Hillary Is Hysterical As She Channels Her Inner Rove

First, The Hillster betrays the purity test that she imposed on The Hopester. When The Hopester admitted that the Dumbos had some no-so-bad ideas, The Hillster went over the top and hysterically accused her opponent of betraying the Democrats. Of course, The Hillster played the same card when she drank some of The Geezer's Kool-Aid and proclaimed her support for the hare-brained gas tax holiday this summer. The suspension of the gas tax is another of the rebate schemes peddled by The Dumbos to engage the public in a huge 3-Card Monte scam. Now, The Hillster has outdone herself. Not content to pander for the vote with another rebate, she and her minions are out to keep the voters in North Carolina at home by spreading confusion about voter eligibility. After all, it worked for Turd-Blossom (as The Dubster calls him) in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004. Now we learn that The Hillster's minions (aka Women's Voices Women Vote) pulled this scam in at least eleven (11) other states in 2008. Creating all of this confusion with official-sounding telephone calls and mailings had only one objective: keep The Hopester's voters at home on election day. If this is (fair & balanced) electoral fraud, so be it.

[x Facing South]
D.C. Nonprofit Aimed At Women Voters Behind Deceptive N.C. Robo-Calls
By Chris Kromm

Who's behind the mysterious "robo-calls" that have spread misleading voter information and sown confusion and frustration among North Carolina residents over the last week?

Facing South has confirmed the source of the calls, and the mastermind is Women's Voices Women Vote, a D.C.-based nonprofit which aims to boost voting among "unmarried women voters."

What's more, Facing South has learned that the firestorm Women's Voices has ignited in North Carolina isn't the group's first brush with controversy. Women's Voices' questionable tactics have spawned thousands of voter complaints in at least 11 states and brought harsh condemnation from some election officials for their secrecy, misleading nature and likely violations of election law.

First, a quick recap: As we covered yesterday, N.C. residents have reported receiving peculiar automated calls from someone claiming to be "Lamont Williams." The caller says that a "voter registration packet" is coming in the mail, and the recipient can sign it and mail it back to be registered to vote. No other information is provided.

The call is deceptive because the deadline has already passed for mail-in registrations for North Carolina's May 6 primary. Also, many who have received the calls — like Kevin Farmer in Durham, who made a tape of the call that is available here — are already registered. The call's suggestion that they're not registered has caused widespread confusion and drawn hundreds of complaints, including many from African-American voters who received the calls.

The calls are also probably illegal. Farmer and others have told Facing South the calls use a blocked phone number and provided no contact information — a violation of North Carolina rules regulating "robo-calls" (N.C. General Statute 163-104(b)(1)c). N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper further stated in a recent memo that the identifying information must be clear enough to allow the recipient to "complain or seek redress" — something not included in the calls.

It is also a Class I felony in North Carolina "to misrepresent the law to the public through mass mailing or any other means of communication where the intent and the effect is to intimidate or discourage potential voters from exercising their lawful right to vote."

The calls have been denounced by the N.C. State Board of Elections, as well as by voter advocacy groups including Democracy North Carolina, which called them "another in a long line of deceptive practices used in North Carolina and elsewhere that particularly target African-American voters."

Yesterday, I placed a call to the Virginia State Police, which had investigated similar suspicious robo-calls before that Virginia's primaries last February. Their investigation concluded that the source of the calls was Women's Voices Women Vote.

Facing South then contacted Women's Voices, and staffer Sarah Johnson confirmed they were doing similar robo-calls in North Carolina; they later admitted that they were the ones behind the deceptive "Lamont Williams" calls.

So who is Women's Voices Women Vote, and why are they making shadowy and legally-questionable calls that are causing North Carolina voters so many headaches?

The D.C.-based nonprofit, led by well-connected Washington operatives, claims in a press release they sent to Facing South [PDF] that the North Carolina calls are part of a 24-state effort targeted at a list of 3 million voters, especially unmarried women. The robo-calls, which never mention Women's Voices, are followed by mailings that include information on how to register to vote. They plan to mail some 276,000 packets in North Carolina alone.

But since last November, in at least 11 states nationwide, Women's Voices — sometimes working through its Voter Participation Center project — has developed a checkered reputation, drawing rebukes from leading election officials and complaints from thousands of would-be voters as a result of their secretive tactics, deceptive mailings and calls, and penchant for skirting or violating the law. For example:

* In Arizona last November, election officials were "inundated with complaints" after Women's Voices sent a mailing erroneously claiming that recipients were "required" to mail back an enclosed voter registration form. Many who received the mailing were already registered; the mailing also gave the wrong registration date. Secretary of State Jan Brewer denounced the group's tactics as "misleading and deceptive." A similar mailing in Colorado that month "[drew] fire and caused confusion," according to a state press release.

* In Wisconsin, state officials singled out Women's Voices for misleading and possibly disenfranchising voters, stating in a press release: "One group in particular — Women's Voices Women Vote, of Washington, D.C. — apparently ignored or disregarded state deadlines in seeking to register voters," sending in registrations past the January 30 deadline and causing "hundreds of Wisconsin voters who think they registered in advance" to actually not be.

* Michigan officials ended up "fielding tons of calls from confused voters" after Women's Voices did a February mailing to "380,000 unmarried women" -- including numerous deceased voters and even more that were already registered. Sarah Johnson of Women's Voices "seemed confused by the confusion," the Lansing State Journal reported.

* A 1.5 million-piece Women's Voices mailing in Florida falsely stated: "To comply with state voting requirements, please return the enclosed application." Pasco County's elections supervisor called it "disingenuous"; another said it created "a lot of unnecessary panic on behalf of the voters," reported local newspapers. Sarah Johnson of Women's Voice said, "I'm sorry to hear that."

* By March, Women's Voices was backing off the erroneous "registration is required" language, but there were still problems. For example, a mailing in Arkansas allowed that "registering to vote is voluntary," but a clerk in Washington County reported that "the majority [of forms] sent back to the county come from registered voters, causing needless labor for office employees."

Problems with the group's tactics have also been documented in Louisiana, Kentucky and Ohio.

In each state, the Women's Voices campaigns have brought the same news and the same themes, again and again: Deceptive claims and misrepresentations of the law — sometimes even breaking the law. Wildly inaccurate mailing lists, supposedly aimed at "unregistered single women," but in reality reaching many registered voters as well as families, deceased persons and pets. Tactics that confuse voters and potentially disenfranchise them.

For such a sophisticated and well-funded operation, which counts among its ranks some of the country's most seasoned political operatives, such missteps are peculiar, as is the surprise expressed by Women's Voices staff after each controversy.

In at least two states, the timing of Women's Voices' activities have raised alarm that they are attempting to influence the outcome of a primary. As we reported earlier, in Virginia, news reports surfaced the first week in February that prospective voters were receiving anonymous robo-calls telling voters that they were about to receive a voter registration packet in the mail.

The timing of the calls was astoundingly off: As the Virginia State Police confirm, the calls were made Feb. 5 and 6 — about 10 days before the then-critical Virginia primary, but more than two weeks after the deadline for registering in the state had passed (Jan. 14). The Virginia State Board of Elections was deluged with calls by confused voters — many who were already registered. When they heard the calls from Women's Voices, they feared that they really weren't.

Because of the horrible timing and their secretive nature, state officials assumed the calls and mailings were part of an identity theft scheme. When the Virginia State Police investigated, they found Women's Voices was behind them. Women's Voices was unapologetic after the controversy, merely issuing a boilerplate press release trumpeting the success of the program.

Now Women's Voices is plunging North Carolina into the same confusion. State officials tell Facing South they are still receiving calls from frustrated and confused voters, wondering why "Lamont Williams" is offering to send them a "voter registration packet" after the deadline for mail-in registration for the primaries has passed.

In correspondence with North Carolina election officials, Women's Voices founder and President Page Gardner merely said that the disruptive timing was an "unfortunate coincidence" — a strange alibi for a group with their level of resources and sophistication.

There are other questions about Women's Voices' outreach efforts. Although the group purports to be targeting "unmarried women," their calls and mailings don't fit the profile. Kevin Farmer in Durham, who first recorded the call, is a white male. Many of the recipients are African-American; Rev. Nelson Johnson, who is a married, male and African-American, reported that his house was called four times by the mysterious "Lamont Williams."

And as Farmer asks, "Why are they using a guy for the calls if the target audience is single women?"

Some have also questioned the ties between Women's Voices operatives and Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton. Gardner, for example, contributed $2,500to Clinton's HILLPAC on May 4, 2006, and in March 2005 she donated a total of $4,200 to Clinton, according to The Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org. She has not contributed to the Obama campaign, according to the database.

Women's Voices Executive Director Joe Goode worked for Bill Clinton's election campaign in 1992 as a pollster; the group's website says he was intimately involved in "development and implementation of all polling and focus groups done for the presidential primary and general election campaigns" for Clinton.

Women's Voices board member John Podesta, former Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton, donated $2,300 to Hillary Clinton on April 19, 2007, according to OpenSecrets.org. Podesta also donated $1,000 to Barack Obama in July 2004, but that was well before Obama announced his candidacy for president.

"The reports from other states are very disturbing, especially the pattern of mass confusion among targeted voters on the eve of a state's primary," Democracy North Carolina's Bob Hall tells Facing South. "These are highly skilled political operatives — something doesn't add up. Maybe it's all well-intended and explainable. At this moment, our first priority is to stop the robo-calls and prevent the chaos and potential disenfranchisement caused by this group sending 276,000 packets of registration forms into North Carolina a few days before a heated primary election. We need their immediate cooperation."

While Hall says his group has "begged" the group to stop the mailings, Women's Voices has refused to do so -- even though the mail-in voter registration deadline for the primaries passed April 11.

State election officials say they are bracing for the deluge of confused phone calls and complaints that are sure to follow.

[UPDATE: Bob Hall tells us that Women's Voices is now cooperating and trying to stop the North Carolina mailing. The mailing has apparently left the mail house but there’s still a chance it can be stopped before it gets into the mail system.]

[Chris Kromm is the Executive Director of The Institute for Southern Studies and Publisher of the Institute's journal, Southern Exposure. Reporting and research assistance was provided by Sue Sturgis, Editorial Director of the Institute's Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch.]

Copyright © 2008 The Institute for Southern Studies

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.

The Hillster's BIG Problem

We have been treated to the weepy Hillster, the feisty Hillster, the shot-drinking Hillster, long-suffering-wife Hillster, and the prevaricating Hillster ducking sniper fire in Bosnia. Now, The Hillster has joined forces with The Geezer on a gasoline tax holiday this summer. Sorry, but this approach to ever-higher gas prices is hysterical. If this is a (fair & balanced) challenge to get out of the kitchen if the heat is too intense, so be it.

The May 7, 2008, cover of the New Republic
[x Slate]
That's Hysterical: Attacks on a "hysterical" Hillary Clinton have a long literary pedigree.
By Linda Hirshman

I wonder whether the SAT still includes those questions about which object does not fit into the larger group. Here's mine:

1. Lucia di Lammermoor
2. Lady Macbeth
3. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton
4. Fraulein Bertha Pappenheim ("Anna O.")

Lucia, the heroine of Sir Walter Scott's novel The Bride of Lammermoor and, more recently, of Gaetano Donizetti's eponymous opera, is forced to marry her brother's ally rather than her true love, loses her mind, stabs the groom to death on their wedding night, and—after some impressive vocal pyrotechnics in her bloodstained wedding dress (the opera's mad scene)—dies. Lady Macbeth, of Shakespeare's play and, more recently, Giuseppe Verdi's opera, is married to an aristocratic, but not royal, husband; eggs him on to kill the king and various other superdelegates; loses her mind; and—after some impressive vocal pyrotechnics (the opera's sleepwalking scene)—dies. Bertha Pappenheim, the "Anna O." of Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer's studies on hysteria, developed paralysis, lapses of consciousness, and hallucinations, but, after a so-called talking cure with Breuer, recovered sufficiently to die (operatically in form, if not in fact) of tuberculosis.

Then there is Sen. Hillary Clinton, whose husband's antics probably would have driven Mother Theresa to homicidal ideation and who has been repudiated on an almost daily basis by people she has personally and politically supported for years. She travels from rally to rally, delivering boring, but worthy, addresses to the assembled multitudes and finds herself—against all odds, since the first recorded contest—approaching, if not securing, the nomination to run for the highest office in the United States.

And yet the media keep trying to paint her as a hysteric. Here's the cover of this fortnight's New Republic. Category mistake? From all those brilliant young Harvard guys at the New Republic?

Clearly, something else is afoot.

By playing the "hysteric" card, Clinton's attackers are following a very old script—a script that taints women with madness every time they, you know, say anything at all that might distinguish them from a doormat. The word hysterical does not mean any old homicidal lunacy. It means—and has meant since the birth of Western medicine—symptoms caused by the uterus (in Greek, hystera): a disease, as Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, called it, of women:

When the uterus has reached the liver and the hypochondrium and causes suffocation, the whites of the eyes roll up, the woman becomes cold, and even sometimes livid. She grinds her teeth; saliva drips from her mouth, and she appears to be having an epileptic fit.

So that's where the New Republic got its cover art …

Ancient doctors speculated that uteri drove women crazy because the thirsty organs didn't get watered enough by having sex with men. Although ordinary anatomy eventually dispensed with that theory, the notion that there was some medical basis for female hysteria just would not stay dead. Famed scholar and literary critic Elaine Showalter wrote in her book Hystories that "for over a century the political context of hysteria has been feminism. Hysteria became a hot topic in medical circles in the 1880s and 1890s when feminism, the New Woman, and a crisis in gender were also hot topics. … [D]octors viewed hysterical women as closet feminists who had to be reprogrammed into traditional roles."

Ever since, you could be certain that whenever the old hysteria talk surfaces, the writer is relying, usually quite consciously, on the old association between uppity women and insanity. Culture critic and Slate contributor Stanley Crouch, who recently invoked the H-word when describing Clinton's television persona in his Daily News column ("Clinton seems by turns icy, contrived, hysterical, sentimental, bitter, manipulative and self-righteous [italics mine]"), certainly knows what he is doing. As Salon described him in its series Brilliant Careers, the volatile and charismatic Crouch is "[a]rmed with an elephant's memory and a passionate knowledge of and engagement with art and history." Nor, probably, would anyone contend that Slate's own Christopher Hitchens didn't know the queen's English when he described Clinton's story about Bosnia as "flagrant, hysterical, repetitive, pathological lying." Flagrant, yes; repetitive, yes; and maybe pathological. But "hysterical"?

This charge of insanity—fits, pathology—against any woman who aspires to transcend prior female achievements is the go-to weapon for people who would keep women down. And this move goes way beyond the candidacy of any particular individual. In a recent Nation column, Tom Hayden (the '60s guy, now in his 60s) deployed a full arsenal of insults, comparing Clinton to Lady Macbeth and then going on to liken her appearance to a "screech" on the blackboard.

Hayden, apparently fearing some criticism, hid behind the voice of his never-before-heard third wife, Barbara, a "meditative practitioner of everything peaceful and organic," never previously given to offering hostile political pronouncements. But Clinton's appearance on TV apparently makes Tom's wife "scream." Poor Tom Hayden, still looking for a sufficiently submissive female. Everyone remembers Jane Fonda, Hayden's second wife. But probably few Nation readers remember the first Mrs. Hayden, one Casey Hayden. In 1965, right around the time she divorced Tom, Casey Hayden wrote the screed that helped launch the women's liberation movement, Sex and Caste. Her ex-husband's most recent unleashing of the hysteria rocket shows how little distance we have covered since Casey Hayden picked up her pen.

Can Tom Hayden be suggesting that hysteria is contagious—that even peaceful Barbara becomes somehow unhinged when exposed to the hysterical female presidential candidate? Or maybe it's Tom himself who is the real constant here, seeing women as hysterical wherever they appear.

[Linda Redlick Hirshman is a lawyer, feminist, and the author of The Woman's Guide to Law School and a retired Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at Brandeis University. She holds a law degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in philosophy. She has written for a variety of periodicals, including Glamour, Tikkun, Ms., the ABA Journal, and the Boston Globe. Hirshman is the author of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World.]

Copyright © 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.