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Or maybe the Clinton campaign is not so strapped for cash after all: ABC News is reporting that contrary to earlier reports, senior campaign staff is still getting paid as usual. And one Democratic consultant not aligned with any campaign speculates that the whole "we're so broke" narrative might have been a fund-raising stunt for the benefit of potential donors.
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Anne,
The larger question about Hillary-as-beneficiary-of-Bill is fair game, and I want to say more about it in a second. First, though: what was creepy about Matthews wasn't that he was saying Hillary benefited from a form of nepotism (maritalism?); it was that he was saying we could elect her only because we felt sorry for her. Which seems creepier and nastier to me.
But on to the larger question about what, exactly, the nature of Hillary's accomplishments is--something that's been troubling me these past weeks. Like you, I'm sometimes bemused by the eager championing of her candidacy by feminists; you'd think feminists would want the first female presidential candidate to have a very different C.V. (And I'm sure many do.) I think you're right, we probably would never have heard of Hillary if Bill Clinton hadn't picked up his saxophone and started campaigning all those years ago. Yet if you stop and think about it, the issue is a little more complicated. Because one important (and unanswerable) question is: Would we have heard of Hillary if she hadn't married Bill Clinton? After all, she presumably shaped her career largely around his ambitions and his talent, and part of the deal they struck seems to have been that when the time came, he'd use his influence to support her. You could take the hard line and say that lots of talented women of her generation chose NOT to get married precisely so they wouldn't find themselves in her shoes. And I can understand that. Or you could say she shouldn't have settled so early into the role of just supporting him. But whatever the case, it would be important, I think, to acknowledge how difficult it is in within a marriage, even now, to insist that a husband's choices should be shaped by a wife's ambitions, rather than vice versa. You could still conclude that she just doesn't have real credentials, and that parlaying Bill's power into her own is creepy. Even so, it's a conundrum the men in this race didn't have to face -- just it proved a benefit they weren't able to take advantage of.
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Give me a break, indeed. Like Emily Y., I can scarcely believe what I'm seeing on this video of the former president, who in theory is in New Hampshire trying to help his wife get elected. The mere sight of a defiant Bill Clinton waving his finger around stirs up so many bad memories that if we didn't know better, we might think the next Clinton presidency was supposed to be all about redeeming the last one. Just like George W. was supposed to rewrite the book on Poppy, and we know how that turned out. Did you see the poor kids seated behind him squirming like they'd rather have been stuck in traffic? "Ken Starr spent $70 million and indicted innocent people to find out that I wouldn't take a nickel to see the cow jump over the moon!'' Clinton thundered. Yeah, and his wife just spent $100 million to find out he still can't keep ... his mouth shut. Is it too late in the cycle for a legal separation?
(And Meghan, this is sad, but when I saw the USA Today reference to the "seemingly sexist remarks'' of the men who yelled "Iron my shirts!'' at Hillary Clinton, what I assumed was that the editors were hedging their bets in case the guys turned out to be plants from the Clinton campaign, trying to manufacture a little gender-based outrage.)
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If we need any reminder that it's not easy to be the first popular female candidate for the American presidency, it arrived Monday in the form of an announcement by the AP that Hillary Clinton was leading in yet another poll. This one? The candidate likely to make the "scariest" Halloween costume. Some 37% of the respondents to the survey chose Hillary as their front-runner. (Giuliani was second, with 14%. More key details here.)
The fright-mask news arrives roughly a month after it was announced that Clinton had led in a Pew poll asking respondents about the relative "toughness" of the various candidates: In it, some 67% of Democratic-leaning voters said that Hillary was the first candidate who came to mind when they heard the word "tough." By comparison, only 39% of Republican-leaning voters thought of Giuliani when they heard the word "tough." (Yet he was considered the "toughest" Republican candidate.) All this might seem to be good news for Clinton: after all, over the past year, she has labored hard to burnish her "tough" persona, so as to stave off the perception that a woman--and a Democrat, to boot!--would prove soft on matters of foreign policy. It'd be easy to think that it had finally paid off.
But I've been wondering all this time whether a "tough" backlash was on its way (maybe just because I've been reading Susan Faludi's flawed but sometimes piercingly insightful The Terror Dream). And just last Friday a crucial American institution paved the way for said backlash. In a segment entitled, "Is it OK for women to cry" -- pegged to Ellen DeGeneres' on-air breakdown--the Today Show broadcast images of Clinton giving a speech and shaking hands and confidently pronounced that many people think "that she is too stoic, that she doesn't reveal enough of herself"--on its way to elaborating on the communicative benefits of crying in public. If media coverage of the last election was filled with accusations about girlie-men, will this one be full of talk about manly-girls? Let's hope not. In the meantime, here's an article that briefly discusses the latter group (scroll down); apparently we see them as "pretenders." Sound like a familiar critique of Clinton?
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