The XX Factor: What women really think.

The "I's" Have It

Aside from their different oratory styles, there was one important stylistic difference that becomes painfully apparent in the his and hers transcripts: Obama uttered the word I three times—including when he said "I want to congratulate" Hillary. Mrs. Clinton? More than 20 times. Obama is the "we" candidate; Hillary is the "me" candidate. Even when she says something mildly stirring—"This campaign is about people. It's about making a difference in your lives. It's about making sure that everyone in this country has the opportunity to live up to his or her God-given potential," for example—it all comes back to her: "That has been the work of my life."

Clinton critics like to describe her as power-hungry, but I don't know if that's the source of all the self-referencing. She's long given me the impression that she believes she knows what's best for me, for all of us, and we'll like it whether we like it or not. And no amount of humanizing or not-quite-weeping over coffee with the girls can get me past that.

Bradley Effect?

With all due respect to Chris Matthews, and a few of Slate's very own pundits, I don't buy the theory that the "Bradley Effect" explains why Obama lost New Hampshire—that voters "lied" to pollsters to seem progressive.  

Here's why, via Marc Ambinder: "the pre-election polls did NOT overstate Barack Obama's support. He averaged 36.7%, according to Mark Blumenthal's compilations," which is just under his actual piece of the pie—37 percent (with 95 percent of precincts counted).

So, what happened? The people who said they would vote for Obama probably did so, and undecided voters chose Hillary. Big whoop.

Did Hillary find her voice?

Some analysts have been arguing that many of the actual differences between Clinton and Obama are a matter of style rather than substance. But, wow, is that stylistic difference.... substantive. Watching the two candidates speak last night you couldn't escape it. Obama is all cute optimism checked by quasi-gravitas. His way of ducking his head and looking down at the end of sentences makes you feel secure and cozy inside; it suggests an untapped inner power. Never mind that his speech doesn't say very much at all, built as it is on repetition and rousing rhetorical flourishes about hope and affirmation. Hillary says more, but she continues to seem so ill at-ease; watching her try to play cool gal, making shout-outs to supporters as the applause died down, simply made me uncomfortable. 

I wonder if the biggest difference comes down to their voices. (Not their speaking styles.) Obama's is round and full and open. But Hillary always sounds as though she's not quite inhabiting hers- as if she is stuck using what some scholars call the "false voice," where the throat constricts. At other times, she seems as though she's trying to speak in a lower voice than is comfortable for her. I don't think this is a small point. As Anne Karpf points out in her fascinating book, The Human Voice, a lot of how we judge people's derives from what their voices subconsciously convey to us. She points out that over the past 50 years women's voices have deepened to a pitch closer to men's--a pitch we associate (if I recall correctly) with trustworthiness  and power. (Margaret Thatcher's voice, Karpf notes, "lowered by 60Hz, or about half the normal difference between a female and a male voice" while she was Prime Minister.) Watching that clip of Hillary's "emotional moment," I was most struck by how natural her voice sounded. She said she finally had found her true voice. Was it the way her voice sounded, as much as anything she actually said, that might have spoken to voters?