Iowa's remarkably race and gender-neutral caucuses, in which Barack Obama received a majority of women's votes in an overwhelmingly white state, were a historic breakthrough. The result was a win for Obama, a third place finish for Hillary Clinton and an accelerating poll movement from Clinton to Obama by African-Americans in South Carolina and elsewhere.
With the prospect of black voters shifting to Obama and unlikely to return to her, Clinton turned her full attention to wooing New Hampshire's white voters, women in particular. And thus began a campaign based on rigorous 1990s politics of identity, a game at which the Clintons excel, using one group against another as the need arises, usually with a heavy dose of condescension.
The seeds had been sown for weeks, perhaps even months: a Clinton campaign co-chair questioned whether Obama had been a drug dealer; Bill Clinton complained about "those boys" going after his wife. The Iowa loss precipitated a harsher, more overt gender-centric campaign, Obama having to be stopped at any cost.
One of two recent defining moments is, of course, Clinton's teary-eyed, barely coded appeal to women to save her candidacy from incompetent, overly entitled men (including a particularly uppity black one): she very much knew what she was doing, and it worked stunningly. When that same night, in a debate, John Edwards appeared to team up with Obama, it played wonderfully into the image of her as an unfairly victimized woman.
Another significant instance was Hillary's disgraceful downgrading of Martin Luther King's historic role, arguing in the process that she would play Lyndon Johnson to Obama's King (in her mind, this was a good thing). The message is clear: black dreamers need white leaders to make things happen, otherwise it's all just a "fairy tale," in Bill Clinton's words. Gambling that they have lost most black voters' allegiance and have nothing further to lose, the Clintons are on a roll. They've been there before and, for those who remember, the names of their targets instantly evoke a bittersweet era of triangulation, culture wars and Clinton intrigue: Sister Souljah, Lani Guinier, Joycelyn Elders...
Endless numbers of commentators have positively contrasted Obama and Al Sharpton, the most recent black presidential candidate besides Obama (Joe Biden, for one, lauded Obama for being "the first mainstream African-American [candidate] who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy"). But a more apt comparison may be between Sharpton and Hillary, both of them experts at playing their identity cards just at the right moment, to the right audience. Not coincidentally, Sharpton is a pure product of the 1990s, exploding on the national scene in the 2004 election after more than a decade of mining the rich fields of New York's Giuliani-powered racial strife.
It is exasperating that Clinton is so successful at playing both sides of the coin: a woman who has drawn her political power from her marriage, but one who objects to the patriarchal remnants that fall in her path to the presidency. She says she can relate to other women's political and professional struggles, but most of them face very different challenges, starting with the fact that their husbands (for those who are married) are not former presidents of the United States. This overreaching self-identification is what most politicians do (Edwards relating to poverty, for instance), but the gap between the reality of Clinton's life for the past twenty years and that of the women she says she empathizes with seems particularly wide. Conversely, to this day we have not heard Obama complain about the host of biases that undoubtedly hinder his improbable candidacy, no matter who his audience is. Perhaps it's a generational thing, perhaps it's pride, and perhaps it's astute campaigning. Most likely, it's a mix of all three.
Like most Americans who are not wealthy, heterosexual, white and male, Clinton has surely faced barriers, but not when she has run for elective office: in her first attempt, the 2000 New York Senate race, she had the weight of her husband's presidency and, by extension, of the country and state's Democratic establishment. Clearly not waiting her turn, she leapfrogged other hard-working candidates, including a highly accomplished local Congresswoman, who was induced to drop out of the race. No ya-ya sisterhood there.
We will never know what Hillary would have achieved had she not been married to Bill, but it is hard to believe that she would be one of four or five contenders for the presidency at this very moment, no matter how smart, hard-working and gifted she is, with odds nearly infinitely low for even the most driven aspirants. It is, then, breathaking chutzpah for her to question the credentials of a candidate such as Obama, who has built a successful life, political and otherwise, from a 60s-era broken, biracial, binational nomadic household. If experience matters so much, there is surely more to be said for a candidate with the skill to navigate those kinds of challenges than one who married the right guy.
It may be that for a woman to be elected President of the United States, she does need the full force of the Clinton machine behind her. We just wish that the lucky candidate would not be the former President's wife. No matter what Chris Matthews says (no surprise), there is no lack of outstanding potential women candidates, starting with the current crop of Senators and Governors.
The fact that Clinton is running strongly says less about the progressive empowerment of women in American politics than about the reactionary, scary concentration of US political power into an ever-shrinking group. It will never be said enough that if Clinton is elected and finishes just one term in office, the country will have been ruled by a Bush/Clinton presidency for 24 consecutive years. For any voter born after 1958, every presidential general election choice will have featured a Bush or a Clinton on the ticket (and in every case that ticket was the winning one). This alone should be reason enough to strongly question voting for another Clinton, no matter how likeable or qualified they may be.
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Posted January 13, 2008 | 11:37 AM (EST)