The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Hillary's Girls Pass the Kleenex and Save the Day

Back when that book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten came out, I thought about how everything I needed to know I learned in my 92 years of dating. And as it turns out, those lessons hold up pretty well in political life, too, in that chemistry and timing trump reason and a common goal more often than we'd like to admit.

Political life does not always mirror the real thing, though: If New Hampshire were an employer and Hillary Clinton a job candidate, she would have been out of contention the minute her eyes filled with tears during the interview. As those Sex and the City women (thank you, Trailhead) and every flesh-and-blood XX knows, men can throw phones and wastebaskets across the office and that's cool, but a woman who lets a tear fall is toast.

Which really might explain - sorry, but the instant Conventional Wisdom does occasionally get it right -- why women who could relate rode to Clinton's rescue last night. In future contests, I'm guessing Obama will refrain from gratuitous, way-beneath-him swipes like "You're likeable enough, Hillary.'' But that still leaves her with the same problem Al Gore had in 2000: What about Bill?

Will We Ever Get Tired of Talking About Hillary?

I agree that there were no gender politics at play in the video, but I did find it quite ineffectual. The other candidates are shown, over and over, addressing or referring to "Senator Clinton ... Senator Clinton ... Senator Clinton." Without context, it's hard to know if they were critiquing a policy statement or complimenting her pantsuit. But last week's debate spawned another YouTube video that I feel is far more damning to Sen. Clinton, and that's the clip put out by the John Edwards camp of Hillary contradicting herself on Iraq, Social Security, and those infamous driver's licenses for illegal immigrants in New York. If, as a few of us seem to agree, Hillary's biggest problem is not her gender but her phoniness, I think it probably helped her to let the storm over her playing the gender card swirl for as long as it could. It served to distract people from her debate performance.  

Have the Media Been Too Harsh on Hillary's "Politics of Pile On" video?

I missed out on some of the analysis of the Clinton campaign's "pile on" video last week. Now that I've caught up, there is something I don't understand about all the fuss over Hillary supposedly playing the gender card/"victim card." As far as I can tell, there is nothing explicitly gendered about the "Politics of Pile On" video that was released on You Tube, and there is nothing explicitly gendered about the press release. Nor does either document portray Clinton as a victim. On the contrary, read the press release, and you'll find that the point is not one of victimization or wimpy femaleness. Its point is that the "pile-on"style is contrary to the "politics of hope" message Obama (and to some degree Edwards) both espoused early on. Nor does the imagery of the video make Hillary look like a frail woman embattled by men; at the end, Hillary looks cool, calm, and collected, not shaken and stirred. (I say all this as no particular defender of Hillary, about whom I have reservations.)

I suppose you could make the argument that no man would ever run an ad like "The Politics of Pile On", but that would be purely speculative. I suppose you could say that the video implicitly brings up gender by contrasting Hillary with the men, and maybe it does, but there's nothing in the way it's edited to suggest gauzy, delicate femininity. In the main, the video is not about gender, it's about hypocrisy. I don't happen to think it's a particularly good video about hypocrisy, but no matter. Meanwhile, the gender lens seems to have largely been derived from the media's reading of the whole event (as in this Gail Collins column about "six men" piling on one woman). Hillary herself said (I paraphrase):  "They didn't pile on me because I 'm a woman, but because I'm the front runner." This has been construed as some kind of rhetorical turnaround, but it seems to me pretty consistent with the presentation of the YouTube video and the press release. So a fund-raising letter said Hillary needed women's help; that's tacky, but I'm not sure it has all that much to do with Hillary's own self-presentation.