which is accompanied by a photo of Chelsea with Hillary that does convey great warmth—says that Chelsea is becoming more comfortable on the trail. If so, that's great for Chelsea. Maybe if she gets to find her own voice, people won't be so skeptical about it.
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I've written before about the effect of birth order on intelligence. It's not my favorite topic, because it pits older siblings against younger siblings and inevitably makes parents feel guilty. Here's a new study from Brigham Young University economics professor Joseph Price that offers a possible explanation for the IQ edge that firstborns supposedly have, on average, in addition to higher earnings and educational attainment. The central finding is that "first-born children get about 3,000 more hours of quality time with their parents between ages 4 and 13 than the next sibling gets when they pass through the same age range." More inequity. More guilt. Parents spend time evenhandedly on any given day. But, the study found, parents spend less time with children daily as families grow older. "First-born children get more quality time simply because they pass through childhood when there is more overall family time to be shared." What's more, the time that younger siblings do spend with their parents more often involves TV. Lucky them. I guess the good news is that more time with parents is good for kids' brains.
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