The Nation: Hillary Struggles Against Sexism But Regularly Plays Race Card

[Hissyspit]

http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/84150/

Hillary Struggles Against Sexism But Regularly Plays Race Card
By Betsy Reed, The Nation. Posted May 2, 2008.

In the face of raw, media-driven misogyny, Clinton resorts to playing the race card and loses some women's support in the process.

In the course of Hillary Clinton's historic run for the White House -- in which she became the first woman ever to prevail in a state-level presidential primary contest -- she has been likened to Lorena Bobbitt (by Tucker Carlson); a "hellish housewife" (Leon Wieseltier); and described as "witchy," a "she-devil," "anti-male" and "a stripteaser" (Chris Matthews). Her loud and hearty laugh has been labeled "the cackle," her voice compared to "fingernails on a blackboard" and her posture said to look "like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court." As one Fox News commentator put it, "When Hillary Clinton speaks, men hear, take out the garbage." Rush Limbaugh, who has no qualms about subjecting audiences to the spectacle of his own bloated physique, asked his listeners, "Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?" Perhaps most damaging of all to her electoral prospects, very early on Clinton was deemed "unlikable." Although other factors also account for that dislike, much of the venom she elicits ("Iron my shirt," "How do we beat the bitch?") is clearly gender-specific.

Watching the brass ring of the presidency slip out of Clinton's grasp as she is buffeted by this torrent of misogyny, women -- white women, that is, and mainstream feminists especially -- have rallied to her defense. On January 8, after Barack Obama beat Clinton in the Iowa caucuses, Gloria Steinem published a New York Times op-ed titled "Women Are Never Front-Runners." "Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House," Steinem wrote. Next came Clinton's famous "misting-over moment" in New Hampshire in response to a question from a woman about the stress of modern campaigning. For that display of emotion, Clinton was derided, on the one hand, as calculating and chameleonlike -- "It could be that big girls don't cry ... but it could be that if they do they win," said Chris Matthews -- and, on the other, as lacking "strength and resolve," as her Democratic rival John Edwards put it, in a jab at the perennial Achilles' heel of women candidates. Riding a wave of female sympathy, Clinton won New Hampshire in what was dubbed an "anti-Chris Matthews vote."

Thus, feminist opposition to the sexist treatment of Hillary Clinton has morphed into support for the candidate herself. In February Robin Morgan published a reprise of her famous 1970 essay "Goodbye to All That," exhorting women to embrace Clinton as a protest against "sociopathic woman-hating." In the Los Angeles Times, Leslie Bennetts, author of The Feminine Mistake, wrote of older female voters fed up with the media's dismissive treatment of Clinton: "There are signs the slumbering beast may be waking up -- and she's not in a happy mood." A recent New York magazine article titled "The Feminist Reawakening: Hillary Clinton and the Fourth Wave" described how "it isn't just the 'hot flash cohort'...that broke for Clinton. Women in their thirties and forties -- at once discomfited and galvanized by the sexist tenor of the media coverage, by the nastiness of the watercooler talk in the office, by the realization that the once-foregone conclusion of Clinton-as-president might never come to be -- did too."

The sexist attacks on Clinton are outrageous and deplorable, but there's reason to be concerned about her becoming the vehicle for a feminist reawakening. For one thing, feminist sympathy for her has begotten an "oppression sweepstakes" in which a number of her prominent supporters, dismayed at her upstaging by Obama, have declared a contest between racial and gender bias and named sexism the greater scourge. This maneuver is not only unhelpful for coalition-building but obstructs understanding of how sexism and racism have played out in this election in different (and interrelated) ways.

Yet what is most troubling -- and what has the most serious implications for the feminist movement -- is that the Clinton campaign has used her rival's race against him. In the name of demonstrating her superior "electability," she and her surrogates have invoked the racist and sexist playbook of the right -- in which swaggering macho cowboys are entrusted to defend the country -- seeking to define Obama as too black, too foreign, too different to be President at a moment of high anxiety about national security. This subtly but distinctly racialized political strategy did not create the media feeding frenzy around the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that is now weighing Obama down, but it has positioned Clinton to take advantage of the opportunities the controversy has presented. And the Clinton campaign's use of this strategy has many non-white and non-mainstream feminists crying foul.

While 2008 was never going to be a "postracial" campaign, the early racially tinged skirmishes between the Clinton and Obama camps seemed containable. There were references by Clinton campaign officials to Obama's admission of past drug use; the tit-for-tat over Clinton's tone-deaf but historically accurate statement that Martin Luther King needed Lyndon Johnson for his civil rights dreams to be realized; and insinuations that Obama is a token, unqualified, overreaching -- that he's all pretty words, "fairy tales" and no action.

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[Maribelle]

1. Lying about Hillary appears all the Obama followers have left.

However, Hillary supporters are fully aware these outright lies, and arguments built on weak and false innuendos will get even more deceptive with more frequency on the weekend and Monday.

Truly pathetic desperation, this.

[Blondbostonian]

2. You're delusional

I can't wait for this to be over and Obama the nominee.

The person throwing the "kitchen sink" is your girl. People looking at this from a view outside the campaigns acknowledge this. Try some critical thinking.

[Maribelle]

3. Wrong. I was not even a Hillary supporter when I began to see the hate thrown at her.

And I saw it clearly, without bias.

If obama followers were so confident that obama was going to be the nominee, they would change focus and begin to make nice to Hillary and her supporters knowing full well they would not be able to win the GE without Hillary's supporters. The fact that the hate against Hillary and her supporters continues to flow so that is is now reaching the flood stage is proof enough that obama's followers are desperate. By Monday night the flood level of negativity from obama's followers will reach record heights. We know this just as surely as we know the sun will rise tomorrow.

[Blondbostonian]

4. Bullshit

In the real world, Hillary is throwing the kitchen sink. She is the one who went negative and proudly proclaimed it.

This message board has nothing to do with reality.

BTW- You have posted negative things on Obama over and over again. I'm thinking you're not going to be able to handle what's going to happen next month when Obama wins the nomination.

Be prepared for it.

[Maribelle]

8. I made a post once that I had never made a negative post against any candidate and ...

I was now taking off the gloves. And that's exactly what I did back then.

It's called pushback.

The race card Axlerod used to support Patrick in Massachusetts, that Axlerod used against Nutter in Philadelphia, and that Axlerod used against the Clintons, was one motivating factor.

Obama has made his own bed.

[journalist3072]

6. Agree wholeheartedly. As an African-American I am offended by this baseless hitpiece

Not factually based at all.

[journalist3072]

7. Agree wholeheartedly. As an African-American I am offended by this baseless hitpiece

Not factually based at all.

[FarrenH]

5. Seems pretty accurate to me

Even if not of Hillary, then of some her supporters here at DU. I'm looking at this from a foreign perspective because I'm a left-liberal white South African who reads DU to get a feel for similarly aligned American politics.

A few years back I listened to an interview with a prominent American feminist who'd spent some time in SA, travelling around and talking to people and she said something quite interesting. She said feminist activism took off fairly late to our shores because under Apartheid, white women were too comfortable to feel hard done by and black women were more put out by institutionalised racism than institutionalised sexism (for context, Apartheid made black labour so cheap almost every white middle class woman had a maid doing all the work).

It seems to me the same dynamic applies in the USA, just in a different degree. Comparing, say, being a black woman living in violence-torn neighbourhoods and having the police disproportionately harrass and detain your children to, say, being a white women earning slightly less in the same job, having to endure sexist subtexts all the time (which black women have to endure too) and living in better circumstances with better prospects for your family, its obvious that historically, black women are more hard done by than white women. Race is obviously a bigger issue than sex, just as it is in South Africa. Its not that sexism isn't an issue, just that it is, quantifiably, less of an issue from the point of view of negative impact. Black men are more hard done by than white men, and black women the most hard done by of all.

One of my favourite American feminist bloggers, over at Pandagon, recently earned herself a lot of righteous ire over the appalling use of imagery in her recently published book. The ostensibly feminist text used images of "Jane of the Jungle" swinging to the rescue in various situations with Scary Black Savages as the antagonists. The complete failure by both Amanda and her publishers to understand the stupidity of advancing feminism with racist imagery was astonishing in this day and age (in fairness to Amanda she apologised and subsequent printings will not have the images but still WTF?)

And I've seen the same blindness, the same papering over of racism and absurd claim that sexism is somehow a greater problem in American society from several ostensibly feminist Clinton supporters on this board. Obviously single-issue obsessives. Its not even a subtext. In several recent debates its been an overt theme: "All forms of oppression are equal!". Bullshit.

And Hillary is guilty of exploiting that. Come on! The Wright issue? Being disseminated by her campaign? I've watched the videos, listened to the man speak and there is nothing outrageous about him. There are one or two things he says that I disagree with. Understandable, since I'm an atheist and a skeptic. But most of the things he's being slammed for are historically accurate and 100% aligned to moral true North. He's being slammed for being a racist and in the videos I've watched he doesn't say a single goddamn racist thing. No, the real reason he discomforts some people is because he's angry, he's black and he's stating uncomfortable TRUTHS. IOW, the only reason to amplify his role in Obama's life is to win over the racist Angry White Man vote.

Sorry, but as a white male watching the whole spectacle from afar, it looks like many Clinton supporters are in denial about the cynical use of race in this election.

[livingmadness]

9. Great post

I can clearly remember feeling enraged by the comments of Steinham and Ferraro which attempted to paint race as secondary in concern to sex/gender. I was absolutely appalled, there was little engagement with the concept of intersection between these and other -isms whatsoever, though Gloria to a certain extent pulled back on that argument following her notorious piece. I pinpoint that time as the moment my support of Obama become entrenched, prior to that while still supporting Obama over Clinton, I had felt thrilled at the prospect of either in that they would both be ground-breaking presidencies symbolically.

[FarrenH]

10. A simple test

Which quality is a better predictor of socioeconomic status?

1) Sex?
2) Race?

And the answer is, of course, race. It seems some white feminists are incapable of grasping this simple truth. I'm not trying to attack feminism with that statement, just put it in its proper context for the people playing silly games with moral equivalence.

The cynicism in Clinton's campaign is extraordinary. Its being thoroughly picked apart and documented and there is absolutely no doubt about the fact that she is pandering to the center right and deliberately using right-wing talking points to attack her opponent

My interest in American politics grew exponentially over the last few years because of enormous anger with George W Bush and what he's done to the world, never mind the US. And when I see the way the Clinton campaign is run I see everything that's wrong with US politics today. The pandering to right wingers and right wing news moguls. The faux-"balance". The willingness to use bigoted smears to impugn good men. Clinton may be a competent policy wonk, but she's also quite obviously an establishment player who is going to make a lot of concessions to the special interests she is beholden to. She no doubt believes that she can jettison quite a few values and climb over the bodies of her opponents if she at least effect some of the changes near and dear to her heart. But it strikes me that Obama is fully capable of effecting the same changes and not, in the process, royally screwing his potential allies in government, precluding other necessary changes and inflaming feelings in the Middle East and around the world even further - which is exactly what Hillary is doing.