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After three days of coughing and spitting and quite literally losing her voice everywhere, Hillary Clinton’s speech tonight sidestepped the odd, preteen claim she recently made about having "found her voice" someplace along the campaign trail. Instead she finally paid homage to the other voices she’s been hearing there and in chaneling those voices she came as close as she comes to looking comfortable in her own skin. The speech worked so well because it reached beyond All Things Clinton, and honored “your voice, your values, your dreams.”
This is the rhetorical flourish we’ve come to associate with Barack Obama—that all this is bigger than the candidates. Clinton’s finally figured out that voters are less moved by incantations of “yes she can,” than “yes we can.” And so she deftly honored the working women and the feminist pioneers and the children for whom she was meant to be speaking all along.
She distilled everything shrill and entitled in that wretched Robin Morgan essay into this pitch-perfect formulation: Clinton simply thanked her mother, “born before women could vote, who is watching her daughter on this stage tonight.”
There was a plea to end the war, to guarantee health insurance and to promote stem-cell research, and a promise that she won’t let anyone “swiftboat this country.” There was yet another pledge to hear our voices—not hers, ours. And then a lingering image of another tough New York broad who’s heard it all, but said very little—the State of Liberty, who just wants to be given some tired huddled folks to shelter.
A nice speech, stem to stern, illuminating that sometimes "finding your voice" just requires getting out of its way.
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The story line tonight is a familiar one. Hillary Clinton built her victories in Nevada and New Hampshire on women, older voters, and voters who make less than $50,000 a year (and in Nevada, Latinos). Tonight, she appears to have leads with some or all of those groups in the states she has won: Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Tennessee. According to early exit polls—and they're early, so the precise numbers could change—she is up among women in each of these states, and others, by at least 15 points. OK, New York doesn't count, because it's her home state. But in all the states that have been called so far for which there is exit polling, it looks as if women were a hefty majority of voters overall—as much as 57 or 58 percent. Obama may have won by a small margin among men in New Jersey, but not by enough to overcome the Women for Hillary numbers. Clinton also won most of the Latinos in New Jersey and most of the older voters (age 65 and older) in all the early states except Illinois. These categories look like big, fat Clinton leads. The split among people who earn less than $50,000 a year is a bit closer. But Hillary also looks to be far ahead among people who have not gone to college. Meanwhile, Obama is well ahead with independents (with the probable exception of Massachusetts) and hugely with black voters. He is also generally up with people under 30, people who went to college, and the earners of $50,000 or more a year. That's true not just in the states he has won so far—Georgia, Delaware, Alabama, Illinois—but in the others as well.
What to make of this? The voting blocs are holding steady.The majority of each group knows what it likes, and it's not being swayed by the ongoing campaigning. And as women outvote men, they go a long way toward carrying Hillary. If they give her California later tonight, despite the Maria Shriver/Caroline Kennedy/Oprah Winfrey juggernaut, that's, well, a big blow for Obama. We are queenmakers, it seems. Except, of course, for that far less definitive delegate count.
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I remember a conversation I had with a female colleague at the Washington Post. It was right after I'd had my first child and decided to work four days a week instead of five. When my colleague found this out, she looked upon me with utter horror, pity, and disgust. Then she lectured me. The older generation of women—Mary McGrory's—broke the glass ceiling with great pain. They could make it to the top jobs but only after giving up the notion of any kind of domestic life at all. No husband, no kids, just work. The middle generation—Hillary's and this colleague's—were allowed to have a job AND a family only if they pretended the latter didn't exist. Sick child? Too bad. I'm on deadline. The nanny knows the way to the doctor's.
Now here I was, little Miss Mommy, ruining all they had sacrificed to build with my four day a week nonsense. How dare I?
So there's the feminist generation gap.
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To return to a previous point: Meghan, at least you're in North America! To watch this particular primary race from Europe has been a distinctly odd experience. On the one hand, it's fantasically frustrating, almost homesick-making, to be so far away when American politics (finally!) have produced an election as gripping as this one. On the other hand, it's nice to be so popular: Suddenly, Americans are the most envied nationality in the room. After all, we have real politics! We have unpredictable voters! We have black candidates, female candidates, war heroes, evangelicals, Mormons! Everyone wants to know who will win, and nobody believes us when we say we have absolutely no idea. If you hold an American passport, you must have inside information.
Above all, it's the unexpectedness, the defiance of the opinion polls that Europeans seem to admire, almost to the point of jealousy. Which makes me wonder whether the traditional criticism of U.S. electoral coverage—too much horse race, not enough substance—isn't somewhat off. People love following a horse race, as long as it's a real horse race, and not a jumped-up and essentially boring contest between two equally flawed candidates (i.e., 2004). People love watching candidates actually trying hard to win.
Clearly, a primary like this one, staged every four years, would do a lot more for "democracy promotion" and American public diplomacy than a thousand earmarks' worth of Congressional funding. You want to make democracy appealing to the Russians or the Iranians? Remind them that a good election is a lot of fun! I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't really that simple.
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Emily, Emily, and Hanna: I’ll say this for the Robin Morgan letter. It certainly does crystallize the battle lines. I wonder if she’s mobilized half as many women as she antagonized with this effort.
Her argument features the same limp syllogism Rich Ford wrote about last month: Some people oppose Hillary because she’s a woman; therefore everyone who opposes Hillary necessarily hates women. Sure, you can find some wisp of sexism under every attack on Hillary Clinton if you want to, and some of our sisters in the blogosphere have thus smoked out Josh Marshall and Andrew Sullivan as deranged woman-haters, no better than Chris Matthews and Bill Kristol.
There are a lot of creepy cretins out there who hate women, and by all means let’s shame them right back into their caves. But the suggestion that nobody can oppose Hillary without also hating women is just as sexist, and the notion that women must vote for her simply because sexism is gross is even worse.
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Welcome, Hanna (and for anyone who is wondering, Hanna is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and the author of the new book God's Harvard, and we are v. glad she has joined us here). You captured my feelings about the Morgan essay—a mix of guilt and chagrin and dismay. In this I think we are very much reflecting our generation. For me, Morgan's ourage is entirely too shrill. I can agree on some of the subtance, but the style makes me want to run. The tone and the worldview are so far from mine that I can't get past that. But here's the thing: For the older women whom I've discussed this essay with, who are Hillary supporters, Morgan's take is the one that's missing. They see her essay as a crucial reminder of the past and its continuing relevance. This comes across poignantly toward the essay's end, when Morgan says, "We are the women who brought this country ..." and then lists about two dozen advances that most of us are probably extremely grateful for. Amen and thank you to her generation. Now they are trying to be the women who bring us our first woman president—a good president, they feel certain—and we are hestitating, hedging, resisting, as Meghan puts it. I can understand how infuriating that must feel. Even if, like Dahlia, I reject the premise.
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I admit, this Robin Morgan letter got me a little bit. Particularly her asking if we can't get behind Hillary because she isn't as "likeable" as we want her to be. My lack of affection for Hillary always surprises me: Am I so deeply in the post-feminist generation that the first plausible female candidate leaves me totally cold?
But then pretty quickly, Morgan lost me. Obama is "papering over real suffering" in the promise of a "feel good campaign"? Is she serious? Has she read all the e-mails about Obama the Muslim? Did she hear Bill Clinton compare him to Jesse Jackson, with no correction from his wife? Does she honestly doubt that millions of Americans would never vote for Obama just because he's black?
And then there's that annoying second-wave notion that only certain women are real women, i.e., Condi Rice and Elizabeth Dole don't count, Golda Meir was really a man, and you're a traitor to your gender if you think otherwise.
By the end of the letter, I came closer to understanding why I have so much trouble rallying for Hillary. She doesn't identify anymore with the part of herself that's a pathbreaker, a radical, a free spirit. Instead she is much more attuned to the side of herself that, as Morgan sourly puts it, feels she's being constantly "silenced" by the big boys.
Obama could do that too. But he doesn't.
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If heretofore silent Chelsea really forwarded this semi-demented rant from Robin Morgan, then her mother's campaign should cut her Internet connection. The campaign probably doesn't want to have to explain it, doesn't endorse sentiments in Morgan's essay such as: "Personally, I’m unimpressed with Caroline’s longing for the Return of the Fathers ... I still recall Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick." And if Chelsea really wrote: "I confess that I didn't entirely get 'it' until not only guys stood up and shouted 'iron my shirts' but the media reacted with amusement, not outrage ... " then she needs a better Internet connection. The "Iron my shirts" business was a prank by a couple of stupid radio guys. But let's say it hadn't been—I would still hope Chelsea would have seen it as a moment of meaningless idiocy and not as the voice of patriarchy trying to keep her mother from the presidency. But I hope that this letter from Chelsea itself turns out to be a prank.
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Somewhat lost in the presidential horse race this week, the Senate again takes up the question of retroactive immunity for the phone companies that helped the Bush administration in its illegal eavesdropping program. The rationale for granting telecom immunity is that they were innocently misled by the Bush administration’s doomsday rationale for breaking the laws and need to be free to be misled by the same rationale again in the future.
I point this out to make the simple observation that the folks inclined to sneer about Barack Obama’s hands-across-America yes-we-can fairy tales would do well to remember that we haven’t exactly been residing in gritty, cold reality these past eight years.
As Fred Kaplan points out in his new book, Daydream Believers, excerpted today in Slate, the politics of the Bush era has largely rested on near-daily screenings of a horror movie cobbled together up by a handful of fantasists unmoored from history, science, technology, or fact. And it was a movie they were screening privately long before 9/11.
After eight years of enduring the “daydreams” of “dangerous men [who] act their dream with open eyes," Obama’s daydreams about change and hope sound almost hardheaded and pragmatic to me.
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I've been radio-silent for the past few weeks because I've been on leave from Slate: The Lannan Foundation has kindly put me up in a house in Marfa, a tiny town in far West Texas distinguished by the happy co-existence of transplanted artists and older Texan families. Marfa is so stimulating in a quiet way that today is the first day I've missed NYC at all. But boy, is it tough to be in a state that's sitting on the sidelines as Super Tuesday moves into high gear. It's all the more so because votes in New York and Connecticut (where most of my friends and family live) actually seem to matter for Democrats this year. What's more, so many family friends and family members seem to be going into today's primary genuinely undecided—which is weirdly exciting. Some seem, well, shy about revealing who they're voting for, and for reasons they can't entirely name: women who feel a strange, subterranean pull when they imagine pulling the lever with Hillary Clinton's name on it for presidential nominee, even though they are, on a conscious level, Obama supporters. And men who say the same. (Over on Salon, Rebecca Traister wrote an interesting piece about being undecided.) All of which does underscore one thing worth remembering whatever happens: Somewhere beneath all the overinflated rhetoric about "change," some real changes have taken place. And there they are, alone on the ballot sheet: a female presidential nominee, and an African-American one. The kindergartner in me who asked why there had never been a female president is, well, foolishly excited, even if the adult in me is able to hesitate, hedge, and resist.
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There's an e-mail making the rounds this week that looks like it originates with Nicole Davison, a friend of Chelsea Clinton's, with the subject line "A must read...send to every woman you know..." In the version I got, it looks as if Chelsea forwarded it along. (I called the Clinton campaign to check on this. Waiting to hear back.) The essay is by Robin Morgan, of 1960s and '70s radical feminist fame. In those days, she wrote the movement manifesto "Goodbye To All That." The new essay is here and it's called (fittingly) "Goodbye To All That (#2)." Its hellbent in its support of Hillary. You really have to read it to get the full effect, but it's like the roar of second-wave feminism roasting everything in its wake--women who aren't avid Hillary supporters ("goodbye to some women letting history pass by while wringing their hands"); Barack Obama ("how dare anyone unilaterally decide when to turn the page on history, papering over real inquities and suffering constitutiences in the promise of a feel-good campaign?"); and, of course, sexist men guilty of "sociopathic woman-hating."
In the version I got, it looks as if Chelsea forwarded Davison's email with Morgan's essay, and added this note: "I echo Nickie though would also add to please forward this to all the men you know too--voting in the election tomorrow, voting next week, already voted. I don't agree with all the points Robin Morgan makes but I do believe her thesis is important for us all to confront--I confess that I didn't entirely get 'it' until not only guys stood up and shouted 'iron my shirts' but the media reacted with amusement, not outrage..."
Which is extremely interesting, if only because it's more than I think I've ever heard straight from Chelsea. If this is her writing, she seems pretty astute. So, is she right? Even if we don't agree with all of what Morgan has to say, either because we just don't or because we're not of her generation, should the reception to Hillary's candidacy radicalize us? Or is this just all too unhinged? The group of women on my e-mail list were split.
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Barna Group, which regularly surveys the political mood of conservative Christians, just released one strange set of findings. According to thier latest poll: If the election were held today, most born-again voters would choose the Democratic nominee for president. Barna's research indicates that "born-again" voters are most likely to vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton (20 percent), followed by Sen. Barack Obama (18 percent), and Mike Huckabee (12 percent). Yes, you read that correctly—SEN. HILLARY CLINTON.
In its shock and dismay, the Family Research Council points out that to be sure, a born-again ain't what it used to be. The category only includes "people who make a personal commitment to Jesus Christ as their Savior and believe they will go to heaven when they die." A true "evangelical," by contrast, also believes in the accuracy of the Bible, God as the earth's creator, and a few other conditions.
Still, pretty weird. This is like, back to born again, circa 1950. Maybe it's time for the first female Pat Robertson.