Wild Cards
June 2, 2008
(This were my thoughts in response to a post on the effect of sexism or lack thereof on the Clinton campaign over at HuffPo, reblogged from elsewhere.)
At the end of the day, there are two types of Hillary voters: solid Democrats who didn’t like Obama for his lack of electability, slightly-too-far-left politics or rebellious spirit, and older, weary women who see Hillary as their champion. So if you want to talk about why she’s not getting nominated, it’s largely because half of her fans are voting for the entirely wrong reason. Yeah she’s a polarizing figure, one who brings out the worst sexist tendencies in our country. But the sheer number of people whose vote for or against Clinton depended on their feelings about America’s foremost post-sweetheart is the biggest issue. Like it or not, she was basically an actress running on the popularity of her movies.
Her support among women feels analogous to black people who vote for Jesse Jackson, born out of a deep-seeded (but, yeah, reasonably accurate) feeling that politics has failed them and that a symbolic vote for one of their own kind is more important than actually participating in the electoral process. Everyone else was essentially voting for the Democratic version of Mitt Romney, a very middle-of-the-road candidate who was acceptable to the mainstream party voter, especially in contrast to the other choices. That should be good news for Obama. He might scare off uneducated white working voters (uhh) but if legions of women were putting their frustration with the patriarchy ahead of their political values in the primary, our boy Barry might have a much better shot in some of the tougher races.
This year’s election has been a pretty intriguing status check for America’s prejudices. The Democratic primary more or less asked the question “are we more sexist than racist?” We’re not getting a straight answer to that query as long as the woman in question is Hillary Clinton. We’re heading towards a presidential election which will basically be a referendum on the question “are we still terrified of black people?” (even if we’ll hardly get a straight answer when Fox News insists on calling the black person in question Barack Hussein Obama).
I think we’re much better off as a country asking that question when we choose our leader than asking “do we still resent strong women?”
