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At a campaign event in New Haven, Conn., today, Hillary Clinton may have teared up a little as she was being introduced. Clinton fans raced to say she is exhausted and vulnerable. Clinton-haters interpret it as a cynical effort to gin up another rush of sympathy like the one that put her over the top last month in New Hampshire.
Clinton has famously called herself a Rorschach test, and already at Fox News they’re jawing on about how she was faking it. Interestingly enough, the real outrage seems not to be that candidate Clinton got misty, but that she somehow lacks the originality to show her human side in new ways. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one's composure in New Hampshire may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose it again in Connecticut starts to look like hysteria.
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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.
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