He Ain't Heavy, He's My Sister?

Ah, the election of 2008: such wonderful trifecta of conundrums — racism, sexism, and ageism. The Hopester is a man of color, The Hillster is a woman (Hear her roar!), and The Geezer is — in his own words — older than dirt. If Election '08 was a horse race, The Hopester would be Big Brown, The Hillster would be a courageous filly, and The Geezer would be en route to a rendering plant. As the process grinds onward (How long, O Lord?), The Hillster's crusade has brought her righteous sisters to a fork in the road. Two different news outlets (¹Time and ²NYTimes aka Fishwrap) have provided differing views of the woman voter in '08. (Hear her roar!) If this is (fair & balanced) philogyny (NOT!), so be it.

¹[x Time]
The Feminist Divide Over Obama
By Amy Sullivan

When the abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America announced its endorsement of Barack Obama earlier this week, president Nancy Keenan and her colleagues knew their decision would raise eyebrows. The debate between Obama and Clinton supporters on the organization's board, according to those familiar with it, was "spirited." But they ultimately reached a unanimous decision to throw their support behind Obama, a longtime supporter of abortion rights, and the move was immediately assailed by Clinton supporters as a betrayal. In the process, they added new fuel to a furious debate that has raged mostly below the surface of this campaign, often dividing friend from friend and sister from sister. Do women have an obligation to support a serious woman candidate? Or is gender now simply an interesting but ultimately irrelevant consideration?

The Grrrl Power position was staked out early on by Emily's List. Less than one hour after Clinton announced her candidacy in January 2007, the group issued an endorsement statement from president Ellen Malcolm. "I am one of the millions of women who have waited all their lives to see the first woman sworn in as President of the United States," wrote Malcolm. "And now we have our best opportunity to see that dream fulfilled." Of course, given that Emily's List exists for the express purpose of electing women, it's no surprise that Malcolm would so quickly embrace Clinton, a candidate so strong she was hailed as the frontrunner from the moment she entered the race.

But Malcolm and others have upped the ante, declaring that Clinton's candidacy not only compels their personal support, but also that of all feminists. After Clinton's disappointing showing in the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, Malcolm even wrote an op-ed declaring that Clinton herself had a "responsibility" to stay in the race. She owed it to all women to prove that she wasn't a quitter. The sentiment echoed Clinton's own comments on the stump, her declaration that "I am not a quitter. I do not give up."

These rousing displays of fortitude , however, don't necessarily suggest a positive message for women. Clinton's vow, in particular, moved Slate writer Dahlia Lithwick to ask what it means if feminism is "the inability to concede error or defeat — even in light of irrefutable, empirical evidence and in the face of spiraling support and tanking morale."

Which is why other leading feminists — including former NARAL head Kate Michelman and writer Katha Pollit — have taken a more pragmatic approach, endorsing Obama for reasons they say are unrelated to gender. Similarly, the NARAL board also focused its decision-making on the question of how best to blunt John McCain's appeal to swing voters, particularly moderate pro-choice women who are largely unaware of his steadfast opposition to abortion. The issue was the main topic of conversation when I met with NARAL staffers earlier in the winter and has long worried the organization. They also reportedly wanted to dampen fears that the primary season will result in splits within the party. A NARAL endorsement would, the board hoped, signal that women could back Obama with a clear conscience.

This isn't the first time that NARAL has made waves in the women's community since Keenan took over its leadership at the end of 2004. During the debate over Justice John Roberts' confirmation as Supreme Court chief justice, the organization ran a controversial ad strongly implying equivalence between the jurist's views and the actions of abortion opponents who bomb clinics. The next year, NARAL took the unusual step of endorsing then-GOP Senator Lincoln Chafee in his re-election race before he even had a Democratic challenger. The group was criticized by other pro-choice allies for failing to pursue a strategy focused entirely on gaining a Democratic majority in Congress. NARAL's endorsement of Joseph Lieberman in his 2006 Senate campaign against liberal opponent Ned Lamont raised similar concerns in the women's community.

Keenan herself is a somewhat unusual figure in the broader women's and abortion rights community. A Catholic from Montana, she delivered an unorthodox speech on the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade earlier this year. Talking openly about her experience as a pro-choice Catholic, Keenan also called on her pro-choice compatriots to recognize their own missteps in confronting the abortion issue. "As positions on both sides of this debate have hardened the past three decades, they have also grown more distant from the lives of everyday people," she told the audience [italics hers]. "The slogans and bumper stickers that paint this issue in black and white no longer touch the profound complexity most people feel on the issue of abortion."

Those slogans and bumper stickers have long given comfort to — and helped solicit donations from — staunch abortion rights supporters. Many NARAL state affiliates whose members come from the ranks of second-wave feminists who prefer purist positions have been openly uneasy with this new openness on the part of the national organization, as well as NARAL's relative openness to the focus on abortion-reduction currently being embraced by congressional Democrats. The Obama endorsement reignited those concerns, so much so that at least a half dozen NARAL affiliates from states including Pennsylvania, Missouri and New York wasted no time distancing themselves and underscoring their continued neutrality in the ongoing Democratic contest.

But politics is also, well, political, and NARAL was well aware that if it had withheld its endorsement much longer, it would have risked irrelevance. Now it's so relevant, of course, that it has succeeded in reinvigorating weary Clinton supporters. But that too may fade. Despite Malcolm's feisty rhetoric, her organization has not included references to Clinton's candidacy on the fundraising appeals they have sent out since the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, as they did with earlier missives. Even candidates of the sisterhood have their expiration dates.

[Amy Sullivan is a senior editor at Time, a liberal Democrat, and an evangelical Christian. Her most recent book is The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap (2008).]

Copyright © 2008 Time, Inc.
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²[NY Fishwrap]
Gender Issue Lives On As Clinton’s Hopes Dim
By Jodi Kantor

With each passing day, it seems a little less likely that the next president of the United States will wear a skirt — or a cheerful, no-nonsense pantsuit.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is now in what most agree are the waning days of her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. To use her own phrase, she has been running “to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling” in American life, and now the presidency, or even a nomination that once seemed to be hers to claim, seems out of reach.

Along with the usual post-mortems about strategy, message and money, Mrs. Clinton’s all-but-certain defeat brings with it a reckoning about what her run represents for women: a historic if incomplete triumph or a depressing reminder of why few pursue high office in the first place.

The answers have immediate political implications. If many of Mrs. Clinton’s legions of female supporters believe she was undone even in part by gender discrimination, how eagerly will they embrace Senator Barack Obama, the man who beat her?

“Women felt this was their time, and this has been stolen from them,” said Marilu Sochor, 48, a real estate agent in Columbus, Ohio, and a Clinton supporter. “Sexism has played a really big role in the race.”

Not everyone agrees. “When people look at the arc of the campaign, it will be seen that being a woman, in the end, was not a detriment and if anything it was a help to her,” the presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said in an interview. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign is faltering, she added, because of “strategic, tactical things that have nothing to do with her being a woman.”

As a former first lady whose political career evolved from her husband’s, Mrs. Clinton was always an imperfect test case for female achievement — “somebody’s wife,” as Elaine Kamarck, a professor of government at Harvard and a Clinton supporter, described her.

Still, many credit Mrs. Clinton with laying down a new marker for what a woman can accomplish in a campaign — raising over $170 million, frequently winning more favorable reviews on debate performances than her male rivals, rallying older women, and persuading white male voters who were never expected to support her.

“She’s raised this whole woman candidate thing to a whole different level than when I ran,” said Geraldine Ferraro, a Clinton supporter and the first woman to be the vice-presidential nominee of a major party, contrasting her own brief stint as a running mate in 1984 with Mrs. Clinton’s 17-month-and-counting slog.

Ms. Goodwin and others say Mrs. Clinton was able to convert the sexism she faced on the trail into votes and donations, extending the life of a candidacy that suffered a serious blow at the Iowa caucuses. Like so many women before, she was heckled (in New Hampshire, a few men told her to iron their shirts) and called nasty names (“How do we beat the bitch?” Senator John McCain was asked at one campaign event).

But the response may have been more powerful than the injury. In the days after Mrs. Clinton was criticized for misting up on the campaign trail, she won the New Hampshire primary and drew a wave of donations, many from women expressing indignation about how she had been treated.

And Mrs. Clinton seemed to channel the lives of regular women, who often saw her as an avenging angel. Take Judith Henry, 67, for whom Mrs. Clinton’s primary losses stirred decades-old memories of working at a phone company where women were not allowed to hold management positions. “They always gave us the clerical jobs and told us we didn’t have families to support,” she said. At a rally last month in Bloomington, Ind., she sat with her daughter Susan Henry, 45, a warehouse worker, who complained that her male colleagues did less work and made more money than the women did.

Decades after the dissolution of movement feminism, Mrs. Clinton’s events and donor lists filled with women who had experienced insult or isolation on the job. Moitri Chowdhury Savard, 36, a doctor in Queens, was once asked by a supervisor why she was not home cooking for her husband; Liz Kuoppala, 37, of Eveleth, Minn., worked as the only woman in her mining crew and is now the only woman on the City Council.

Ms. Kamarck, 57, the Harvard professor and a longtime adviser to Democratic candidates, said she was still incredulous about the time her colleagues on Walter F. Mondale’s presidential campaign, all men, left for lunch without inviting her — because, she later discovered, they were headed to a strip club.

Janet Napolitano, the Democratic governor of Arizona, said the world was different now, especially the political world, thanks in part to Mrs. Clinton. “I never heard anybody say she can’t be elected because she’s a woman,” said Ms. Napolitano, who supports Mr. Obama and like many of his supporters saw less sexism in the race than Mrs. Clinton’s backers. “That’s a different deal than we’ve heard before in American politics.”

But as others watched a campaign that starred two possibly transformative figures, they felt a growing conviction that the contest was unfair. Mrs. Clinton’s supporters point to a nagging series of slights: the fixation on her clothes, even her cleavage; chronic criticism that her voice is shrill; calls for her to exit the race; and most of all, the male commentators in the news media who, they argue, were consistently tougher on her than on Mr. Obama.

Some even accuse Mr. Obama of chauvinism, pointing to the time he called Mrs. Clinton “likeable enough” as evidence of dismissiveness. Nancy Wait, 55, a social worker in Columbia City, Ind., said Mr. Obama was far less qualified than Mrs. Clinton and described as condescending his recent assurances that Mrs. Clinton should stay in the race as long as she liked. Ms. Wait said she would “absolutely, positively not” vote for him come fall.

Ms. Ferraro, who clashed with the Obama campaign about whether she made a racially offensive remark, said she might not either. “I think Obama was terribly sexist,” she said.

Cynthia Ruccia, 55, a sales director for Mary Kay cosmetics in Columbus, Ohio, is organizing a group, Clinton Supporters Count Too, of mostly women in swing states who plan to campaign against Mr. Obama in November. “We, the most loyal constituency, are being told to sit down, shut up and get to the back of the bus,” she said.

Whatever barriers Mrs. Clinton may have smashed, she left some intact for future contenders to try themselves against. She seemed uncertain how to reconcile her sex with her political persona. Though she projected an aura of authority, said Robert Shrum, a Democratic consultant unaffiliated with any candidate, she variously cast herself as a victim of male domination, a warm girlfriend type and, at the end, an indefatigable warrior. She even made contradictory statements about whether sex should be a factor in the race.

Mrs. Clinton ran into trouble with some of the classic hurdles that women who are politicians face, historians and sociologists said. “It was the same conversations we’ve been having since the ’70s,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

Take the need to project toughness and warmth simultaneously. The test is unfair, many say, because men are not subjected to it as harshly and because it is nearly impossible not to err on one side. Still, some say Mrs. Clinton went overboard on toughness.

“The idea that you have to talk about eradicating Iran — that’s all, to me, the voices of people advising her,” said Patricia Schroeder, a former Colorado congresswoman and Clinton supporter who considered seeking the Democratic nomination in 1987.

And yet Mrs. Clinton may not have passed the commander in chief test. In New York Times/CBS News polls conducted this winter, voters rated Mr. Obama’s potential in that area more highly than they did Mrs. Clinton’s, though neither served in the military or has much experience directly handling international crises. Perhaps participants had many reasons for preferring Mr. Obama, but they followed the long-standing pattern of finding women less plausible military commanders than men.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, many women say with regret, did not inspire a deep or nuanced conversation between men and women, only familiar gender-war battles consisting of male gibes and her supporters’ angry responses. Mr. Obama, who sought to minimize the role of race in his candidacy, led something of a national dialogue about it, but Mrs. Clinton, who made womanhood an explicit part of her run, seemed unwilling or unable to talk candidly about gender.

Mrs. Clinton, for example, declined a New York Times request earlier this year for an interview about the gender dynamics of the race; her aides said the topic would be impossible for her to address in a frank way.

The conversation Mrs. Clinton spurred among women, however, seemed newer and more surprising. Her candidacy split Democratic women, not to mention prominent feminists. (Last week, the abortion-rights group Naral Pro-Choice America endorsed Mr. Obama, setting off protest from other women’s groups.) The cleft was largely along generational lines, with older women who had waged their own battles showing more solidarity and younger ones arguing that voting for a male candidate over a female one was itself a sign of progress and confidence.

“The most important contribution she has made is to show that women candidates are just like men candidates,” said Joan Scott, a historian at the Institute for Advanced Study. “You have to judge them not on the basis of their gender but their character.”

Over the course of the campaign, Jennifer Rogers, a film producer in Los Angeles, came to agree. She voted for Mrs. Clinton, in part because she hoped to see a female president, but she recently lost enthusiasm over what she called a lack of truthfulness on the candidate’s part. “Her problems are about who she is and not her gender,” said Ms. Rogers, 28.

Amy Rees, a 35-year-old stay-at-home mother in San Francisco, agrees — most of the time. She said she agonized between the two choices, finally voted for Mr. Obama and did not regret it. Mrs. Clinton lost on the merits, Ms. Rees said.

Still, every so often, she feels a flicker of worry about whether that is entirely so. Referring to Mr. Obama, Ms. Rees said, “He still looks more like every other president we’ve ever had than she does.”

[Jodi Kantor writes for The New York Times on cultural phenomena and politics, among other topics.

Kantor graduated from Columbia University in 1996 and briefly attended Harvard Law School before landing a job as an editor of Slate. After corresponding with New York Times columnist Frank Rich about how that paper could improve its arts coverage, she was brought on as editor of the Arts and Leisure section by Howell Raines, executive editor. It was a watershed moment in journalism, as she had begun her career online, and was only 27 at the time (her predecessor, John Rockwell, had been in his late 50's when appointed to the post).

As arts editor, Kantor worked to make the Times' arts coverage more aggressive, expanding its focus to cover the stories behind, and the social conditions surrounding, the arts. She also made coverage more contemporary, focusing on new art forms. Her role as editor occasionally controversial, however; while some charged that she hired many writers with limited experience in traditional journalism, and assigned pieces on trivial pop culture subjects, others believed she helped the paper connect with audiences. Kantor eventually stepped down from her editorship to pursue reporting once more.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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