Is Misogyny More Powerful Than Racism?

Hmmm.... 2-Buck Huck makes a joke about someone pointing a gun at The Hopester in response to offstage noise at a gathering of the National Rifle Association. Huck gets a yuck out of that crowd. The Hillster pitches her campaign at hard-working, white Americans. Now, Ellen Goodman plays the gender card in her analysis of what the Democrat campaign of 2008 has become. Which epithet is tougher to take? Bitch or Nigger? Pick your poison. The Geezer's down-low campaigners (Who studied at the knee — and other low joints — of Turd Blossom.), with their push-polls and other dirty tricks, will have a grand time with the B-word, the N-word, or low-information signals no matter which Donkey emerges as the 2008 nominee. We get the leaders we deserve and that has proved to be the case with The Dubster. Since most voters are not smarter than a 5th-grader, stupid trumps gender or skin color. The Geezer has it wrong, too. Instead of proclaiming himself "older than dirt," he needs to trumpet (more aggressively) that he is "dumber than dirt." Of the three still standing, The Geezer has the least mental firepower; he graduated 5th from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy. After eight years of The Dubster, we deserve more stupidity, not less. If this is (fair & balanced) political despair, so be it.

[x Boston Fishwrap]
The Democratic Food Fight
By Ellen Goodman

Is there anyone who still remembers the folksy winter tableau? Eight Democratic candidates against the picturesque backdrop of Iowa and New Hampshire. It was a feel-good photo-op of diversity. The Democratic Party was black and white and Hispanic, male and female and proud. Our party, its leaders said, looks like America.

As for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? Yes, there were the predictable magazine cover stories asking whether America was "ready" for an African-American or a woman. But these were not long-shot candidates, a favorite son or daughter running to prove a point.

Obama presented himself as the American sum of his roots. He wasn't "the African-American candidate" but the post-racial, post-divisive orator whose presence and eloquence promised to turn that page. For her part, Clinton seemed to leap over the old gender barriers simply by being the front-runner. For once, a woman was the experienced candidate, the tough guy in the race.

Now what? The sense of freshness, the pleasure of breaking barriers, has been nearly exhausted. We've gone from party lovefest to food fight, from having our eyes on the prize to feeling like partisans at a prizefight.

Look at any blog where opinion-hurling — racist! sexist! — has become a bitter sport. The pollsters have sliced and diced us into demographic tidbits of race, gender, class, and age, producing self-fulfilling prophecies of splinter. Now national polls say a quarter of all Clinton supporters won't vote for Obama. And the feeling is mutual.

This is what America looks like?

As one supporter told Clinton in an e-mail, "It's not over until the lady in the pantsuit says it is." But the campaign obits are written and waiting for release. So, for many women, the feel-good tableau is tainted by a 5 o'clock shadow of bad feelings. A historic campaign has opened fissures along historic fault lines.

The deepest is between women and our culture. The campaign was rife with reminders of how women charging forward are pushed backward. Clinton supporters aren't the only women who have rediscovered a word rarely spoken outside of women's studies class: misogyny. How else to explain the focus on Clinton's cackle and cleavage, the T-shirt that read "If Only Hillary Had Married OJ Instead"?

All season, cable news anchors displayed boorish contempt for a woman Chris Matthews called "Nurse Ratched." In offices, sly jokes are forwarded by e-mail, and women who do not laugh are accused of being "too sensitive." Women who protest are accused of playing the gender card.

There are fractures as well, long dormant, between African-American and white women. Sisters and sisterhood. Who defines a double bind? Who limits that identity?

And the generation gap? Has it become an unbridgeable chasm? Many feminist elders see Obama as just another man leapfrogging over a qualified woman to the corner office. Many post-feminist daughters describe the former first lady as "old politics" and define progress as voting for the person, not the gender.

As for class divisions? Many urban professional women whose lives followed the same arc judge Clinton as if she were running for Perfect Woman while down-the-economic-ladder women identified more with this Wellesley graduate for president.

And as if that weren't enough, at the last minute there was a wedge driven into the reliably Democratic pro-choice community. In a gratuitous slap, NARAL Pro-Choice America preemptively endorsed Obama, prompting one among thousands of angry pro-choice women to write: "Et tu, Brute?"

I am sure there will be endless post-mortems and PhD theses written on this primary. How did race and gender tip the balance? Was this a loss for women or one woman? Did Clinton blaze the path or leave an ugly footprint for the next woman?

Time and the specter of John McCain may patch these crevices. But we have watched the political become (too) personal. We have watched the first optimistic blush of diversity get bloodied with tribalism.

Both Clinton and Obama brought new voters and energy into the compelling narrative of this campaign. But how hard will it be to rebuild the Humpty Dumpty of diversity into the portrait of what America looks like — at its best?

[Ellen Goodman has been with The Boston Globe since 1967. Goodman graduated from Radcliffe College, cum laude, in 1963. She began her career at Newsweek, where she worked as a researcher at a time when very few women became writers. In 1965, she landed a job as a reporter for the Detroit Free Press and two years later, she returned to Boston, where she began writing her column for The Boston Globe. Her column went into syndication in 1976, and it currently is found on the op-ed pages in over 440 newspapers in the U.S.

In 1980, Goodman received the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary. Among other awards she has won are the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award and the Hubert H. Humphrey Civil Rights Award. The National Women's Political Caucus gave her the President's Award, and the Women's Research and Education Institute presented her with their American Woman Award. Goodman spent 1973-1974 at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow. She has also worked as a radio and television commentator and taught journalism at Stanford University as the first Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Professional Journalism.

Goodman wrote the book Turning Points, about the effect of the changing roles of women on the family, and she is co-author with Patricia O’Brien of I Know Just What You Mean: The Power of Friendship in Women’s Lives. In addition, five collections of her columns have been published: Close to Home, At Large, Keeping in Touch, Making Sense, and Value Judgments.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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