Tuesday, June 03, 2008 - Posts
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Just finished watching Hillary Clinton’s unconcession speech. I guess we should give her credit for the fact that her supporters now look sufficiently angry to set small brushfires.
It would have been hard enough to choke down all the quasi-messianic imagery. (Each vote for her was “like a prayer;” supporters hand her rosaries AND bring her back from the dead.) But the real rhetorical gem tonight was the whole new “invisibility” trope: “None of you is invisible to me!” she vowed. So (subtext): “If I concede, America, you’d go right back to being invisible!” You’d be Tinkerbell!
Clinton did answer one burning question: “What does she want?” She just wants to win the war, turn the economy around, and fix health care. Since we all of us want those things, too, her real desire is actually to be the person who does it. Why doesn’t she just say that?
Nor have I any idea what to make of the call to her supporters to weigh in on her Web site with our own votes for whether she indeed goes on to the next round of Dancing With the Stars . . .
Unfortunately, I kept thinking of that Gilligan’s Island episode in which Ginger acts out an excruciatingly long and melodramatic death scene. You keep thinking her every last gasp is really it. But then she keeps rolling around and twitching because she’s been peeking through her fingers all along and knows you’re still watching.
Read more XX Factor posts on Hillary Clinton's speech Tuesday night.
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Hillary was on her game tonight. She looked good. She spoke well. She touched on the groups of voters she feels she owns and the problems of theirs she wants to solve. And, alas, she went from more conciliatory (congratulating Obama) to less (I won the popular vote, the 18 million people who voted for me). Fair enough that she doesn't want to drop out tonight. But couldn't she have done more to start laying the groundwork for unity? Marjorie and Kim have been expressing their doubts lately about how blacks and women can come together after the gibes and elbow-throwing of this campaign. The same question more generally applies to the two halves of the Democratic Party. I'd like to think voters can do some of this on their own, and that the divisions don't run as deep and aren't as full of acrimony as they've seemed lately. But the signals Hillary sends now matter enormously. And tonight, she' s still telling us that who the Democratic nominee is matters more than what he or she does—or, really, whether he or she wins. A friend of my mother's who is a Hillary supporter told an Obama fundraiser recently that she needs time to heal. That will be a lot easier if Hillary starts the clock running. Tenacity is a feminist trait, yes. But a strong woman should also know how to make a gracious exit.
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Congratulations, Barack Obama! And bye-bye, Hillary.
But don't be sad, die-hard Hillary supporters—you've still got a presumptive presidential nominee who values Hillary's experience and her contributions to his campaign, who's willing to take Hillary at her word and rely on her judgment, who's eager to enlist her in his campaign to get to the White House.
That would be John McCain, of course. His campaign is already sending around the video of Hillary helpfully asserting that both she and McCain have "passed the commander in chief test," while Obama brings Americans nothing but "a speech he gave in 2002."
Hillary, demand what's due to you: a slot as McCain's running mate! Hell, you've done so much for McCain already—you deserve it.
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Well, we probably won't be seeing those colorful prairie dresses and perfect tresses on the front page of the newspapers again very soon. I've been fascinated by the Yearning for Zion ranch drama, which I—like Dahlia, in her great piece comparing the seizure of children to the warehousing of Guantanamo prisoners—have been all but sure would end badly: the overintrusive state would sabotage itself, and the insular compound would become more insular and defensive than ever. But to judge by news reports of the deal struck yesterday, I'd say, with somewhat mixed feelings, that the monthslong mess may well rate as a victory for the state, and maybe for teen mothers, too-even if it was a legal travesty.
The real goal all along, or so it seems plausible to me, has been a criminal prosecution of male leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints found to have impregnated, and otherwise mistreated, young adolescent girls bound to them in "spiritual marriages." It was a Herculean challenge, given a community so barricaded against the outside world. But a sweeping raid, however unwarranted it was soon judged to be, forced open the doors long enough to gather DNA and other evidence from the women and children necessary to substantiate any charges. What's more, the judge's order yesterday evidently specifies that the criminal investigation go on, and facilitates it by barring sect members from traveling outside Texas. In addition, it subjects sect members to continued scrutiny by Child Protective Services. Already the prospect of such supervision seems to have elicited an avowal that the sect will cease to condone underage marriage. It's enough to make ignoring legal requirements look like good social policy-fitting in its way, I suppose, when dealing with a community based on polygamy.
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So here we all sit, waiting for the lady in the pantsuit to go ahead and sing. It's going to be hard for anyone who cares about equality and multiculturalism and common ground and all that jazz to feel joy at the end of this slugfest, regardless of where they stand. For a long time, I felt bruised by the Clinton/Obama wars, but now I just feel numb, and that worries me more.
Reading Geraldine Ferraro's irrational screed in the Boston Globe this weekend, which Marjorie so brilliantly deconstructs today on The Root, did not make me bewildered or angry or chagrined. It made me tired. I just shrugged and turned the page. Whatever, Geraldine. Keep on raging against the dying of that light.
For the life of me ,I simply cannot see this rampant, bludgeoning sexism that Ferraro and her ilk keep spewing about. Sexist incidents, yes. Sexist columnists and sexist commentators and some idiot with a shirt - yes. But some kind of wholesale, bloodthirsty sexist take down of Clinton? No. One condoned, snickeringly, by Obama and his crew? No, no, no. (And I won't even address Ferraro's laughable charge that white working-class folks can't relate to Obama and his wife because of their education but somehow can relate to Bill and Hillary, who apparently attended community college on 4-H scholarships. As far as I know.) And so, not seeing it, my inclination is to brush the dirt off my shoulders and say to Ferraro and all those other Angry White Women out there: Get a frickin' grip.
What stops me is only this: Too often I have stood in that painful place where all around you people (white people, mostly, in my case) insist that your interpretation of your own experience is incorrect. You're too sensitive, you're overreacting, yeah, that's what I said, but it's not what I meant, you just don't understand. I know as well as anyone that just because a huge and particular swath of humanity does not "see" something doesn't mean it does not exist. As Tim Wise points out, in this point-by-point essay on white denial, even in the early 1960s—a time at which America still operated under homegrown apartheid—most white Americans insisted racism did not exist or was not a major factor in the lives of black folks. Gallup polls show that nearly two-thirds claimed to believe blacks were treated the same as whites in their communities, while 85 percent said black children had just as good a chance as white children to get a good education.
The power of human beings to block out what they do not wish to see is astonishing.
So I want to be careful here.
Still, I just don't see it.
And, heartbreakingly, I'm so numb I just don't care.
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