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05/27/2008 Two things that have particularly disturbed me in this campaign are the assertions by some in the Clinton camp that women who do not support Hillary are somehow betraying their gender, and that supporters of Obama are naïve and cult-like. So in order to address these assertions I am going to write this week on my evolution from a person willing (albeit with reservations) to support a Clinton candidacy, to one who completely rejects it. Even though I have written about this before, I hope to present a much more comprehensive explanation of my thought processes. From what I have heard and read, I believe my thoughts reflect those of many other Obama supporters. The essay will be written in two parts. In the first installment, I will describe why I decided not to support Senator Clinton. In the second I will describe why I am supporting Senator Obama. First let me say that I am a member of the generation of women that is enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton's run for the presidency. I, too, would love to see a woman become president and succeed in that job. And at first, I considered joining with the over-60 set and supporting her too. Early on I joined with others in expressing my displeasure at some of the sexist words used to describe her by a handful of men in the media, and the ridiculous attacks on her clothes and her laugh. It was tempting to get behind her and help her win just to shut them up. As for Hillary's competence, I have always thought she was qualified to be president. I even think she would outperform her husband, who failed in many ways in spite of the good economy he presided over. But to me her personal and family negatives, and the way she has run her campaign, outweighed the positives she might bring, especially when her proposals weren't that different from those of her rival. Hillary and Barack, after all, have similar policy positions. The two areas in which Hillary claims superiority to Barack are in her health care plan and her foreign policy experience. Granted, Hillary's health care plan – if it could be implemented - is one that would achieve universal care more directly than Obama's, as it contains a mandate. To some voters, this is significant. However neither Obama's nor Hillary's plans will be implemented exactly as they are. Both would have to compromise in some way, so each of their proposals is really only a beginning. In addition, Hillary may have more trouble implementing her plan because of her lack of skills to work with those who do not agree with her. This is the main reason why her plan failed in the nineties. Barack, on the other hand, is someone who not only has the right skills, but has put forth a plan that his opponents will be more willing to consider. As for foreign policy experience, Hillary has a good point. She has been in the Senate longer than Barack, and she was a witness to the foreign policy of her husband's administration. Yet Hillary also voted to authorize the Iraq War, and to most progressives like myself, this is a real deal breaker. This is why most of us supported Howard Dean four years ago, and were disappointed with the choice of John Kerry. Dean opposed the war and was not afraid to speak up. Barack did the same, but it isn't so much that Barack opposed the war from the beginning that turns me away from Hillary. What makes Hillary's war vote so unacceptable to me, besides the fact that it has resulted in what some call the biggest foreign policy disaster in our history, was the probability that she cast that vote for political reasons. She knew she would be running for president, and she believed her biggest hurdle was convincing the American people she could be a tough commander in chief. This kind of politically motivated voting, when that vote has cost this nation so much, makes it difficult for me to trust her. There were plenty of reasons to support Hillary Clinton in spite of her vote, however. I forgave John Kerry his vote in favor of the war and I could have forgiven her. There is no doubt that she is extremely talented, both as a legislator and a candidate. She has a mastery of the issues and is highly disciplined. I can understand why many women find Hillary's candidacy so compelling, and I know many are voting for her at least in part because they want to see a woman president. I personally wouldn't vote for someone just because of their gender or race or skin color, but I understand the passion with which many women view the candidacy of Hillary Clinton as the first viable female candidate. With so many women behind her, Hillary started the campaign with a huge advantage. Even the media was at first fascinated by her candidacy, some rolling out the red carpet for the "inevitable" candidate. Hillary explained to reporters and voters that the contest would be over by February 5th, and that she was determined to be the nominee by that time. The media saw her as the frontrunner, at least until Iowa. It was after Iowa that everything changed for the media and for me, and I began to turn away from Hillary. The first thing that happened was the insertion of the gender card into the race immediately after the Iowa primary, when Gloria Steinem asserted that Hillary's battle was more difficult because of her gender than Obama's was because of his race. Steinem wrote that "gender is probably the most restricting force in American life" and soon her op-ed was circulating all over the internet, from one email inbox to another. This began to galvanize women, and Hillary took full advantage of it, showing her vulnerable, victim side prior to the New Hampshire primary, and bringing women out in droves to vote for her. My reaction to the op-ed was mixed. Yes, most women my age will attest to the restrictions we have encountered as women, but I did not see Hillary as particularly restricted. Hillary had every possible advantage in running for the presidency, certainly more advantages than most of the men she competed against. She was wealthy and well-connected, the wife of a former president. She had lived most of her adult life in mansions, first the Governor's mansion in Arkansas, and then the White House. She had been privileged to work in the Senate for eight years prior to her candidacy for president, forming political alliances with fellow legislators and lobbyists. She had corporate support and money, and an army of high ranking Democrats on her side. The gender argument didn't make sense to me. I was also offended by Gloria Steinem's implication that gender was more of a disadvantage than race. I suspect African Americans would disagree, noting that white women in America have not been legally held in slavery, nor bought and sold, nor ripped from their families and native lands. To be an African American in this country has historically been, and in many cases continues to be more restricting than being a woman, even though I agree with my sisters that patriarchy through the ages has been extremely detrimental to women's well being and to their equality. If we are willing to be honest, however, we would have to say that there are categories of people who would have an even more impossible task than a white woman in trying to become president. I'm thinking specifically of Muslims, atheists, and gay and lesbian citizens. And recently we have seen how some white voters simply refuse to vote for a candidate because his skin is too dark. (This is one reason why Geraldine Ferraro's comment - that Obama wouldn't be winning if he wasn't black – was so outrageous.) My second negative reaction came when Bill Clinton came charging in to help Hillary in Nevada and South Carolina. As usual, Bill became the center of attention, claiming he had seen voter intimidation in Nevada, and dismissing Obama's win in South Carolina by reminding everyone that another black man, Jesse Jackson, had won there twice but never gotten much further. Clinton claimed he was simply stating a fact (a typical Clinton excuse) and that no one should interpret it is a racially charged statement, but I see no other way to interpret it. He could have referenced many white candidates who won in South Carolina but lost the nomination, such as John Edwards in 2004, but he chose a black candidate, and he chose that candidate for a reason. While Gloria Steinem had played the gender card, it was Bill Clinton who first played the race card. Bill Clinton's appearance and questionable statement brought back a lot of memories that eight years of the disastrous Bush presidency had almost erased. Almost – but not quite. Bill's behavior reinforced some of the nagging reservations I had harbored about Hillary from the start. I wanted to support a woman, but I didn't want to see Bill Clinton back in the White House. I also didn't want to see another family dynasty dominating the presidency. The Bushes held the White House for 12 years, and those had mostly been disastrous for the country. The Clinton years had brought economic prosperity but, along with it, far too much drama. Bill Clinton tarnished the White House with his sexual misconduct and lies to the American people, and I say this as someone who voted for him twice and defended him when he was being attacked by the Republicans and ultimately impeached. You may say "What does this have to do with Hillary?" My reply would be that she knew, as did we, long before he took the oath of office, that he had been unfaithful to her. We heard all the rumors, we saw the two of them admit as much on "60 Minutes." We voted for him anyway, believing the Clinton marital problems were over, thinking it didn't matter. But it did matter. It cost us a great deal, not the least of which was the Congress and the administration being distracted from the biggest threat this country has faced in decades: Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. In addition, Bill and Hillary Clinton have been telling us for over a decade now that when we vote for one of them we are getting "two for the price of one." We are to believe that they make decisions together and that the experience she now claims as First Lady was experience in governing rather than in traditional First Lady pursuits like beautifying America or promoting literacy. We are to see them as a governing team. Their partnership is part of their strength. And yet, their partnership in its private realm has always been problematic, so much so that their marital troubles spilled over and infected the entire country.(Yes, I know the Republicans were on the hunt, but had Bill Clinton behaved himself they could never have succeeded.) In as much as Hillary knew what her husband was capable of, and stayed with him even after he betrayed her and the country with his sexual promiscuity and blatant dishonesty, she must bear some of the responsibility for anything Bill Clinton might do in the future in a second Clinton presidency. And while forgiving is a good thing, forgetting is foolish. The last thing this country needs right now, when so much must be done to repair it both internally and in the eyes of the world, is a philandering, dishonest First Spouse to distract the president and the people from the work at hand. We have not talked about this in the primary. Barack Obama is too much of a gentleman to bring it up. The media is reluctant to go there, and the Republicans are currently holding their fire because they want to help Hillary succeed in the primary so they can destroy her in the Fall election. But the reality is that if Hillary is the nominee the Republicans will bring it up, and the country will be dragged through the drama all over again. I simply didn't want to go there, nor can we as a country afford to. I don't want the couple's marital problems to once again become the country's problems, nor for Hillary's campaign to be about resurrecting the image of the Clintons, giving them a do-over so to speak, to remove the memory of the last two sordid years of his presidency. My third negative reaction came after Super Tuesday when Clinton not only did not sew up the nomination, she actually trailed Obama in delegates, and began the narrative that some states were more important than others. The states she won - big states, with larger populations - should be weighted more heavily in the minds of the superdelegates, her campaign insisted. Obama's big wins in caucus states should simply be discounted, she said, because caucuses are "undemocratic." As the weeks went on and Obama won state after state, Hillary's attempts to challenge the "unfairness" of the rules escalated. As she saw her inevitability slipping away, she rolled out more and more arguments about why Barack should not be considered the frontrunner. She seemed totally incapable of playing by the rules she had agreed to at the start of the campaign, and of accepting responsibility for the weakness of her own efforts and her lack of preparation for a candidate such as Obama. She began to act like a poor loser, going from the inevitable nominee to a woman who was grasping for any rationale she could present to the superdelegates to choose her instead of Obama. A fourth negative reaction came with her campaign's bold announcement of its "kitchen sink strategy," wherein she would go negative in as many ways as she could. If she couldn't win by highlighting her own strengths, she would win by using Rovian smear tactics against her opponent. It was in this time period that she told the press that she and McCain brought a "lifetime of experience" to the race, while Obama brought "a speech he gave in 2002." It was in this time period that she took full advantage of Obama's biggest probems – his "bitter" statement and the Jeremiah Wright tapes. Not content to let the press chew him up and spit him out, the Clinton campaign piled on and made these even bigger issues. Seeing Hillary Clinton nearly embrace her Republican opponent, McCain, while trashing her fellow party member, was more than unseemly. It was almost unprecedented in primary politics. A fifth negative reaction came when Hillary told everyone that, while on a trip to Bosnia as First Lady, she and her daughter encountered sniper fire and had to run to their car. When this turned out to be a totally manufactured scenario, Hillary simply said she had been tired and had "misspoken," leaving me to wonder how she could handle those famous emergencies she might encounter at 3 a.m., were she to become president. It also showed me how easy it was for Hillary Clinton to lie, and reminded me of lies during the first Clinton presidency. A sixth negative reaction came recently, when the math made it impossible for Hillary to catch Obama in delegate votes and she began to insist that the votes from the disqualified states of Florida and Michigan be counted. Where once she signed a pledge not to campaign in either state, and agreed that the votes would not count because both states had broken the DLC rules, she now demanded that these voters not be "disenfranchised." She shamelessly compared the Democratic Party's rules in not seating the two states to the travesty that happened in Florida during the 2000 election. Furthermore, she began to float the idea that it was not just the superdelegates who could support her, but that delegates pledged to Obama could also do so. She attacked the Democratic Party, saying that if they had only adopted the rules of the Republican Party, she would be the nominee. And then there was the statement by Senator Clinton that no one should expect her to leave the race before June as her husband didn't win the nomination until June, 1992, and RFK was assassinated in June, 1968. When media and Obama supporters expressed outrage that she would reference the assassination of RFK, especially when Obama has had so many death threats against him, and when she was obviously staying in the race in case something unexpected happened, she simply said she was stating a fact and she meant no harm. I believe she meant no harm (though I think it reveals something interesting about her psyche), but the statement was inappropriate and unbecoming of a future president. We have lived with an inelegant speaker, a buffoon who always manages to put his foot in his mouth, for nearly eight years. We don't need another president who states "facts" but always manages to stir up controversies by bringing up those facts. Finally, there is the recent emphasis on "sexism" as the real force that is defeating Hillary Clinton. Geraldine Ferraro set off the fire storm in this talking point, but others, including Hillary herself, have fueled it. I'm not sure what they hope to achieve with this strategy other than further angering their supporters and ensuring that they will not vote for Obama in the Fall. If this is what happens, and disgruntled Clinton supporters are the reason Obama loses the election, Hillary will be destroying whatever positive legacy the Clintons still possess. I want to say a few words here about sexism and attacks by the media. Hillary Clinton is a smart woman. She had to know that a woman running for the presidency would encounter a measure of sexism and misogyny. She can't have expected the media and the citizenry to give her or any female candidate a free pass. However, the attacks on Hillary are not any tougher than the attacks on male presidential candidates, including Howard Dean, John Kerry and now Barack Obama. You can find disrespectful treatment of candidates during every political campaign. Hillary is not the first to be attacked unfairly. John Kennedy was attacked for his religious affiliation in 1960. In the Republican primary this year, Mitt Romney was also attacked for his religious beliefs. Before he left the race there were countless stories and blog posts ridiculing Mormon beliefs, sometimes distorting them, and laughing at the famous "Mormon underwear." Was that fair? And who can forget the Swift Boat ads calling John Kerry's military heroism into question, and the purple band-aids, meant to poke fun at Kerry's purple hearts, worn by delegates at the 2004 Republican convention? Or the media's attacks on Howard Dean for the supposed "scream," with its implications that Dean was a bit unhinged? Or the outrage over Obama's African American pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and the Senator's 20 year membership in Trinity United Church of Christ? Hillary inserted herself into this attack on Obama by saying that if she had been a member of that church, after she heard some of Rev. Wright's inflammatory comments it would no longer have been her church. Yet this is easy to say from a distance. Hillary is a white woman, who as far as I know has no close association with one church and one pastor. How can she possibly know what she would do if she were a young African American woman who was embraced by the members of her neighborhood church? Clearly this was a political statement on Hillary's part, meant to tarnish Obama. And what about Obama's comments about people being bitter and clinging to religion and guns? Isn't this comment a reflection of what everyone in the Democratic Party, including the Clintons, have acknowledged about a certain segment of voters? In fact, haven't we Democrats complained for years about the Republican strategy of playing on people's irrational fears that the Democrats will ban the Bible or take away their guns? Yet the media and Hillary's campaign attacked Obama mercilessly for these comments. While some media attacks on Hillary have obviously been gender related, Obama has been attacked because of his race and religion. In a political campaign, unfortunately, candidates are attacked not just for what they propose, but for who they are (Mormon, female, black, war hero) and even for rumors of who they are. Internet rumors have spread around the country falsely calling Obama a Muslim, a foreigner, and a supporter of terrorists like Hamas. Surely, Hillary hasn't had to face these kinds of attacks. Hillary even fueled the lie that Obama is a Muslim by offering a qualified answer when questioned on "60 Minutes" about whether or not that allegation was true. "No," she said to Steve Kroft, "as far as I know." And something that no one has mentioned in response to the charge of "sexism" towards Hillary is that many people in the media say negative things about Hillary not because she is a woman but because she is a Clinton. The Clintons are not popular among large segments of the media and Hillary is deliberately confusing attacks on her as a person and politician with attacks on her as a woman. It's much easier on the ego and much more likely to galvanize support among women if you can convince them that the media hates you because of your gender rather than because of your behavior or your personality or your spouse. In fact, many women are so passionate about electing a woman president that they ignore Hillary's flaws as well as her unfair attacks on her opponent. They blame the media for Hillary's failures and criticize women like me who have cared about women's issues all of our lives, believing we are betraying our gender if we do not support Hillary. Nothing in the woman's movement of the seventies suggested that the world should be divided between men and women, with women always supporting women and men always supporting men. The whole point of equality is that every citizen is trusted to make their own decisions in life, and that includes their choice of presidential candidates. A great many Clinton supporters, particularly women of my generation, are furious with Barack Obama and his supporters. I don't understand this. I really don't, unless it is simply because Obama's attractiveness and charisma gave him what was seen as an unfair advantage over the talented but rather uncharismatic woman who felt she deserved the nomination. Most women my age, who now support Barack Obama, used to be great fans of the Clintons, voted for Bill twice, verbally defended him to our friends during the impeachment, and couldn't understand the vitriol with which the right wing attacked the Clintons. We were loyal and steadfast Clinton supporters, even when they let us down. Furthermore, I have seen little on the part of Barack Obama that would cause such anger. He has not stood by and let Hillary say anything she wants about him without fighting back, but I don't think Clinton supporters can say he has been sexist or unfair. As Bill Clinton has said many times, if you're going to be a candidate, you have to be able to take the heat. Instead, I think Clinton's supporters are taking their lead from her. As she becomes desperate and directs her rage at Obama for daring to take the nomination from her (even though it was never hers), she causes her followers to feel cheated. Hillary's behavior is that of a woman who believes being elected president is her destiny and no one should be allowed to get in her way. Her female followers in turn act as if Hillary is their last hope of electing a female president, that if she fails no woman will ever succeed. And because of that, I believe some Hillary supporters are behind her not so much because they applaud some of the things she has said and done in this campaign, but in spite of them. I recall voting that way for Bill Clinton. There were things about Bill that were troubling, not least of which was his philandering, but voting for a fourth straight Republican administration was unthinkable. So I voted for a candidate in spite of his weaknesses. I won't do that again, and fortunately I won't have to. Ultimately, in spite of Hillary's gender and her strengths, I decided not to support her for the reasons outlined above. While I would love to see a woman president, Hillary is not that woman. Instead, I am supporting Barack Obama, not because I have drunk the "Kool-Aid," not because Obama is a man, and certainly not because I am opposed to a woman becoming president. In fact it saddens me that the first time I have an opportunity to vote for a woman candidate for president, she is simply not the best candidate. I support Barack Obama because, at this time in our nation's history when we face so many challenges, I am convinced he would make a better president than Hillary Clinton. As a female citizen of this country, that is my right. Indeed, that is my duty. -Ellen Terich All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com |