Tuesday, March 04, 2008 - Posts
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Because I want to play in the sandbox, too! Upon my return from voting in the Ohio primary, I read Meghan's post about how Democrats in Texas are excited to vote and caucus. Not only is my corner of the state lacking Texas' "cool, bright" weather (we have dreary, unending rain), but my party is seriously hurting for excitement. I live in one of the more conservative congressional districts in the state (Yes, we're responsible for Jean Schmidt. Sorry about that), and, with McCain having the nomination locked up, most of the action seems to be focusing on school levies and the heated race for county commissioner. Aside from the one Huckabee sign I saw and a few dozen loyal Ron Paul supporters, you can hardly tell there's a presidential race going on.
I'm left jumping at bits of gossip that I get about that other, more interesting race. The local news reported this morning that there were long lines in some precincts because people were asking to change their party registration—I'd think that would bode well for Obama, unless there are that many Republicans crossing the aisle to vote for Hillary because they want to face her in the fall. And—big news—Obama's campaign just moved the party for his Cincinnati supporters to a bigger location.
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Meghan and Hanna, you're helping me put my finger on what's been bothering me this week. It's the crying gender wolf—baking real instances of sexism in the same pie as the made-up slights, or even the nonslights. Example from the Post story today: Obama pulling out HIllary's chair for her at the debates gets cast as a way to take power away from her, as opposed to simple courtesy or a touch of chivalry. The problem with this is the usual crying-wolf problem: It devalues the actual problem of sexism that Hillary confronts, and it's just freaking wearisome. John Dickerson has made the point (in the context of McCain's response to the NYT's Vicki Iseman story) that a candidate can only protest that he or she is getting treated unfairly so many times before it starts to wear thin. There's the skillful taking of umbrage, and then there's whingeing. Also, the even less attractive my-victimization-is-worse-than-your-victimization—see the trotting out of sexism "is the worst of the -isms." As if that is a competition we really need to have.
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It's a cool, bright morning here in West Texas. Folks in Marfa, Texas, where I've paused en route to El Paso, are out voting and preparing to caucus. Most of the people I've talked to have already voted—Texas offers early voting. Most are planning to caucus later tonight. The Texas primary—as everyone's been saying—is unusual in that voters can both vote and caucus if they show up at the evening caucuses with a voter-registration slip. Effectively, your vote can be counted twice. This has come to be known as the "Texas two-step." Some people here are worried about another form of two-stepping, you might say: As Politico flagged earlier this week, the Dallas Morning News apparently got a peek at Clinton's "training materials," which apparently tell volunteers, "DO NOT allow the supporter of another candidate to serve in leadership roles."
I've been a Hillary defender on this blog in the past—and I'm the first to be frustrated by the latent sexism that has permeated so much of the election coverage. But I find it strange that the sexism meme is hitting a high now—and that CNN spent so much time this morning analyzing their so-called "fairness" to Hillary. Over the past few weeks, Hillary has trotted out all sorts of hardball tactics—the "Shame on You" moment; the satirical imitation of Obama; these reported caucus shenanigans; and, last but not least, the gender card, which she has used without shame, most notably (and ineffectively) in the Ohio debate, where she whined that she "always" got the first question. The problem with playing the victim and crying gender as frequently as she's been doing of late is that it degrades the power of that claim for the rest of us. She wants to be a leader. She can't worry every time a knock comes that it's a sexist one. I wish I could say I felt that she's just calling it where she sees it—which I'd be the first to defend. But watching the vagaries of the campaign these last few days, I've had the uneasy sense that she's stressing the hardships of being a woman as a cheap campaign strategy. I hope I'm wrong.
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A guest post from David Plotz, who writes:
That was a great post, Melonyce. It got me thinking about why my immediate reaction was so skeptical, based on what little I knew about the book. Was it just some reflexive racism of the sort you describe—no way a white kid gets sent to a poor black foster family? Or was it something else? And I haven’t really settled it in my own mind.
I think the answer is that I did a quick mental calculation that went something like this: How many white kids get placed in black foster families? How often do those foster families happen to be right in the middle of gangland, USA? What are the chances that that kid then grows up to be a gang girl and gang mascot who witnesses murders, etc.? And what are the chances that she then makes it entirely out of gangworld? And what are the chances she then turns out to be a really good writer? And what are the chances she happens to get her writing into the hands of a swanky New York publishing house? I think the result of that mental calculation was the notion that there was a small chance that each one of these things could be true but an infinintessimally small chance that they all could be true.
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Today, the front page of the Washington Post has another installment in the "feminists are pissed" series dominating the press (and soon to dominate more if Hillary loses today). They call her a witch, a hag, an old bimbo, say the leaders of NOW. They are threatened by her power. Once again, I can't relate, particularly since the NOW leaders never even consider the possibility that people simply may not like her. But one thought did strike me in reading this. One of the NOW leaders tells the story that she was wearing a Hillary sticker in a hotel and a man came up to her and said, "Ah, come on. A woman's place is in the kitchen." I'm not sure I believe the story, but let's say it's true. Maybe what it means is this: There are people who still believe this. When I travel around conservative Christian circles, it's commonly held that a woman's place is not in leadership. This is true even for modern, highly educated conservative evangelicals. In my book, I focus on a couple of highly successful young career-minded women who are facing this dilemma—work or cede your life to your new husband and family. Basically, they all choose the latter. This makes this "ism" different from "racism." No conservative Christian would argue anymore that the black man needs to be kept down. But they do have a coherent, theological, philosophical explanation for why a woman's place is fundamentally still in the kitchen. One may disagree, but is this the same as sexism?
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So glad that Ann pointed readers to the save-the-time-use-survey campaign. It would be heartbreaking to lose a source like that, which—like reports by the National Center for Health Statistics, and the Census Bureau—offer such valuable real-time snapshots into our lives, health, and well-being, all of which are affected by, and affect, policy. For a journalist there are few more productive (and pleasant) activities than curling up with a source that provides data on who is doing the housework, how much time working parents are able to spend with their children (or each other), how much time adults spend caring for elderly parents, etc. I wonder why the administration is anxious to defund it—it's so cheap! For my part, just glancing at the Web site and calling up the data for leisure time, it's interesting to know that Americans spend 2.6 hours a day watching television, but just 19 minutes "relaxing and thinking." I wonder how multitasking will eventually affect the pie charts: What if you are driving and applying mascara at the same time? Shopping and talking on your cell phone? Lying in bed in the middle of the night, worrying? They'll need more than 24 hours in a day. I wish they'd expand it to include more categories. It's hugely worthwhile social research, for policymakers, journalists, and future scholars, about the way we live now.
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Guess I’m a rube, too, Hanna. When David started the e-mail thread at Slate calling BS on Seltzer’s “memoir,” I had the sneaking suspicion that folks were quick to denounce the book’s veracity out of the notion that a white girl couldn’t possibly be raised in a black foster family or have experienced the stuff that Margaret Seltzer said she had. No doubt David and others saw fakery in aspects of the story aside from her skin color. I, too, thought she was playing up the lingo and lifestyle for effect—the gangster recuperating from a gunshot wound on her couch was a bit much, and the pit-bull tattoo, well. Still, that didn’t prove that the writer hadn’t spent her adolescence in South Central running drugs for thugs. Assuming that a white girl wouldn’t be placed in an inner-city neighborhood with a black foster family is folly. My black aunt took in plenty of white kids, from toddlers to teens, during many years as a foster mother. There's a thorny presumptuousness behind the mind-set of how could a white kid possibly get stuck in such a hopeless life! In reality, a white girl could be placed in a housing project in Compton or a trailer park in Riverside. She could wind up slinging crack or meth. Both scenarios are feasible, even if they don’t apply to Margaret, and hopelessness knows no skin color.
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Quick, before we're all caught up in the reading of campaign entrails, I'd like to mention an item on the agenda of the Department of Labor's first budget hearing later this week: the American Time Use Survey, which will be eliminated if the Bush administration gets its way. Don't yawn: This is one of the most fascinating, and useful, data-collection endeavors around. And though there isn't a music video (yet) touting the cause of keeping it funded, there is a group of economists who are using their time to rally support for it. Check out this Web site if you're in need of a worthy cause to get behind when the primary season cools down.
Begun in 2003, the ATUS is a household survey that aims to track how Americans use their time when they aren't working. It's a look into the nonmarket nooks and crannies of life that isn't replicated by any other measurements. As such, it's a source of some of the most revealing information we have about how family life is changing—not to mention a resource for assessing all kinds of policies: Who's doing how much on the home front, with the kids, or with the elderly, for example? And what might that suggest about the role of the government or business? Without any data, we won't have answers. Without the ATUS, it will be easier to forget that those are important questions that need asking in the first place: That's the even larger danger of defunding the ATUS. Katharine G. Abraham, a former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics who is now at the University of Maryland and is a driving force behind the SAVEATUS mission, put it this way to me: "It seems to me that this is a more general phenomenon—that social statistics generally tend to get short shrift relative to economic statistics. And I also think it's self-reinforcing—if we don't have information on the non-market effects of our policy choices, for example, we tend to ignore them or at least give them less weight than they should get." Time spent figuring out where our time goes is time well spent-and it isn't even very expensive: $4.3 million a year.
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