Hating Hilary
Submitted by jen on May 23, 2008 - 3:15pm.
2008 Election | Hillary Clinton | Media | misogyny
by Andrew Stephen
UK's New Statesman US correspondentGloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind has been shamelessly peddled by the US media, which - sooner rather than later, I fear - will have to account for their sins
History, I suspect, will look back on the past six months as an example of America going through one of its collectively deranged episodes - rather like Prohibition from 1920-33, or McCarthyism some 30 years later. This time it is gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind. It has been shamelessly peddled by the US media, which - sooner rather than later, I fear - will have to account for their sins. The chief victim has been Senator Hillary Clinton, but the ramifications could be hugely harmful for America and the world.
I am no particular fan of Clinton. Nor, I think, would friends and colleagues accuse me of being racist. But it is quite inconceivable that any leading male presidential candidate would be treated with such hatred and scorn as Clinton has been. What other senator and serious White House contender would be likened by National Public Radio's political editor, Ken Rudin, to the demoniac, knife-wielding stalker played by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction? Or described as "a fucking whore" by Randi Rhodes, one of the foremost personalities of the supposedly liberal Air America? Would Carl Bernstein (of Woodward and Bernstein fame) ever publicly declare his disgust about a male candidate's "thick ankles"? Could anybody have envisaged that a website set up specifically to oppose any other candidate would be called Citizens United Not Timid? (We do not need an acronym for that.)
I will come to the reasons why I fear such unabashed misogyny in the US media could lead, ironically, to dreadful racial unrest. "All men are created equal," Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed in 1776. That equality, though, was not extended to women, who did not even get the vote until 1920, two years after (some) British women. The US still has less gender equality in politics than Britain, too. Just 16 of America's 100 US senators are women and the ratio in the House (71 out of 435) is much the same. It is nonetheless pointless to argue whether sexism or racism is the greater evil: America has a peculiarly wicked record of racist subjugation, which has resulted in its racism being driven deep underground. It festers there, ready to explode again in some unpredictable way.
~ snip ~
Evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, American men like to delude themselves that they are the most macho in the world. It is simply unthinkable, therefore, for most of them to face the prospect of having a woman as their leader. The massed ranks of male pundits gleefully pronounced that Clinton had lost the battle with Obama immediately after the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, despite past precedents that strong second-place candidates (like Ronald Reagan in his first, ultimately unsuccessful campaign in 1976; like Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson and Jerry Brown) continue their campaigns until the end of the primary season and, in most cases, all the way to the party convention.
None of these male candidates had a premature political obituary written in the way that Hillary Clinton's has been, or was subjected to such righteous outrage over refusing to quiesce and withdraw obediently from what, in this case, has always been a knife-edge race. Nor was any of them anything like as close to his rivals as Clinton now is to Obama.
~ snip ~
Rarely is she depicted as an intellectually formidable politician in her own right (is that what terrifies oafs like Matthews and Carlson?). Rather, she is the junior member of "Billary", the derisive nickname coined by the media for herself and her husband. Obama's opponent is thus not one of the two US senators for New York, but some amorphous creature called "the Clintons", an aphorism that stands for amorality and sleaze. Open season has been declared on Bill Clinton, who is now reviled by the media every bit as much as Nixon ever was.
Here we come to the crunch. Hillary Clinton (along with her husband) is being universally depicted as a loathsome racist and negative campaigner, not so much because of anything she has said or done, but because the overwhelmingly pro-Obama media - consciously or unconsciously - are following the agenda of Senator Barack Obama and his chief strategist, David Axelrod, to tear to pieces the first serious female US presidential candidate in history.
"What's particularly saddening," says Paul Krugman, professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton and a rare dissenting voice from the left as a columnist in the New York Times, "is the way many Obama supporters seem happy with the . . . way pundits and some news organisations treat any action or statement by the Clintons, no matter how innocuous, as proof of evil intent." Despite widespread reporting to the contrary, Krugman believes that most of the "venom" in the campaign "is coming from supporters of Obama".
But Obama himself prepared the ground by making the first gratuitous personal attack of the campaign during the televised Congressional Black Caucus Institute debate in South Carolina on 21 January, although virtually every follower of the media coverage now assumes that it was Clinton who started the negative attacks. Following routine political sniping from her about supposedly admiring comments Obama had made about Ronald Reagan, Obama suddenly turned on Clinton and stared intimidatingly at her. "While I was working in the streets," he scolded her, ". . . you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board of Wal-Mart." Then, cleverly linking her inextricably in the public consciousness with her husband, he added: "I can't tell who I'm running against sometimes."
One of his female staff then distributed a confidential memo to carefully selected journalists which alleged that a vaguely clumsy comment Hillary Clinton had made about Martin Luther King ("Dr King's dream began to be realised when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964") and a reference her husband had made in passing to Nelson Mandela ("I've been blessed in my life to know some of the greatest figures of the last hundred years . . . but if I had to pick one person whom I know would never blink, who would never turn back, who would make great decisions . . . I would pick Hillary") were deliberate racial taunts.
Another female staffer, Candice Tolliver - whose job it is to promote Obama to African Americans - then weighed in publicly, claiming that "a cross-section of voters are alarmed at the tenor of some of these statements" and saying: "Folks are beginning to wonder: Is this an isolated situation, or is there something bigger behind all of this?" That was game, set and match: the Clintons were racists, an impression sealed when Bill Clinton later compared Obama's victory in South Carolina to those of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 (even though Jackson himself, an Obama supporter, subsequently declared Clinton's remarks to be entirely inoffensive).
The pincer movement, in fact, could have come straight from a textbook on how to wreck a woman's presi dential election campaign: smear her whole persona first, and then link her with her angry, red-faced husband. The public Obama, characteristically, pronounced himself "unhappy" with the vilification carried out so methodically by his staff, but it worked like magic: Hillary Clinton's approval ratings among African Americans plummeted from above 80 per cent to barely 7 per cent in a matter of days, and have hovered there since.
I suspect that, as a result, she will never be able entirely to shake off the "racist" tag. "African-American super-delegates [who are supporting Clinton] are being targeted, harassed and threatened," says one of them, Representative Emanuel Cleaver. "This is the politics of the 1950s." Obama and Axelrod have achieved their objectives: to belittle Hillary Clinton and to manoeuvre the ever-pliant media into depicting every political criticism she makes against Obama as racist in intent.
The danger is that, in their headlong rush to stop the first major female candidate (aka "Hildebeast" and "Hitlery") from becoming president, the punditocracy may have landed the Democrats with perhaps the least qualified presidential nominee ever. But that creeping realisation has probably come too late, and many of the Democratic super-delegates now fear there would be widespread outrage and increased racial tension if they thwart the first biracial presidential hopeful in US history.
But will Obama live up to the hype? That, I fear, may not happen: he is a deeply flawed candidate. Rampant sexism may have triumphed only to make way for racism to rear its gruesome head in America yet again. By election day on 4 November, I suspect, the US media and their would-be-macho commentators may have a lot of soul-searching to do.
I think they will continue to trash and slash her once she's the nominee. And once she's the president, I predict it will be corporate press and the so-called progressive blogosphere that will do everything they can to make her presidency a failure. It seems like Repubs have grown some kind of respect for her, and I also have heard of several Repub women who say they will vote for her, just because they see what a fighter she is, who will not give up and will not give in. Not your typically whimpy Dem, that's for sure! She's got STARCH!
Once in a while you get shown the light, In the strangest of places if you look at it right.
he is a deeply flawed candidate
NSS
This reminds me of the run up to the war.
Anyone who spoke out against it was vilified.
And look where we are today......letting the media pick our candidate.
To heck with them
If O bamboozles his way to the Nom ......and if McCain picks Charlie Crist as his VP, I'll happily vote for them.
And please, no one bring up the Supreme Court. Both Roberts and Alito were confirmed when the Dems were in the majority in Congress....AND......Obama thought Roberts was GREAT! He admired him so much, and was all set to vote for him until a staffer clued him in on how bad it would look politically.
So who knows what RW yahoo, a President Obama would nominate...cuz he does LUV those Republicans. And a Dem Congress would never go against a Dem President's choice.
At least with McCain, they might stand up to him.
Enough!
"I do not see how you can pretend two million people did not vote.", Kevin Spacey 5/21/08
Obama called Axelrod before giving his Dumb War speech to float the idea first?
As in the speech he is basing his entire campaign and his superior judgement on?
I read this the other day. Sorry link free right now but I have it on file and if anyone doubts it I can produce that linky when I have more time!
He has been planing his run for Prez, since he wrote his first book.
Speaking of which...
Who write two autobiographies before the age of 45?
Huh?
"I do not see how you can pretend two million people did not vote.", Kevin Spacey 5/21/08
I have to save mine until all parties involved have been deceased so as to avoid lawsuits. It's why I take so many vitamins.
Humor disclaimer applies
New York Times- a long many paged article but it's in there. Here's part of the passage. It was after "Salzman" called O and asked him to speak at the anti war rally....
But before Mr. Obama called her back, he dialed up some advice.
With his possible run for the United States Senate, he wanted to speak with Mr. Axelrod and others about the ramifications of broadcasting his reservations about a war the public was fast getting behind.
An antiwar speech would play to his Chicago liberal base, and could help him in what was expected to be a hotly contested primary, they told him, but it also could hurt him in the general election.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/us/politics/11chicago.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
sounding "mean spirited" -- I think my new name for him will be David Astro-Rod! (Master of the Astroturfers per Businessweek)
Much.
He was a 2 bit Chicago poll at the time.
Not a national figure
It was NOT a "major political speech".....though in the way of O and his followers, his past becomes larger than life.
"I do not see how you can pretend two million people did not vote.", Kevin Spacey 5/21/08
OMG, a small time politician with bigger aspirations contacted his political adviser before giving a speech as large as his minor position could take him.
Or, we could just focus on why Hillary supported this damn war in the first place and gave another Democrat the opening he needed. Change one vote and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
in this discussion are coming from your keyboard alone.
Just thought I'd point that out. :)
Most of us are far beyond being surprised, shocked or OMG-level stunned by anything we read or hear from the Obama campaign at this point. There has been no earthshaking drama to emerge from them that throws anyone off their seat.
Same old. Same old.
Which is fine. Just don't try to sell it to us as "New & Improved" and we might proffer more respect. Nobody wants to feel they're being bamboozled.
At some point in your life, I guess you'll begin to realize the guy is ACTUALLY an empty suit. He can make NO decisions without someone telling him; Michelle, Axelrod, Rezco, Lieberman, etc. etc. And you want this 57 state "wizard" running the country?
"New York Times- a long many paged article but it's in there. Here's part of the passage. It was after "Salzman" called O and asked him to speak at the anti war rally....
But before Mr. Obama called her back, he dialed up some advice.
With his possible run for the United States Senate, he wanted to speak with Mr. Axelrod and others about the ramifications of broadcasting his reservations about a war the public was fast getting behind.
An antiwar speech would play to his Chicago liberal base, and could help him in what was expected to be a hotly contested primary, they told him, but it also could hurt him in the general election."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/us/politics/11chicago.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
We're electing the President of the United States, not some g.d. prom king.
at an anti war rally in Chicago mid day. No major media. I think one local writer and a photographer were present. It was not at all a--
MAJOR SPEECH
and he was not at all a--
MAJOR NATIONAL POLITICAL FIGURE
He was a local guy with aspirations of going further who merely was looking out for his image - consulting with his image maker. As I'm sure he did when he removed the same speech from his website as a possible deterrent for his national campaign. The same concerns existed.
So no.... there is not one single thing "unusual" about that. At all. It's extremely common political behavior. It's exactly what every single Washington politico does every single day.
The "unusual" thing is only that this politician spends most of his breath insisting he is the direct opposite of those "old school" insiders and is running an entire campaign based on his breaking those molds. Based on this new kind of politics. This new cataclysmic "change" thing... the kind 'you can believe in'.
The same with corporate connections and lobbyists and etc etc. More mold breaking promises... None of it is shocking or even out of the norm. We are incredibly accustomed to these practices in our so called representatives in government... even those who claim to be outside the 'system' or above it.
So no shock... it simply does not correspond to his impassioned claims of his being somehow dramatically set apart from those norms. And flat out rejecting them....
I call it the Walk/Walk Talk/Talk test. He is scoring poorly on that one.
But I know you already knew that. :)
Big oil is married to endless war
Endless war is married to bush / cheney
and around it goes.
We need representatives who have no interests or holdings in Big Oil companies. Is that not possible in a country of 300 million people to find a handful that are not intimately involved in the big friggin oil bidness!!??
today that Feinstein said that if BO is the nominee, he should absolutely choose Hillary as his VP. Why are some of her supporters even verbalizing this? It's a terrible idea and I doubt that she would consider it at all.
is here for anyone who hasn't read it.
New York Times- a long many paged article but it's in there. Here's part of the passage. It was after "Salzman" called O and asked him to speak at the anti war rally....
But before Mr. Obama called her back, he dialed up some advice.
With his possible run for the United States Senate, he wanted to speak with Mr. Axelrod and others about the ramifications of broadcasting his reservations about a war the public was fast getting behind.
An antiwar speech would play to his Chicago liberal base, and could help him in what was expected to be a hotly contested primary, they told him, but it also could hurt him in the general election.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/us/politics/11chicago.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
We're electing the President of the United States, not some g.d. prom king.
Thanks, Jen.
Yesterday I saw a clip of HC with a female Indy driver who has endorsed her. Then the reporter was asking the driver if she thought Hillary might be a jinx, in view of what happened to the horse in the Kentucky Derby. The driver handled that very well, by more more less ignoring it, and pointing out that Hillary has all the skills to make split-second decisions well, just as a good driver must have.
Of course the hatred voiced toward the quote re Robert Kennedy's assasination is amazing--being ginned up big time by the O! people, I think.
I think the O! people are getting more nervous that something will break over O's head as the race goes on--which is why they want it to end quick. and we have to remember how they didn't let him do many interviews, nothing off the cuff, for the longest time. I just don't think he is that bright, or has that good an understanding of the effects of what he says. He will get buried in debates with McCain.
No way do I think Hillary should accept a VP slot. She'll end up doing all the work for O! (if by some miracle he should win) and getting all the criticism, while he takes credit for her successes. If O! is the nominee, I'm going to look seriously at Barr. Or maybe Nader.
That said, and since the race isn't over yet, I hope the people on TM who talked about getting autographed posters of the picture of Hillary in the rain ready to sell to raise money can do it. I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
The General gets it right.
Competence--What a concept!
about the "jinx of Hillary," and the KY Derby filly (which, as we discussed before on CCN, was the subject of an awful, anti-Hillary editorial in the Chicago Tribune) that have made me swear off of nearly all media outlets except a few blogs and articles found here and there online.
Do O!'s people notice that Hillary doesn't come out screaming hysterically about questions like that from the idiotic reporter at the Indy? She doesn't, although she COULD and IMHO SHOULD, but she doesn't...she soldiers on through the dreck and the not-even-thinly-veiled threats and visions of tragedy presented towards her. It is sickening, and I truly believe that this race card playing over and over and over is starting to backfire on O!. Don't they feel foolish now that RFK Jr. himself says it doesn't mean a thing!!!! No, they probably don't...they've moved onto the next HRC statement they can parse to mean evil intent against the great and powerful O!
Andrew Stephen says,
'Would Carl Bernstein (of Woodward and Bernstein fame) ever publicly declare his disgust about a male candidate's "thick ankles"?'
I don't know about Bernstein's ankles, but from pictures I've seen of him, the rest of him looks pretty 'thick'.
We have ended up with only one dimensional, mythological, paper candidates - the both of them.... well, the three of them if you count the Bill part of "Billary"...
Somewhere in the not too distant past, while I was napping apparently, the media in this country became the omnipotent shaping force that grew into such proportions-- they were capable of painting public opinion in the most indelible and profound way possible. With no regard for reality.
And it worked. Time and time again. It brought us the brush-cuttin' good ole Texas boy ya wanna drink a beer with- George Bush. The Uniter who wanted to 'reach across' that damned aisle and deliver us as one big, happy country. That same Act brought us the cowardly, purple band aided, flip flopping, north eastern liberal, long winded, wind surfing John Kerry as comedic relief. Yuk Yuk Yuk.
It brought us the evildoer Saddam Hussein who was poised to nuke us out existence, the evildoer Hugo Chavez who seeks something so very harmful for America that it cannot (yet) even be articulated but has something to do with Castro and Strong Armed Dictators (a work in progress) --and the King of evildoers... Ahmadinejad who, like Saddam, seeks nuclear obliteration of the US and throw in Israel for good evil-inflationary measure.
And now it has delivered us some new domestic cartoon characters equally unrelated to reality.
It has brought us an "angry red faced, finger wagging racist temperamental" former President-- formerly loved by many, formerly viewed as a civil rights leader and formerly given credit for much of the peace and prosperity of the (ick) 90's. That's all been deleted now and the new personage to inhabit Bill Clinton's body is 180 degrees different. He has been "possessed" by a new and uber-evil spirit, bent upon destruction and deceit. Hmmm. That sounds a lot like that other president we've been living under the past 8 yrs. But no matter. These archetypes can indeed be interchangeable, and the Axelrod's of the world have precedence to thank, that George Bush and Dick Cheney blazed the trail of evil for them in such a rich way-- they can now be withdrawing from that same bank of 'awful' with clockwork regularity.
It has also delivered us a brand new tornadic Hillary Clinton (thick ankled that she is) who rivals only the Wicked Witch of the West in her "scorched earth policy" desires to destroy everyone and everything in her ruthless pursuit of her own ambition and power. Again, this is the same "attribute account" we've been pulling from in our defining of Bush / Cheney / Rove... so the verbiage, and all the colorful adjectives that go with it, are familiar and well understood by our ears. It's like shorthand. She is "rovian" she is "bush in a pantsuit". We get it fast-- without any requisite thought or analysis.
These are the two new characters that we used to know as the Clintons. The redefining work unfortunately has been carved so deeply and repeated by on air personalities so incessantly that it will likely be the one that replaces the two real people behind the cartoon and the one that endures as their "tragic" legacy ...
Next we have character number 3 in the drama-- Barack Obama; the classical champion, the protagonist-- the "transformative uniter" of the "higher mind" who is intent upon helping the people, from the bottom up, ground up, grassrootsy "agent of change". He was a "Community Organizer" (in case you hadn't heard)... The one who is determined to inject his "new kind of politics" into Washington that does not at all resemble that Old Icky Clintonian politics (see above).
He too is a fictional character not unlike the Gods of Mythology we all grew up with. Or the guy in the red cape. He is above reproach and has only noble intent and noble desires for his country and the "folks" in it. He uses "we" and thinks not of his own needs but only of the "others" and promises to relieve their sufferings. He exists on a higher spiritual plane than other characters in the play and floats above them on stage-- on a wire and harness device, but cleverly disguised.
These 3 characters are all stellar dramatic devices for something as grand as Shakespearean level tragedy. They're the archetypical, classic 'tools' required to tell a big story - a story of a dramatic rise and tragic fall. A sort of parable. The actors were not contracted for their roles but assigned them by what we call "powers that be". AKA- the Producers. Who are also the writers. Blame them if you don't like the story... ;)
But no one has 'consulted' with reality during this campaign. Reality has been viewed more like an annoying telemarketer who won't hang up and keeps inserting blah blah in your face when you're clearly not interested in what they're selling. Reality has no place at this table in the 2008 elections theatre season.
It's all about the design of the myth and the constant and brutal reinforcement of that myth. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Ad nauseum. You can never repeat to the point of repetitive in the Mythic Election Season. Because if you should let up... Reality threatens to show up and disrupt the flow of fiction and the suspension of your disbelief. So masses and masses of choral singers have to be rounded up to -- Repeat Repeat Repeat.
So grab your popcorn if you like a good epic drama!
There is no Yes We Can Hopey Changey Obama who'll be riding into Washington 'above it all' to save us from the old school, evil, Clintonian style politicians. There is no evil racist Clinton couple, bent on power, out to destroy the party and the country for their own ambitions that must meet the heroic good hearted Barack Obama on a bloody battlefield. But it makes a good tale.
And they are interesting fictional characters -- and we've already heavily invested in their story line so -- sit back and let's see what happens in Act III, the long awaited denouement.
When it's all over you can go home... they won't be coming out on stage as themselves to take the traditional deep bow. There will be no applause or cries of "encore". There will be the media - the Producers - backstage, brewing up their next new narrative of Mt Olympian proportions to keep us all glued to the tubes. And there will be the low static noise of millions of heads being scratched simultaneously.... a massive audience pondering the unthinkable.... if it is indeed possible that they might have let themselves be--
Fooled again?
if the Obamazombs don't get me first - if I don't show up, can I get a refund?
We're electing the President of the United States, not some g.d. prom king.
is not charged in currency.
You pay in blood. "You" as a nation that is. We are in endless war cycle. The Producers are intent on maintaining that status as many of them are the direct offspring of the big War Contractors (see GE/MSNBC). And thusly stand to profit and survive by keeping the War(s) in play.
So it's kinda hard to get it back. Maybe some sort of national transfusion program could be initiated?
Wes Clark 2012?
the day after the November election. I can see it now..."are you going to run for President again in 2012...?" Off to Iowa we go!!!!
for a gloomy, snowy/rainy Saturday afternoon... Fitting. :(
Once in a while you get shown the light, In the strangest of places if you look at it right.
With a wee bit of Othello and a pinch of Richard III tossed in just to make it more stunning.
Add the blogosphere, and you get Greek Chorus, raising their hands in the air, and collectively adding an "Ai-EEEeeee!" here and again.
You're onto something that would make terrific live theatre. I just wish it wasn't shaping our lives.
wake up with a hate hangover and groggily wonder what happened? I personally wonder if pundits like Olbermann will have a job when the dust clears. What are these anti-Hillaryites going to do and say if she's the nominee? Will these liberal BOers continue to trash her, helping to put JM in the WH?
I know cases of staunch Republican women who are terribly upset by the apparent misogyny that flays the airwaves 24 hours a day. And ethnic tensions are being whipped up as the Clintons are ridiculously accused of racism, whole geographical sections are labeled as intolerant and backward, and females are smugly advised by males to stop throwing the china, put on a dress and an apron, and get back to the kitchen. Regardless of the outcome, the nation is in for some rocky times.