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We welcome this guest post from Yasmine Ergas, who teaches international law at the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia University and is the associate director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights.
Earlier this year, French minister of justice, Rachida Dati, created shock waves, not so much by giving birth out of wedlock and refusing to divulge the name of the father, but by going back to work after only five short days. Last spring, the Spanish minister of defense, Carme Chacon, proudly reviewed the troops, pregnant belly first. And on Jan. 13, Hillary Clinton appeared at her confirmation hearing with Chelsea at her side. Are these women, Hillary in particular, heralding a new way of politics by bringing female solidarity, maternity, and womanly ways of being into the traditionally male—and adamantly masculine—enclosures of government?
Sometime in the middle of her campaign, after Bill had made one too many offensive remarks, Hillary changed strategy: Bill was relegated to the background. The iconic Clinton family had never done much for her candidacy anyway. Those pictures a' trois on the campaign trail served as a perpetual reminder of unsavory domestic relations rather than as a net positive. It was smart of Hillary to let Bill go silently into his foundation's night.
In place of the threesome came Hillary and Chelsea. A grown woman with her grown daughter. Sure, it was a unit made of shared ambitions and intense grooming. But it was also a unit made of similarity and difference, of experience and apprenticeship, of a solidarity that runs both ways. Standing next to each other on a podium, working the crowds together, they seemed to acknowledge that there was a reason why it was just the two of them up there, and that reason might not have been of their own making. Surely, neither Hillary nor Chelsea had invited Gennifer Flowers, or Monica Lewinsky, or any of their ilk, into their household. Of course, mobilizing Chelsea wasn't just circumstantial, it was also clever politics. It brought some youth appeal (not much, to be honest) to counter Obama's messianic status among the young. It dispelled the idea that Bill would be the real president. Even more, having her child around feminized Hilary. It promised to transform the incipient dragon lady—the "monster" that Samantha Power had invoked—into a mother figure.
And that transformation emphasized the idea that the relationship between mother and child can stand on its own terms, that what can be passed from mother to daughter includes knowledge about how to be out there in the world, that a woman with children is not a woman alone. So it is actually Hillary and Chelsea who are iconic. They represent all those women who, in fact or in fantasy, have brought up their daughters to be participants in the world.
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Poring through Michael Calderone's "Top Ten Media Blunders of 2008" in the Politico, it was hard not to notice how many of his favorite Fourth Estate screw-ups had to do, in some obvious or oblique way, with sexism purportedly making its way into the press. You've got the whole Hillary-in-New-Hampshire episode, in which Hillary wept and the media's subsequent mockery mobilized women voters on her behalf (or so the mythology goes); you've got MSNBC's choice to hand its election coverage over to Chris "She-Devil" Matthews; you've got the "Obama's baby mama" Chyron on Fox; and you've got the David Shuster pimp-Chelsea Clinton thing—along with the questionable coverage of two alleged Big Macher mistresses, Vicki Iseman and Rielle Hunter.
You could make the case that all the media's stumbles over sexism should alarm women, but I wonder if the opposite isn't the case. It shows how sensitive we've become to the various pitfalls inherent in covering women. (And, well, maybe too sensitive, but that's another debate.)
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On the campaign trail, Chelsea Clinton compares her mom to Margaret Thatcher. But can you imagine Thatcher whimpering that it seemed like she always had to go first in debates, and that just wasn't fair? One thinks not, and I was surprised when Hillary Clinton did so last night. In so enthusiastically casting herself as the injured party, she undercuts her central argument about what a rock she is and comes across as more a whiner than a fighter.
Barack Obama had just refused his shot at aggrievement; he said he took her at her word that she didn't know anything about how a photo of him in traditional African garb got leaked to Matt Drudge. Then he briskly moved on. So, it seemed extra small when, after repeatedly extending a back-and-forth on health care, she then complained at length about being asked to go first in answering the next question, about NAFTA. Normally, debaters like to go first, but she tried to make this seem like part of the vast media conspiracy against her:
"Can I just point out that in the last several debates I seem to get the first question all the time, and I don't mind, you know, I'll be happy to field them. But I do find it curious, and if anybody saw Saturday Night Live,'' she said, referring to a skit in which the press is seen waiting Obama hand and foot, "you know, maybe we should ask Barack if he's comfortable and needs another pillow. I just find it kind of curious that I keep getting the first question on all these issues,'' she repeated, throwing her arms up in frustration, "but I'm happy to answer it.'' Just like your mom is happy to sit home in the dark alone, insisting Oh, don't worry about me.
Clinton also tried to stop Brian Williams from cutting to a commercial -- a losing proposition if ever there was one. And she suggested that she would have made her tax returns public by now if she weren't already too overburdened to sleep. When asked if she would release the returns before the Texas and Ohio primaries next Tuesday, she answered, "I can't get it together by then, but I will certainly work to get it together. I'm a little busy right now; I barely have time to sleep.''
She did show 12 kinds of chutzpah, though, in calling out Obama for merely denouncing rather than denouncing and rejecting Louis Farrakhan, who recently endorsed him: She noted that she, by contrast, had made clear during her first Senate race that she would not accept the support of an independent party with a history of anti-Semitism. Which was a bold boast, given that this was around the same time she listened as Yasser Arafat's wife, Suha, accused the Israelis of gassing women and children on a daily basis; after the speech, Clinton rose and kissed Mrs. Arafat on both cheeks.
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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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After the events of this past weekend, it’s very difficult to hear Hillary Clinton extol the virtues of forgiveness. Indeed it’s extremely hard to hear Sen. Clinton say anything at all today over the relentless drumbeat in my own mind: “Don’t say pimp ... don’t say pimp ...”
I really need this job.
Clinton is typically fluid and charming before more than 800 students in American Politics 101, a class taught by the legendary Larry Sabato, at the University of Virginia. Batting back questions about biofuels and stem-cell research and universal health care with data and talking points, Clinton gets a solid 10 for technical merit. Still, you can’t help but wince when she gets to the parts of her remarks in which she describes people who lose their jobs. Clinton’s compassion for America’s unemployed is seemingly boundless, unless the unemployed in question have dissed her daughter.
The remarks seem to spin off into a different stratosphere in response to a student question about the “most influential person in her political career.” After paying homage to the Roosevelts, JFK, and LBJ, and with just a roundabout reference to her husband, Clinton arrives at Nelson Mandela. She describes Mandela at his inauguration, introducing three prison guards who’d treated him humanely in his many years at Robben Island. She quotes Mandela saying, “If I left prison embittered and full of hate, I would still be in prison. ... You have to give up whatever hate you have. You must learn to forgive.”
This is obviously a lesson with which Clinton still struggles. She can describe how powerfully it affected her that Mandela—in a spirit of bipartisan trust and hope—left the army and police force intact when he assumed power, while she cautions that 40 percent of Americans won't support a Democratic nominee regardless of who wins, presumably because there can be no trust or hope. She can claim to have forged deep personal friendships with individual Republicans—from Lindsey Graham to Sam Brownback—by getting beyond “caricatures” and “stereotypes.” But then she warns that whoever wins the Democratic nomination will surely be swift-boated—“subject to the full force of the Republican machine,” because “that’s what they’re good at.”
And Clinton draws a distinction between herself and Barack Obama when she says, “I have no illusions about bringing the country together in the absence of a fight.” But the implicit distinction between herself and Mandela is there, too. She wants reconciliation, and she wants to forgive, but she can’t get beyond her certainty that what needs forgiving and reconciling is an immovable wall that only she can overcome. Clinton wants to say that she, like Mandela, has not been exiled to some remote emotional prison of bitterness and hate. Yet she just saw to it that a reporter was suspended for saying mean words.
Dan Gross pointed out earlier today that the Clintons have a complicated relationship with forgiveness and redemption. Hillary Clinton wants to believe she’s forgiven what’s been done to her while warning us that she’s the only one tough enough to stand up to the next round of it. As always seems to be the case with the Clintons, the political is personal. The personal is personal, too.
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Fascinating post, Dan. It would have been fine if Hillary said the "pimped out" remark was contemptible, Shuster apologized, and everyone moved on. But I agree that it is discomforting when the person who wants to be president demands someone be fired for an offensive comment. And does Hillary really want to be delivering the message that we can expect her administration to respond with thin-skinned victimization to ill-considered remarks? I believe Hillary was genuinely offended, but she is also pushing this so hard because she thinks it will somehow play well. How exhausting. Especially when you compare it to how gracefully Obama has brushed off the racial insinuations in this campaign.
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A guest post from Daniel Gross, who writes Slate's "Moneybox" column:
I'll declare my interest upfront: David Shuster has been one of my closest friends for 26 years, long before we got into journalism. So if you want to dismiss this whole post, a priori, feel free.
No matter how much the term pimp has become mainstreamed, it is was a poor choice of words. But the efforts to paint Shuster as a malicious misogynist are way off-base. He has been a scrupulously honest and fair reporter for 18 years—at CNN, at ABC's Little Rock affiliate, at Fox News Channel, and MSNBC—and he richly does not deserve the storm of criticism and pressure being rained upon him.
Context, of course, is everything. As the Clinton campaign noted, there has been a "pattern of behavior" of on-air hosts at MSNBC and other outlets making derogatory references to women in general, and to Hillary in particular. Critics have charged that Chris Matthews, the anchor of MSNBC, is an offender in this regard. The cable news landscape is filled with men who let their bile-filled ids run rampant. CNN's Glenn Beck is Archie Bunker without the comic timing. Bill. O. Reilly. But these clowns are largely condoned—no, encouraged—by their bosses. And they never apologize. And they're never suspended.
Shuster, who has been suspended by MSNBC, apologized on the air—twice. On Friday, he tried to apologize personally to Hillary and Chelsea—on the phone and via e-mail—but was rebuffed. On Saturday, the Clinton campaign released a letter to NBC head Steve Capus declaring that "no temporary suspension or half-hearted apology is sufficient." In effect, a U.S. senator called for General Electric, a publicly held company with all sorts of interests in front of the government, to fire one of its employees.
The Clintons' refusal to accept an apology is strange given that they are among our era's great forgivers. Hillary has forgiven Bill for the enormously public humiliations he inflicted on her and Chelsea in the late 1990s. All the Clintons have shown an ability gracefully to reconcile with their implacable foes. In recent years, Hillary has buddied up with vast-right-wing-conspiracy progenitor Rupert Murdoch. Bill Clinton broke bread with Richard Mellon Scaife, who devoted a chunk of his fortune to destroying the Clintons in the 1990s—and nearly succeeded. And they've also shown a remarkable ability to grant indulgences to people who make nasty remarks about their only child. Remember John McCain's 1998 joke about Chelsea being so ugly because her father was Janet Reno? McCain apologized for this bit of straight talk, and the two senators have since bonded over shots of vodka in Estonia.
So, why are the Clintons, who have always excelled at burying the hatchet, now trying to bury it between my friend's shoulder blades? Well, it's a lot easier to be a mensch when you're winning than when you're losing. Consider, again, the context. On Tuesday, Clinton and Obama fought to a draw in the primaries. Then came news that while Obama had raised $32 million in January, Hillary had been forced to loan her campaign $5 million, and that senior aides were working for free. (Hillary has since reported a $10 million month.) On Saturday, as the candidate was signing her name to a memo declaring Shuster beyond the pale of forgiveness, Obama was eating Hillary's lunch in Washington, Louisiana, and Kansas, and the Clinton campaign was shaking up its top ranks. Another butt-kicking in Maine followed. In recent weeks, umbrage has joined inevitability and experience as a recurring Clinton motif. And Shuster's misuse of a bit of slang has functioned as a heaping portion of that umbrage.
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It seems patently ridiculous to say Chelsea is being "pimped out." She's 28. She's smart and articulate. She's been quiet a long time. In fact, I would say she hasn't been pimped out enough. Where is there a candidate's child anywhere in America who doesn't shill for their parents? It seems natural, and when they fail to do it, we think something's wrong (Reagan's son, Guiliani's kids). If you want to argue about pimping out, then look at the Edwards kids, campaigning before they were out of diapers.
Shuster was totally wrong, but the more important point is the Clintons' reactions. Apparently, Shuster has offered to apologize to all involved; the NBC president got down on his knees. But they won't have it--they are just too insulted and outraged.
I mean, come on. Hillary's the tough one who knows how to fight the right-wing machine, right? So, why does she take it seriously? Why does she pay any attention to this nonsense? Are we supposed to believe Chelsea just crumpled when she heard the word pimp attached to her name and took to her bed? No. This is just the Clintons, at home and alive again, in their happy role as the Most Aggrieved.
Who needs Chelsea, anyway, when we've got Amy? Amy Winehouse, that is. I've seen that recent paparazzi shot of her wandering the streets in just her bra. I've watched that cell-phone video of her smoking crack in a seedy room. I know she looks like a heroin addict, and she's an embarrassment to Jewish women everywhere. I know that song "Rehab" is an absolute lie--nobody needs rehab more (and she, in fact, DID go to rehab a couple of weeks ago). Accepting her Grammy award, she was barely comprehensible, and she seemed to sign off with something like "Burn Londontown Down."
I usually have no interest in the starlets hellbent on self-destruction. And yet, I can't get enough of her.
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Chelsea Clinton has no trouble talking, as it turns out, though she doesn't seem to enjoy it much. The former First Kid took audience questions for nearly an hour at a small campaign event today at the University of Maryland, where she was articulate, knowledgeable and almost completely without affect.
There's a reason most people have never heard her voice; at a campaign rally in Utah on Jan. 29, Chelsea told the crowd she'd never spoken in public before, and "I'm feeling a little bit intimidated about that.'' She did not seem particularly nervous in front of a couple of hundred people on the campus in College Park, but rarely smiled as she reeled off the details of her mother's campaign proposals in a soft near-monotone.
On a makeshift stage in the student union's lower level food court, she said hello and made just one point about her mom—briefly pitching her as a fiscal conservative—before going straight to the Q & A. Now that she's in the financial sector herself, said Chelsea, who works for a hedge fund, she sees how important it is that Hillary Clinton puts a price tag on all of her policy proposals: "She tells you how she'll pay for everything, and that makes her the most fiscally conservative person on either side of the aisle.''
She began nearly every answer similarly: "I'm really proud that ...'' When asked about her mother's plan to expand insurance coverage, she began, "I'm proud that she stood up for universal health care,'' then went on to suggest that her own health benefits are not what they might be: "If you're like me and you're not happy with your employer-provided health care'' you'd do better under the Clinton plan. To a young man in the Air Force who wondered what would happen to his pay if Clinton were elected, she said, "I'm really proud how she worked with Lindsey Graham'' to push for regular military pay raises. Without altering her even, pleasant tone of voice, she added, "I don't know how many of you know Lindsey Graham, but he is a very conservative senator and someone who prosecuted my father in the '90s.''
Asked about the deficit, she characterized her mother as "even more fiscally conservative than my dad,'' and in speaking about how her mother would push for global action on global climate change, said Hillary would be like "Thatcher banging Reagan and Gorbachev's heads together'' and convincing them they could talk to each other. Restarting the Kyoto process would "be good for the children and grandchildren I hope to have, and be good for our economy.''
Twice, she said enigmatically that it was humbling to be speaking to people younger than she: "Some of you are a lot younger than I am, I say with another dose of humility.'' Her biggest applause line of the day was, predictably, when she said her mom wants to double the amount of Pell grants to low-income college students. If her mother had not had access to student loans, she said, "I quite literally would not be standing here.''
The question she herself most clearly enjoyed was from a young woman who said, "There's so much sexism in this campaign and in the attacks on your mom. I'm wondering, how do you and your mom take the sexism?''
"You should talk to your friends about what you think motivates the coverage and what it implies,'' Chelsea answered, flashing a rare smile. She cracked a grin, too, when Nandini Jammi, a UMD sophomore, read her a limerick she'd prepared for the occasion. "My boyfriend is here and he's never written me a limerick,'' Chelsea responded. The verse went like this:
When I was a girl, I saw Bill
Run for the president with skill
Now Hillary is awesome
As executive, she'll blossom
So for you Chelsea, Capitol Hill?
"No,'' Bill and Hillary's daughter answered quietly. "I do have a very personal political ambition, and that is to help my mom become my president.'' The only question she did not answer was about what she makes of Barack Obama's amazing popularity and whether her mother would consider choosing Obama as her running mate if she got their party's nomination: "I'm really proud of the broad base of support my mom has also inspired,'' Chelsea told the questioner. "I think the fact that my mom has won re-election and won the plurality of the electorate''—even winning support from farmers in upstate New York—"is a major endorsement of her electability.'' As for whether they'll end up as running mates, "That came up in the debate in L.A. and I would urge you to look at that; I don't have anything to add.''
These weren't reporters asking the questions, so nobody inquired about David Shuster, or whether she thinks the MSNBC reporter's head ought to roll for suggesting that her mom had "pimped her out'' by moving her into a speaking role. Or whether her mother, who has demanded that he be fired, was perhaps exaggerating the slight, hoping to capitalize on the grievance ahead of Tuesday's primaries.
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Ann, your daughter is surely right that nobody pressured Chelsea Clinton into making those calls on her mom's behalf—but I'm not even sure that's what David Shuster was saying. "Pimped out" is pretty harsh, and not something anyone would have said about Cate Edwards or the Bush twins or the Kerry girls, but why is that? I think it's because for a young woman who grew up in the White House, Chelsea has enjoyed a pretty impressive zone of privacy—so that when her parents, who've convinced everybody that she's still off-limits, even as an adult and even on the campaign trail, do seem to be bringing her forward for their own reasons, as they did at the height of Monica madness, it's seen as hypocritical. (Everybody wants to have it both ways, but Bill and Hill often actually get to, and not everybody admires their ability to pull that off.)
Calling Shuster's remark "beneath contempt'' is perhaps going a shade too far as well, no? MSNBC has suspended him for saying such a thing. And he's the latest in a long line of people who have regretted ever mentioning Chelsea—from the kid who was fired from the Stanford Daily for writing about her being on campus to SNL's Lorne Michaels for the infamous Wayne's World skit in which she was described as a "future fox'' to ... well, John McCain, whose awful joke about Janet Reno being her daddy will really come back to haunt him now.
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Here's one daughter's-eye view of the daughter now speaking out on the campaign trail: My teenager dismisses the idea that Chelsea suddenly has marching orders. Chelsea never felt she had to speak up or play a political role before, my daughter points out, so it makes sense to assume she's now in the fray because she's decided she wants to be. Perhaps it's worth noting (this is now me, not my daughter) that over in the Obama campaign, kids seem to be calling some key political shots these days. Caroline Kennedy made a point of saluting her teenagers as the galvanizing force behind her endorsement; Sen. Claire McCaskill's 18-year-old daughter pushed her off the fence. I hear similar stuff, again and again: Obama mamas and papas say they've signed up in no small part because he's their teens' candidate and has gotten the kids so excited. Now, I'm not saying Hillary is running because Chelsea urged her to, but with all these young people out there getting credit for being dynamos, I can easily imagine that Chelsea, almost 28 now, decided she'd hung back long enough and wanted in on the action.
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Emily B, I'm with you that I'm left feeling very uneasy about Chelsea's emergence on the campaign trail. She makes me think of Michael Corleone in Godfather III: "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!" How many times can one person be First Child? She's waved goodbye to her Secret Service agents and the press hordes, grown up, started a career, and now the poor thing has been pulled back in. All these months, as she's stood there silently behind her mother, I've wondered about their dynamic. Did Chelsea say, "Mom, I want to do anything to help you win, but please don't make me speak"? Or did Hillary say, "Baby, I need you out there to prove that I'm a human being. All you have to do is stand there and smile; you don't even have to speak"? Now Chelsea is calling talk-show hosts begging them to vote for her mother and forwarding unhinged rants about sexism. Yes, she's now an adult able to make her own decisions, but I feel sorry for her. What must it have been like to grow up in the Clinton White House?
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The Clinton campaign may have shined the media glare on Chelsea this week by having her call up the hosts of The View, but that doesn't mean they're ready for the harsh lighting. David Shuster of MSNBC's Hardball said on the air that it's a "little bit unseemly to me that Chelsea's out there calling up celebrities" and superdelegates. Then he asked, "Doesn't it seem like Chelsea's sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?" (Here's the full exchange with Bill Press.) A Clinton spokesman called Shuster's statements "beneath contempt" and said he can't envision the campaign participating in any more debates on that network.
Is this use of pimped out inherently offensive? Is that, in fact, what the campaign is doing with Chelsea? Are they now taking excessive umbrage so they can generate coverage and sympathy? Sorry to be so cynical, but the question about Chelsea's role seems pretty inevitable, if not the words Shuster used. If they expect her to be treated as the daughter in the bubble, doesn't she have to stay in the bubble? (Or maybe I am having a Friday afternoon moment of heartlessness.)
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Melinda,
I thought I was our Elisabeth! Sadly, I'm not so young or blonde, but I am (mostly) conservative. I also missed the View episode in which the ladies mocked Chelsea for calling them in support of her mother, but here's what I'm wondering about. Why would ANYONE seek the endorsement of Sherri Shepherd, who once waffled on whether the Earth was round and another time confused Jesus Christ with Adam and Eve?
I just hope we don't have any Rosies lurking among us!
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I don't guess I have ever seen The View—even if we are a sort of online homage to their caffeinated trailblazing. (Only, who is our Elisabeth?) But on yesterday's show, Whoopi and Joy and Sherri went where no Washington reporter has ever dared to tread; they made fun of Chelsea Clinton.
On Monday, co-host Joy Behar said on the air that she still hadn't decided on a presidential candidate. So the next day, after casting her ballot, Behar returns home, picks up her ringing phone and hears the breathy voice of Bill and Hillary's 27-year-old daughter, who was belatedly making a pitch on her mom's behalf. "At first, I thought it was a crank,'' Behar said. Because who knew Chelsea made campaign calls? (Or—until Emily B brought it to our attention—fired off campaign e-mails? And btw, the semi-grammatical, loosely informed message from Chelsea does not seem to have been a hoax, as Emily Y hoped.) Turns out, Chelsea also called The View's Whoopi Goldberg and Sherri Shepherd on Tuesday, and they all re-enacted the calls on yesterday's show, cracking up as they imitated her little-girl voice: "I was like, "Talk up! I can't hear you!'' Shepherd said.
Is this why Chelsea is usually silent? Because she sounds like Marilyn Monroe? Her parents have always been ultra-protective of her, to the point that the first year they were in the White House, they didn't even include her in the family Christmas card. Which was understandable when she was 12, but is increasingly odd now that she's grown; remember her father's insistence, just a few months back, that a New York restaurant take down a photo of Chelsea they'd had hanging on the wall alongside shots of other famous folks who had eaten there?
Maybe now, in any case, the Garbo of the political world is cutting loose at last; hard as it is to believe, she apparently addressed a crowd for the first time in her life on Jan. 29, at the University of Utah: "I'm feeling a little bit intimidated about that,'' she told the audience. She also filled in for her mom at the University of Delaware on Monday. And now that she's dialing for votes, who will hear from her next? Katie Couric? Kelly Ripa? Or if we're really lucky, Maureen Dowd? As you know, Miss Clinton, the D.C./Maryland/Virginia primary is next Tuesday, and some of us are on the fence, too! (Uh-oh, I think I just figured out who our Elisabeth is. Operators will not be standing by.)
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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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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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Usually, Meghan, I'd agree with you entirely that gaffes get more attention than they deserve, at the expense of the substance that should matter more. But I hope this McCain embarassment gets it due in this news cycle, because of the link I drew earlier to his Chelsea Clinton joke. John Dickerson (Slate's political correspondent, if he needs an introduction) is always saying that the gaffes that matter are the ones that confirm our preexisting suspicions about a candidate's weakness. We thought George Allen was a boob; then we knew he was a boob. Laughing at someone else calling Hillary a bitch is evidence of McCain's coarseness, which we've already seen, and which in my mind doesn't bode well for the kind of people he'd want to run the EEOC, say. So maybe I shouldn't care much, but I do.
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Geez, Juliet, I hope you don't believe that Republicans are all cold-hearted greedmeisters while Democrats are all selfless philanthropists! I bet I can think of a few greedy Democrats and, if I try hard enough, a generous Republican or two.
I can see the apparent contradiction you cite, but I don't know, in the case of the first daughters, that either apple has fallen that far from the tree. Hillary Clinton wasn't doing pro-bono work all those years at the Rose law firm. (And thank goodness, since the Arkansas' governor's salary was reportedly $35,000!) As for Jenna, well, it's hard to read a profile of the Bush family without coming across the term noblesse oblige. Sometimes that means serving in government, other times maybe it means heading down to Latin America to work with AIDS patients, as Jenna did. And let us not forget that Laura Bush is a former schoolteacher and librarian-her influence is apparent in Jenna's choices.
It's easy to sympathize with the children-even young-adult children-of presidents. Chelsea had to watch her parents' marital issues morph into a constitutional crisis, and lord knows the Bush twins didn't do anything in college that I didn't get away with quite anonymously. But one of the fringe benefits has got to be how well-connected you are when ready to enter the workforce. So in some ways it's probably easier to branch out and try something that defies expectations.