The XX Factor: What women really think.

Loving and the Campaign

We surely haven't heard the last of the Rev. Wright problem, but after the Obama campaign has been focused on fighting off the notion that Obama is part of this country's deep racial divide, it did feel good to hear him talk again of it being time to transcend categories (though surely it was no coincidence that the backdrop of faces behind him were mostly white women, some old enough to be his mother). Speaking of his mother (I wasn't bothered, Emily, by his shorthand description of her), I couldn't help but think of the obituaries that appeared Tuesday of Mildred Loving, the black woman who was arrested with her white husband in Virginia for the crime of being married to each other. The Supreme Court finally struck down miscegenation laws in 1967; if Barack Obama's parents had traveled with him in Virginia when he was a baby, their mere existence as a family would have put them in legal jeopardy. And now a man who's the product of a marriage that would have been illegal in the majority of states is poised to be the Democratic nominee for president. I hope Mrs. Loving got satisfaction from this.

I also enjoyed watching the backdrop behind Hillary—the shifting facial expressions of Bill Clinton. I'm always intrigued by the semiotics of what she does with Bill. At the last few election nights she's had him in camera range as she spoke; whenever she has him close it seems to signal she feels she's in trouble. At first Bill watched her with that lip-biting look of enchantment we know so well, but as the speech wore on the mask seemed to drop and you could almost read his thoughts: "Hill, you haven't got it. I've got it, and you haven't, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Hill, guess what, all those years you sacrificed for my career—well, it turns out I wasn't holding you back. You're only on this stage because of me, and even so, now that it's your turn and you had everything in your favor—Hill, you just haven't got it. And let's face it, Obama, he's got it."