CLASS

Enough About Us. What About Them?

Melanie Burford / Dallas Morning News-Corbis

Identity Intervention: The women who voted last Tuesday may have been saying less about themselves as women as they were telling us about themselves as voters

By Dahlia Lithwick | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Mar 17, 2008

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"I'm a Rorschach test," Hillary Clinton said of herself, describing the ways Americans projected their own hopes, anxieties and fears about women onto her lightly padded shoulders. Having spent the past two months—dear God, has it been only two months?—bonking each other over the heads with our gender differences, race differences, income and education disparities, Clinton and Obama supporters may not have learned all that much about their candidates. But we sure do know a lot about ourselves.

Democratic women now recognize all of the invisible fault lines between first-wave, second-wave and third-wave feminists, the post-feminists, the "shoulder pad" feminists, the Obama Girl feminists, the angry feminists and the medicated ones. Having turned the entire primary season into a protracted exercise in group therapy, we have explored, deconstructed and shared our collective way into a fog of gender enlightenment. Gloria Steinem has scolded us, Robin Morgan has disowned us, and "Saturday Night Live" has called us the B word. It took the women in Ohio and Texas and Vermont and Rhode Island to remind us that group therapy isn't a luxury everyone can afford.

As has been the case throughout the primary season, women broke big for Clinton again last Tuesday. In Ohio particularly, Clinton took two out of every three white women, and that split may have had less to do with internecine debates between soccer moms and tae kwon do moms than with working-class moms fretting about health insurance for the twins.

In Ohio, where a third of voters are working class, 58 percent of Democrats said the economy was the most important issue to them, and they broke for Clinton. In both Texas and Ohio, Clinton took voters with no more than high-school diplomas by margins of six in 10. In Ohio she took workers earning less than $50,000 a year. None of which means Clinton is necessarily better for those who worry about the economy. It does suggest that those folks care more about their wallets than her pantsuits.

For months we've been watching a primary campaign in which voters—like adolescents on a first date—cannot seem to stop talking and thinking about themselves. The novelty of all these Firsts led us to line up behind the candidates that look most like us: blacks and young people continue to vote for Obama. Women and folks over 50 continue to support Clinton. But just as relationships tend to transition from the early fizz when all you can see is yourself reflected in your partner's eyes, so too is this contest changing into a more sober scrutiny of the guy across the table. And for every woman who experiences sexist attacks against Clinton as echoes of the obnoxious boss who asked her to make coffee in 1986, there must be tens of women who still bring him that coffee every day, then head out for the night shift.

Perhaps the 2008 primary season will settle, once and for all, this question of whether identity politics is a luxury item or a necessity. And if it's truly a luxury item, maybe like the mink stole, it's on its way out. Perhaps at the end of all these months of peering in the mirror, we can stop looking for the candidate who embodies every slight and insult we've ever encountered, and contemplate which of them is better suited to govern. To be sure, the policy differences between Obama and Clinton may be slight. But there are differences of temperament and character that have nothing whatsoever to do with race or gender.

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Posted By: J.Richter @ 05/28/2008 4:23:46 PM

To those who keep infering hte democratic party did not want Clinton to win
- Look up until Feb 4. Hillary was ahead 270 - 180 in superdelegates. THIS IS THE PARTY!
- Bill and Hill are a democratic powerhouse with more access to donors than anyone in the party (Proof. Bill earned almost $100m in a few years after presidency).
- Democrats like to win. You saw the handwringing after Kerry 04 and even before. They know it wil be hard to elect a black man. They expected the system to take care of him like it did Sharpton, Jackson b4 him.
- Even the black vote was initially Clinton property. BO had 38% support as late as Nov 2007.
- And Clinton had more media surrogates than BO (inclding SNL, George Stephanopoulos - a former staffer and almost all ABC and yes even Keith at the beginning. BO started to get good coverage slowly including from Mika whose Dad was an advisor to BO and later even lost it there when Joe went for Hill till this day).
- Even the issue of Michigan and Florida is an example. The RNC made their rule and stuck to it. THe DNC kept waffling on theirs when Hillary was getting behind to leave wiggle room to install what they thought was a stronger candidate. If Hillary had won on Feb 4 or even leading today (and BO had Michigan and Florida) trust me no one would even go back to those issues.

So what's left. Someone suddenly woke up and decided to support this mixed guy with a muslim middle name because they like to lose. Let's not let the emotion of the day cloud our thinking!. Now why he won, that's a different story. But Hillary lost as much as he won due to her own competencies and deficiencies.
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Posted By: loriw @ 05/27/2008 8:52:36 PM

You want us to believe that Hillary can stand up to Big Oil but she couldn't even stand up to her own husband and tell him to keep the Big Willie in his pants and get back to running the country. Hillary couldn't manage her own marriage and now she wants us to put them both back in the White House. The
First Dysfunctional Family - Senator Clinton and Former President Bill Clinton.
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Posted By: ToadTreeHugger @ 05/27/2008 7:24:02 PM

Hillary can win in November, but the media is doing all it can to not only tank her campaign but her career now as well.

In contrast, Obama, who has outspent Hillary by 3:1 even 4:1, has lost five of the last seven primaries, lost all the battleground states, and punted the swing states. In the general election, the GOP will not only target Obama's Achilles heel, but will amplify it ten times. They already have enough ammo with Wright, but when you add Rezko into the mix, you have serious damage.

On the issues, Hillary is the only one standing up to Big Oil. She is the only one with an excellent environmental record. She has the best health care plan. She has stood up for human rights around the world.

In contrast, Obama voted for Cheney's energy bill. He voted for the Class Action Reform Bill of 2005 which makes it difficult for families to bring class-action suits against corporate polluters. He personally crafted a bill to not only water down regulations of radioactive leaks but to prevent local and state authorities from regulating nuclear power plants. He's in bed with the nuclear industry and fighting for its executives instead of the families that have been harmed by its negligence.

What's appalling is that Obama claims that he is above special interests, when in fact he receives more money from special interests than any other candidate. He is preying on youth and their idealism and he is able to get away with it because the media has been in the tank for him since day one, and we now live in an age of American Idol and MySpace.

Obama told large crowds of students how Cheney's energy bill was bad for America, but never once mentioned the fact that he voted for it, and the media never questioned it. He has boasted about authoring bills that he never he even worked on. He was caught in his double-talk with NAFTA and Iraq troop withdrawals. He made a pledge to use public financing a year ago, accusing the current political system of being corrupt, but now has his own political machine that is two, three, four times more powerful than anything we've seen before. He has financial sheisters like Penny Pritzker running his finance committee, and Exelon executives bundling hundreds of thousands of dollars for him.

There has been a double-standard in the media where everything that Clinton has said has been deconstructed and reconstructed to fit an ugly image. If she had a shadowy relationship with Rezko and a corrupt Chicago political machine, or had a 20 year relationship with Wright, or was making back room deals with the Teamsters or nuclear power executives, or was donating large sums to superdelegates to sway their votes, and was out all the while stumping about how corrupt Washington politics is, how bad special interests are, and how a change needed to be brought about, she would have been toast on day one.