The XX Factor: What women really think.

Is It Sexist, or Calling a Spade a Spade?

Going back to the discussion of yesterday, and at the risk of sounding like a sexist myself, I'm wondering if we can find a diva equivalent of Sarah Palin in a male politician. Palin is not alone in this type of tantrum/staff abuse behavior among female politicians (nor is it confined to her side of the aisle). While I haven't heard first-hand of female elected officials throwing things, it wouldn't surprise me at all. I once worked for a high-level woman who famously asked another staffer, on the way to a fundraiser, what dressing would be on the salad at the dinner. (And let me tell you, when you're fundraising, that's the last detail you're struggling to keep track of—and the last one she needs to be concerned about.) A friend worked for a high-level female politician who used to insist that her event information be presented in a specific-color folder, or there was definitely hell to pay. In neither instance is the rejoinder "I'm not sure" or "I can't guarantee that" something you'd counter with if you intended to stick around long.

So Sarah Palin is not the only diva out there. I'm not saying this is acceptable political behavior, and I certainly do expect the runner-up leader of the free world to know that Africa is a continent. But I'm wondering if all this diva-labeling is truly sexist, or are we just calling a spade a spade? I wonder if female politicians act out in ways that are particularly feminine and unpleasant. And I'm hard-pressed to think of a story of a male politician behaving this way from friends who've worked for high-profile ones, these kind of grande dame demands that make the average Jane think, "What??" I'm just wondering: Do we not hear about men throwing things in a rage because there's a sexist tendency to point such ticks out only among women or because women are the only ones who indulge in such extreme behavior?

I do think that anyone running for public office—male or female—has to be massively overconfident to be able to stand up to thousands or millions and say, "Vote for me; I know what's right for you." It's the nature of the beast. And I think women, since they still have to work harder than men to get as far in politics, have to be even more overconfident, to the point of being a little nuts. So maybe, sexist or not, we shouldn't excuse such diva behavior, but we shouldn't blame them either. How else would these women do a job that requires brass balls if they weren't a little imperious themselves?

The Mother(s) of All Elections

I‘m afraid I hear “Sarah Palin’s not going anywhere” as more of a threat than a promise. But I’m with both Rachael and E.J. when it comes to the glory of voting. In fact, after casting a ballot at my local public school (which had a Sesame Street-level vibe of picturesque diversity and neighborly goodwill), I walked to a nearby hospital and gave blood, just to keep that vaguely civic buzz going.

And as long as we’re pitching cornballs, Melinda, I might as well hurl this one out: Now that I’m a parent—and this is my first presidential election since becoming one—I have a whole new investment in this process (like I’m voting for two now, and whoever wins had better goddamned well not wreck the future for my kid). I also, to my surprise, find myself identifying less with the candidates on this excruciating last day than with their mothers. (This happened during the Olympic Games, too; I’d see Nastia Liukin’s mother watching from the stands and nearly faint from anxiety.) Can you imagine the pride, the love, the fear (for their physical safety), and the sickening suspense you’d feel if it was your kid occupying this role on the public stage (even if that “kid” was 72 years old)? It occurred to me when Obama’s grandmother died that, of the four presidential and vice-presidential candidates, Obama is the only one without a living mother, someone to cast her vote for him, hold his hand if he loses, and kvell like nobody’s business if he wins. The fact that his grandmother, who played that role in his life for so many years, missed this election by a matter of hours will surely be a sorrow he’ll carry forever. If my daughter ever runs for president, I’d drive a bargain with the devil to be there to see her win or lose.

Goodbye, Joe, We Hardly Knew Ye

I take back what I said about his bright future even as a Fox News star.

Joe is a faux plumber! (Quel horreur!) And a tax scofflaw!  And something about Obama just happens to remind him of Sammy Davis Jr.!  And-- if true, this next thing is weirder than weird—Joe may be related by marriage to Charles Keating, star of the S &L scandal that almost ended McCain's Senate career!  And—his name's not even Joe!

By now I am starting to feel kind of sorry for Joe. Faux Joe. Samuel. Whatever his name is. He registered as a Republican last spring. By now, he's probably having second thoughts about how great it is to be championed by John McCain before a viewing audience of 38 million U.S. households.

Eat the Rich!

I'm still not worried about Joe the Plumber. For one thing, the guy's now the most famous plumber in America, and I'd say he's got a future as a Fox News star.

But for another, Emily, he's fine either way: If he buys this company and it doesn't make enough to push his personal income over $250,000, then he gets no Obama tax increase, and depending on his income level, he very likely gets one of those Obama tax cuts. Lucky fella. And if his company's profits do push him over $250,000 (I can't find the link, but I believe that in an interview he says they probably would), then his marginal tax rate would go up a tad under Obama's plan, but he's still making far, far more than most of his fellow Americans—and keeping most of it, too.

So what's the problem here for Joe? He'd rather not have his marginal tax rate increase. OK, I get that. But no one—certainly not Obama—is suggesting he didn't work hard to get his money, or that he's not "entitled to keep most of it." We're talking about a small increase in the marginal tax rate for Americans in the top fifth percentile of incomes, not about nationalizing Joe's plumbing business. (Much as I'd like free government-provided plumbing ...)

I guess I just don't see why Obama's comment about wanting to "spread the wealth around" strikes fear into anyone's heart. That's what the progressive income tax is supposed to do—and no one really questions the core concept, just the details (What should the highest marginal tax rate be? What should the income threshold be? etc.). Right now, given the stunning levels of income inequality in this country, both parties agree that we need to spread the weath around a bit. The question is just what mechanism will most effectively do the trick. Is it improving education while cutting taxes for all, as McCain proposes?Or is it tax cuts for the lower 95 percent and marginal tax rate increases for the wealthiest 5 percent, including, hypothetically, Joe the Plumber—if he hits the big time?

Florida II: Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back in the Water

Well, I woke up this morning, switched on my computer, read the headlines, and suddenly had a nightmare vision of Denver-Democratic-Convention-as-Florida-in-2000: a political horror show in which two candidates are running neck and neck, both sides are lining up their lawyers, legal scholars are looking for decades-old precedents, pundits are howling, and no one knows how to resolve the dispute because this sort of thing hasn't happened for a century or more.

That nightmare would be bad for the candidates, bad for the Democratic Party, bad for the political process, bad for the country. It might even be bad for John McCain, since if he won, in the wake of a Democratic Party meltdown, his victory would be suspect, too. Democracy only works when an election is held according to a set of rules which most people in a given society agree to abide by in advance, even when they don't like the result. That advance agreement is what then confers legitimacy on the winner, who is accepted by the losing side because he won fair and square. But when the rules suddenly become unclear, as they did in 2000, and the victor has to be chosen according to some other, ad hoc, previously untested procedure, as in 2000, the winner will inevitably be considered illegitimate by some part of the population.

And—let's face it—no candidate chosen after a rowdy, chaotic, confusing August convention will be considered legitimate by all Democrats, and may not be considered a legitimate presidential candidate by the general public, either. What are superdelegates, after all? Why haven't we ever talked about them before? Why did the Democratic Party impose proportional representation, the worst voting system known to man, on its candidate selection process? Why exactly don't the Florida and Michigan votes count? Should they be held again, as the Detroit Free Press says today? None of these questions can be resolved, post facto, and since they haven't come up before, or at least not in living memory, no one knows how to resolve them in advance.

Maybe some smooth, establishment thing will now happen, either Hillary or Obama will be gently induced to step down, and the Democrats will move on to do battle with McCain, secure that their candidate is the right one. And if not? Time to start playing the creepy horror movie music, since the scary shark scenes are approaching fast ...

Boohoo for Patti Solis Doyle

The pertinent fact about Patti Solis Doyle's explanation for leaving Hillary's campaign (that her little boy cried for Daddy instead of for her) seems to me to lie outside its factual veracity. It's probably a fictionalized condensation of something that's happened many times, to Doyle and to every working parent, especially men (who, if they quit their jobs over a toddler snub, get less moral credit for it than we do). Though I can identify with the pain of being the (momentarily) rebuffed parent, the unspoken assumption that the mother must be the child's default choice (or be a bad mother) makes me want to say, boo-frigging-hoo. So Junior wants Daddy in the middle of the night? Great, more sleep for me!

What really makes me smite my forehead is Doyle's choice to use the anecdote now—and make no mistake, true story or not, the woman is cannily using it to protect herself and her boss. It's getting downright painful watching powerful women shoot feminism in the foot in their attempted support of HRC's campaign. Thanks a lot, Patti, for making the rest of us sound as if we're crying wolf when we talk to our bosses about needing flextime or extra sick days. If "my baby needs me" becomes the new "it's my time of the month," an all-purpose cop-out available only to women, that's just one more way to convince the misogynist wing of Hillary-haters (and, paranoid as Erica Jong may be, they're out there) that we're incapable of holding down the big jobs—like, say, president of the United States.

Is Clinton Only Pretending To Be Short on Cash?

Re: But how DID Hillary become a senator?

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. 

No, Bill, No!

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.)

Power and Empathy

I'm a fan of Shankar Vedantam's "Department of Human Behavior" column in the Washington Post, which reported yesterday on some recent social psychology research that perhaps sheds new light on tough Hillary, and the spectacle of the candidates in general. The experience of being powerful erodes empathy, a study published in Psychological Science (which I haven't actually seen) seems to suggest. Volunteers who were made to feel like top dogs, in contrast to those who were primed to recall situations of powerlessness, very quickly lost the capacity to see things from other people's perspectives. The experiment (which involves drawing the letter E on foreheads) sounds rather ridiculous, but has a certain explanatory, well, power. Here may be another reason that the same candidates who are so exquisitely attuned to the views of others while they're desperately chasing votes become more blinkered once they're in office-and a reason that toughness can eclipse sensitivity in the front-runner in the race, regardless of gender. (So much for femaleness as a vaunted incubator of empathy; here's grist for the notion that the experience of subordinate status, not two X chromosomes, may be a key influence.) The result, as the researchers observe, is a paradox: The very quality that often draws us to support leaders-their ability to see beyond themselves-is all too likely to fade once we've anointed them.

Bitches and Polls

I agree with Dahlia and Emily that gender is a big part of it for many of the Hillary hatas out there. A while back I mentioned a study that suggests we see "manly women" as "pretenders," which does seem to suggest that lots of us murkily associate not toeing-the-gender script with phoniness. Meanwhile, I don't think the media's new focus on "gender" is working out that well for Hillary; it seems like she polled better when we weren't contantly being reminded that she is a... woman and her competitors are.... men. A new CBS/New York Times poll of "likely Iowa voters" shows Obama and Edwards closing on her, with 25 percent saying they'd vote for Hillary, 23 percent going to Edwards, and 22 percent for Obama. (Statistically insignificant margin, but it's intriguing that Edwards is equal with Obama.) Even so, I'm not sure this poll tells us anything substantial.

As for John McCain, Dahlia: Sure, he should have said, "Let's not use that word" before he went on to answer the woman's question. But I can't get too worked up about his response; what's really at stake in this campaign has nothing to do with whether McCain tolerated the word "bitch." I'm increasingly finding it tedious to watch politicians being taken to task for small gaffes while weighty issues go largely unexamined.

Hillary Clinton: Tough, Stoic, or Scary?

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?

Down Under and Dirty

Australia is also in the midst of an election season, though theirs has big two advantages over ours right now.

1. Their parliament election, which will determine whether John Howard remains prime minister or has to move aside in favor of opposition candidate Kevin Rudd, is just a month away.

2. The most embarrassing YouTube video to surface in their election so far features Rudd idly picking at his earwax and then licking his finger. (Watch it here.)

The etiquette breach occurs while one of Rudd’s fellow members of Parliament is droning on something to do with permanent residents. Rudd’s not the only one bored stiff—the redhead sitting in front of him appears to be fighting off sleep, and the woman to his left looks mighty fidgety.

I’m confused, though, about how Aussie blogs and newspapers are reacting. The footage is apparently a few years old and has been on YouTube for months, but it’s only now become an issue. A news site says the 30-second clip “could do more damage to Kevin Rudd's election chances than any policy blitz.” Blogs call it Rudd’s “macaca moment.” Really? I’d be relieved if I saw footage of Barack Obama caught picking his nose, or John McCain trying to surreptitiously rid himself of a wedgie. It’s gross and it’s bad manners, but there’s something endearing about catching politicians in those off-guard, embarrassing moments.