Monday, November 05, 2007 - Posts
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I guess not. But I had the same question as you did, Meghan, regarding to what extent Hillary Clinton's camp had actually played the gender card. The best I could figure was that the press release ended by calling Sen. Clinton "One strong woman," and one of her strategists told supporters in a conference call that he was "detecting some backlash" toward Obama and Edwards among female voters. It's not much, but that bit about the backlash had subtle hints that the boys were being meanies and the girls didn't like it.
I agree that there were no gender politics at play in the video, but I did find it quite ineffectual. The other candidates are shown, over and over, addressing or referring to "Senator Clinton ... Senator Clinton ... Senator Clinton." Without context, it's hard to know if they were critiquing a policy statement or complimenting her pantsuit. But last week's debate spawned another YouTube video that I feel is far more damning to Sen. Clinton, and that's the clip put out by the John Edwards camp of Hillary contradicting herself on Iraq, Social Security, and those infamous driver's licenses for illegal immigrants in New York. If, as a few of us seem to agree, Hillary's biggest problem is not her gender but her phoniness, I think it probably helped her to let the storm over her playing the gender card swirl for as long as it could. It served to distract people from her debate performance.
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Previously, on XX Factor... Hillary Can't Win? I know you mean as in can't catch a break, Dahlia. But until last week, you'd swear from reading the coverage that she'd already been elected. Whenever I mention her high, deep and not-going-anywhere negatives, the unanimous response is, "Hey, but look at the polls; it's a done deal.' So OK, if polls are all, what about this one, a California survey that shows a third of voters there have already decided against her? Gender has zero to do with her biggest weakness, which is the perception that she's a phony - even though women candidates typically enjoy an edge in the "authenticity'' department.
I also wanted to circle back to earlier posts from June and Rachael: See, get a few women who might not be in perfect political sync in a room, even virtually, and before you've collected the coats and the drink orders, they're looking for common ground. Gender stereotype, yes -- but I saw it in action all the time on my book journey in 20 states, and Lord, what a welcome sight.
In Washington, we never stop talking about politics, to the point that if you've run into someone at the dry cleaner's twice, you probably know which way they lean. (And if they don't telegraph it, their poor campaign junkie kids will; last year just before the midterms, my then 10-year-old son answered the phone at dinnertime one night, and called, "Mom, it's another push poll; can I take this one?'') But in a lot of the country, politics is the new sex; nobody says a thing. Mostly because, as June suggests, we'd rather not get into it with people we care about.
All that politeness is hurting our democracy, though, because if those who aren't screaming are silent, there is no national conversation. Because we have no practice, we don't even know how to hash through important issues respectfully, which is to say productively. And if we only speak to people with whom we agree, and give us no pushback, how do we know what we really want from our government? Are we so sure we have nothing to learn, ever, from those with opposing viewpoints?
What I did for the book was get groups of women who were friends but had never talked about politics before together for their maiden voyage, and the result was just the opposite of a shout fest. There were lively disagreements, just as you'd hope, but when people felt heard, even by each other, they put their shoulders down and got serious. Some of the groups are still meeting. And whether Hillary becomes our first woman president or not, that's one way I'd love to see more women leading the way politically -- in their own living rooms.
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I missed out on some of the analysis of the Clinton campaign's "pile on" video last week. Now that I've caught up, there is something I don't understand about all the fuss over Hillary supposedly playing the gender card/"victim card." As far as I can tell, there is nothing explicitly gendered about the "Politics of Pile On" video that was released on You Tube, and there is nothing explicitly gendered about the press release. Nor does either document portray Clinton as a victim. On the contrary, read the press release, and you'll find that the point is not one of victimization or wimpy femaleness. Its point is that the "pile-on"style is contrary to the "politics of hope" message Obama (and to some degree Edwards) both espoused early on. Nor does the imagery of the video make Hillary look like a frail woman embattled by men; at the end, Hillary looks cool, calm, and collected, not shaken and stirred. (I say all this as no particular defender of Hillary, about whom I have reservations.)
I suppose you could make the argument that no man would ever run an ad like "The Politics of Pile On", but that would be purely speculative. I suppose you could say that the video implicitly brings up gender by contrasting Hillary with the men, and maybe it does, but there's nothing in the way it's edited to suggest gauzy, delicate femininity. In the main, the video is not about gender, it's about hypocrisy. I don't happen to think it's a particularly good video about hypocrisy, but no matter. Meanwhile, the gender lens seems to have largely been derived from the media's reading of the whole event (as in this Gail Collins column about "six men" piling on one woman). Hillary herself said (I paraphrase): "They didn't pile on me because I 'm a woman, but because I'm the front runner." This has been construed as some kind of rhetorical turnaround, but it seems to me pretty consistent with the presentation of the YouTube video and the press release. So a fund-raising letter said Hillary needed women's help; that's tacky, but I'm not sure it has all that much to do with Hillary's own self-presentation.
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