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Why Can't Hillary Deliver Women the Way Oprah Does?
As originally published on More.com in the blog MORE from the Floor
Before I got to Denver, I watched the TV talking heads (mostly men) wonder aloud if Hillary, like some sneaky, skeevy Eve Harrington from All About Eve, would pull a last-minute power grab to disrupt the nomination. Would she go for a roll-call vote in which her delegates would somehow refuse to move over to Obama, unleashing chaos on the floor? What were her motives? Why couldn't she just hand the spoils to the victor and get on with it?
Since all's fair in love and politics, I bought the Obama side's frustration. Get the hook, I thought, and get her off the stage. Next!
But after spending nearly all of yesterday covering the Hillary Express--first at WomenCount, then at Emily's List, and finally at the Pepsi Center watching her address the convention--I saw that the task of reprogramming Hillary voters is not so simple. At WomenCount, a mostly off the record event, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney said in her introduction that "Hillary's race was the best of times and the worst of times.... because we saw the dark misogyny of sexist stereotyping ....Women still have more barriers facing them." And Hillary urged the group to "stand up against the pervasive bias we saw in the media." The women in this crowd weren't just voting for a generic Democrat; Hillary speaks to and embodies something powerful and emotional in their own lives: their own decades-long struggles against anti-womanism. And Hillary knows her audience. Speaking at the WomenCount lunch, she didn't even mention the Democratic candidates by name (though she did later, at an Emily's List event that was more public). When Rep. Maloney called HRC a "lioness," she wasn't exaggerating the view of Hillary's supporters. There were a lot of tears in that crowd and you could tell by the hoots and hollers that those cubs were not yet ready to be weaned.
And that's where Oprah comes in. I'm not talking about O the magazine (which is in the same competitive field as More, the magazine I edit). I'm talking about TV-star Oprah who is able to mention a book or beauty product (or, on one occasion, a key-lime bundt cake) on her show and immediately create a feeding frenzy in the stores. For the last few years, TV-Oprah has led America to think of women as a monolith, a group that can be easily turned into buyers by the Woman They Adore (WTA). All she has to do is ask them.
So everyone is shocked and annoyed when Hillary, another WTA, can't just twitch her nose like Samantha in Bewitched and--poof!--hand over the female vote. The truth is that getting women to buy a book or bundt cake is one thing. Getting them to completely change their emotional allegiance is another. And on the emotional level, Barack and Hillary are completely different products. Did Barack Obama agree that his career would take a backseat to his wife's, even though he was equally qualified for big things? No...but Hillary did, and so did many of her female supporters. Did Barack support his wife through years of campaigning and a tumultuous eight years in the White House, while his spouse cheated on him with a partner who was, to put it mildly, not his equal? No, but Hillary did. And did he come back after a great humiliation, construct his own career at last, and make his admirers feel he was taking them back to the top along with him? No, but Hillary did. So why should it be easy for them to just pull Obama's lever? After all, Oprah never asks her biggest fans to stop watching her emotional, inspirational, totally woman-centered show and start watching, say, Jon Stewart.
Women just aren't that shallow. During Hillary's convention speech I ended up sitting with the delegates from West Virginia, a state she carried overwhelmingly in the primaries. Before Hillary spoke, Shelby Leary, 72, told me how, whenever a Democratic solicitation for money arrived at her house, she would write back defiantly, "Put Hillary on the ticket!" As we sat awaiting Hillary at the Pepsi Center, Leary said, "Many women I've talked to say they won't vote for him. I think there is a lot of hurt; they wanted it so bad." In other words...It's the emotional investment, stupid.
Many of us, I think, have come to believe that if the right person does the asking, a shampoo, a car, even emotional allegiance can easily be repackaged and resold. What may be truer is that women are not a monolith, and that "the women's vote"--or at least a good portion of the 18 million who gave their hearts to Hillary--will never be able to be stamped "New! Improved! And now VOTING for Barack Obama!"
For more Huffington Post coverage of the Democratic National Convention, visit our Politics @ the DNC page, our Democratic Convention Big News Page, and our HuffPost bloggers' Twitter feed, live from Denver.
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I worked with a die-hard Hillary supporter who said she wouldn't vote if Obama won the nomination UNLESS it looked like a "close" race. I wonder, Is it close enough now??
Growing up we called people like that "sore losers." You know, the kids who hate losing so much they throw the gameboard across the room so no one can play. And that's how the Hillary camp looks right now.
A candidate who runs in a Presidential race is a seasoned player (not sure about Palin). These candidates know they can lose & are well aware that politics is ugly, dirty and imperfect. But it's what we've got. We can all rant until we're blue in the face about the "stolen" election of 2004, but it doesn't change the reality. We've had 8 agonizing years of Republicans in the White House & we're facing another 4.
Bill & Hillary are barely keeping that board on the table. Their support of our Democratic candidate is barely palpable given their capacity & power and they look like SORE LOSERS who choose to punish Obama and supporters.
And they set that tone for their followers, many of whom are acting the same way yet call themselves Democrats. You can all throw the game board across the room OR you can accept the difficulty of defeat, scoot over and share the sand box.
Democrats needs your support lest we face 4 years of McCain and now Palin in the White House. The choice is
I worked with a die-hard Hillary supporter who said she wouldn't vote if Obama won the nomination UNLESS it looked like a "close" race. I wonder, Is it close enough now??
Growing up we called people like that "sore losers." You know, the kids who hate losing so much they throw the gameboard across the room so no one can play. And that's how the Hillary camp looks right now.
A candidate who runs in a Presidential race is a seasoned player (not sure about Palin). These candidates know they can lose & are well aware that politics is ugly, dirty and imperfect. But it's what we've got. We can all rant until we're blue in the face about the "stolen" election of 2004, but it doesn't change the reality. We've had 8 agonizing years of Republicans in the White House & we're facing another 4.
Bill & Hillary are barely keeping that board on the table. Their support of our Democratic candidate is barely palpable given their capacity & power and they look like SORE LOSERS who choose to punish Obama and supporters.
And they set that tone for their followers, many of whom are acting the same way yet call themselves Democrats. You can all throw the game board across the room OR you can accept the difficulty of defeat, scoot over and share the sand box.
Democrats needs your support lest we face 4 years of McCain and now Palin in the White House. The choice is
I know I'll get flamed for confessing this but Oprah was the only reason my family and I supported him in the primary. Really there was so little difference between him and the former first lady that it was Oprah who made all the difference. I admire everything she stands for so it was an easy call. I hear she got over one million people to vote for him so at least I'm not alone.
Honestly, the Oprah connection is what kept me away from Obama in the first place! After years of kissing John Travolta's behind, wheeling out little red wagons filled with fat, and destroying the power of Toni Morrison novels, the last thing I wanted to do is buy her pick for president. Sure she can tell you where to find the best $49 red velvet cupcake or how to make Jennifer Anniston cry but politics? No thanks.
Still, as a former Hilary supporter, I too am now on board with Obama and intend to support him 100%
Just don't expect me to join her book club or watch her dance to Celine Dion anytime soon.
What a shallow question. Why isn't McCain or bush as charasmatic as Bill Clinton? Questions like these have easy answers that are generally wrong.
I think the women who supported Hillary, at least the die-hards who won't cross over to Obama, are not a bunch of followers. Not a bunch of lemmings. Which is probably why she appealed to us in the first place. Now Obama's people, say a few nice words and they'll follow you to the ends of the earth, regardless of your past record.
Your anger is misdirected. To transfer your anger onto the cnadidate who espouses many of the same views is childish and petty.
Is this the first time you have lost at anything in your life so you just don't know how to react emotionallY?
Go ahead and vote for McCain if you think that will ease your suffering.. show spite vengeance and stupidity.
And when McCain rolls back rights now afforded to win.. you can declare your victory.
Pathetic.
"Obama's people" is in itself a misnomer, as most of those voting for Obama do so not because of his platform, his judgment, and his stand on the issues. We're loyal Americans, which, in our opinion, means the only candidate we could possibly support is Obama.
By very definition, those willing to run off of a cliff nto four more years of Bush for nothing more than a refusal to change course ARE acting like lemmings. It's wisdom, not treachery or blindness, to support the person we believe best for our nation rather than letting something like old-school feminine desire to kick male butt prevent us from taking an objective look at all the options.
Obama's past record is one of supporting jobs, supporting the middle class, supporting the troops without supporting the war, reading the Intel and making a decision based on facts rather than on political ambition. Maybe that doesn't appeal to you, but to those who have chosen to support Obama, his policies and his inclusion of The People in this pseudo-democracy is what our nation needs.
I could tell you why Hillary's ultra Big-Government, Big-brother, Big-Business, lobbyist-supporting, insurance-companies-over-patients benefitting, constitutional-free-speech-attacking-with-money-needed-by-Katrina, more-concerned-with-votes-than-with-lives-and-truth politics has turned off so many, but I won't presume, since I don't know that everybody else hates these signs of bad judgment and egotism as much as I do.
LOL, "do so because of", minus the "not". How appropriate to countering inanity.
Lesley Jane Seymour: But after spending nearly all of yesterday covering the Hillary Express--first at WomenCount, then at Emily's List, and finally at the Pepsi Center watching her address the convention--I saw that the task of reprogramming Hillary voters is not so simple...The women in this crowd weren't just voting for a generic Democrat; Hillary speaks to and embodies something powerful and emotional in their own lives: their own decades-long struggles against anti-womanism.
Otay, let's turn this around. Say Hillary had won, and 30% of the Barack supports (say the blacks in the group) were withholding their support for these same sorts of reasons - seething rage against historical and current prejudice.
What would you say about these black people?
I'd say they were foolish indeed - cutting off their nose to spite their face.
And that's exactly what I say about these women.
Hillary and Barack - both cracking through the glass ceiling this year on behalf of all the disenfranchised and marginalized women and blacks of our too often shameful history. One won, the other lost.
Anyone who withholds support to the winner in this most crucial of election years is putting personal anger above love of country...and that's not a good thing.
End of complexity...and end of story. Let's move on.
Your rebuttal misses the point of the article, which was not to evaluate the "foolishness" of possible die-hard Clinton supporters, but to point out why it is that Clinton herself does not possess some kind of on-off switch that controls their voting choice.
It may well be that die-hard Clinton supporters, or the hypothetical die-hard black Obama supporters in your mirror example, would be foolish not to fall in behind the nominee -- "foolish" here meaning: voting against their own best interests. That would not make them unique -- lower and middle-class Republicans, for example, vote against their own economic best interests all the time. The original article does not pass judgment on the wisdom of the women it describes; it merely proposes a theory as to why it may be difficult to get them to change their allegiance.
I would suggest further reasons that might apply. Some of the "die-hards" may be relatively conservative, or racially biased, or pro-life, or just old. Any of those could be a (non-foolish) reason for some voters to prefer McCain over Obama. However, those same voters might pick Clinton over McCain, yes, simply because she is a woman. Unfortunately, those folks aren't likely to change their minds because Senator Clinton asks them to. I hope there aren't too many of them.
Incidentally, things do not stop being complex just because you'd rather have them be simple. That, in fact, is the hallmark of W-style thinking.
strangelet: Incidentally, things do not stop being complex just because you'd rather have them be simple. That, in fact, is the hallmark of W-style thinking.
===
Remember this: while BushCo was just horrific at governance, they absolutely PWNED the hapless dems in the game of hardball politics.
One of the things democrats are best at is complexifying themselves into losing election after election. Half the time they sound like frickin' Hamlet. It's happening right now, yet again, as they try to find their inner happy warrior to really play smashmouth politics with McSame.
This Hillary women crap is just one more dead end - one more red herring - one more bit of vapid, mindless self-indulgence that neither the party nor the country can afford right now.
She cracked a glass ceiling during the primary, and so did he. She lost and he won.
Now it's time to put BubbaCo, in all it's mottled and dysfunctional psycho-dramatic glory, into the dustbin of history. Time marches on.
To paraphrase the apostle Paul, BubbaCo - along all their slimy surrogates - must decrease, and Barack must increase. As for all those who say they support Hillary but won't hop on the Barack train - he'll do it with 'em or without 'em. Let them eat Fox.
It really is pretty simple.
After all of this overblown hue and cry about devastated Hillary women, it's still a lead pipe cinch that Obama will do better with women voters than the previous 2 democratic candidates for President did. The Hillary voters that are giving Obama real trouble are male voters. Throughout the second half of the primary season, negative Clinton campaign tactics persuaded these blue collar white males (democrats, but not particularly partisan ones) that Obama is weak and spineless, too young and unqualified for the position of president, and softened him up for Republicans to continue these themes throughout the general election. Such persuasion is very difficult to simply overturn with a couple of convention speeches.
It's been interesting to see feminists positioning themselves as the new conservatives. The Republicans need to find a new group of voters to fit with their Southern Strategy generalised and feminists fit the bill perfectly.
Like Southern whites they have that whole victimhood self-image and that faux sense of being owed everything because the world is out to get them. They can be stirred up easily by their sense of prejudice against men the way the Republicans use race right now. Feminists don't seem to have any real issues any more except image. That's perfect for Republicans. And now finally feminists are saying they'll vote McCain out of sheer spite or pique. It's perfect.
easy answer:
oprah is not a divisive person.
Very sensitive. But, for those woman the question should not be Obama or not. Its: Let we make a man making trash for the next four years, and then let a woman do the dishes in 2012? Or let we make a man do his dishes and in 2012 a woman gets a well keept kitchen? (as far as mans can do that..)
I find it amazing that you think Oprah inspires all women. She does not. Don't forget Oprah is on TV 5 out of 7 days, gives out huge gifts, and markets us all to death.
Actually, when Oprah has the absolute ego to think her endorsement could sway me, I was totally turned off.
So, give you head a shake.
She doesn't inspire all women, but hers was the most influential political endorsement in American history. IShe swayed over a million women, and triggered a sea change in the black vote. She certainly swayed me 180 degrees.
What do her gifts have to do with it? Only the studio audience receives them, not the millions watching at home. And the reason corporations let her give that stuff a way is because she's the best salesperson in the country.
She apparently gave Obama more than a million voters with her endorsement alone, so that couldn't hurt.
Fact is, we don't really know what Oprah's influence was. How many people voted for Hillary because she was the ONLY woman running for president? How many people voted for her because they like Bill Clinton? There are so many hanging threads and so much entailed baggage with each vote that it's hard to tell what Hillary's influence is.
Oprah has more regular viewers than Hillary Clinton got votes in the primary, so that's something to consider.
She's lost a lot of viewers because of her support for Obama.
i think HRC has done exactly what she needed to do... she planted the seed of reason...
Charisma -- it's so indefinable - yet we know it when we see it. Oprah has it. Hillary....does she?
Baby boomer views: http://www.Vaboomer.com
And herein lies the problem for Obama, Hillary's women voters were so emotionally invested in her campaign, that now, they just can't get over their emotions. Some might find this a bit sexist, but I'm just going to say it. It's the difference between men and women, one that allows women to be more pragmatic, and thoughtful, in many instances. And one that allows men to be more opportunistic, and decisive in other instances, it;s that "F*&! it" emotion that men have, that women don't, where a man can get over an emotional decision much quicker and move on, while women will dwell on the emotional decision and rationalize(hell hath no fury like a women scorned)...Hillary women feel scorned, to the point where many of them have lost their ability to look at the situation with any rational thought. They feel like this was there opportunity and it was taken from them, when the reality was that it actually was lost because of incompetence. While Obama must work to help bridge that emotional gap for many of these women, the women alse need to move the F*&! on, and support their candidates decision.
I think you got it right, actually. My wife is taking Hillary's loss just as you describe it. Great emotional investment. She has a hard time even looking at Obama.
However, as for me, I am for the first time thinking of supporting Obama only because of Bill Clinton's magnificent speech. This is the third time I'm saying this but my other two comments have been lost! Maybe they were deleted because I said critics of Bill Clinton should be tarred and feathered. He is GREAT.
Yep. Don't know how you got through this time.
you are right... that WAS sexist... as a rule, gross generalizations are not accurate, uninteresting, and thus unhelpful...
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Posted August 27, 2008 | 08:53 PM (EST)