Sherry Chandler

A boob grabbing a [virtual] boob

Well, the world probably doesn’t need me to jump into the middle of this controversy, nor will it probably notice that I’ve done so. (And that may be a good thing.)

But I wanted to share these thoughts from Susie at Suburban Guerrilla. Her take is one that deserves widespread consideration:

Now, out of the larger context, this is about sexism specifically directed at Hillary Clinton. But I don�t believe that�s the primary dynamic at work in this picture.

The fact is, campaigns are run pretty much like fraternity parties. They�re all about heady testosterone, and male dominance, and above all, attitude and action over principle and actual results. I just can�t stress how much this kind of white male frathouse bullshit is valued, even exalted in the typical campaign. (One campaign manager told me how he crawled into the ductwork of an opponent�s campaign office and left a rotting fish. This was in the Sun Belt, and it didn�t take long for the stench to drive people out. This guy was so proud of this story, and many like it – but he�d never yet won a campaign. But see, that�s not the point! And these silly women just don�t get it!)

You want to know why there are so few female campaign managers at the national level? Because most women have a very low threshold for this particular flavor of male bullshit – attitude coupled with non-performance.

Obviously, the Obama campaign was not filled with non-performers but the point here is larger than the Obama campaign. It’s about how politics and business is done in this country. From the Delaware Liberal in the comments:

This frat house shit can go to any bank in the country where there are tons of young males running around with too much money.

Also in the comments, an exchange between Historiann:

Thanks, Susie, for your interesting insider perspective. You don�t say, but I�m curious as to whether or not the candidate is a woman makes a difference in the tone of the campaign.

and Susie:

It doesn�t seem to matter whether the candidate is a woman, unless it�s a low-level (municipal commissioner, county council, etc.) type race. Otherwise, the candidate is much more of a passenger than a driver.

I don�t think it will change until women are running and staffing the campaigns. I talked about this with Ellen Malcolm from EMILY�s List, and she agreed. She said that�s why they do their own campaign training. I�ve talked to other political operatives about their experiences, and they say they�d love to work for a female-dominated consulting firm. (Yes, even some of the men.)

Really, I do think this frat-boy culture is one of the main reasons Democrats lose races they should win.

This whole post and the comment exchange in response to it deserve your attention.

Some others who have commented here and here, and here.

Where it all started.

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Updated: Anglachel, as usual, is good on why this incident is important:

But this isn’t a campaign and we are talking serious, high-stakes politics. Hillary Rodham Clinton is not an electoral adversary, nor is she just another senator. By virtue of her appointment as Secretary of State, she is the representative of the United States to the world. She embodies American policy and reliability to other sovereign nations. To allow this image of her being treated with disrespect by a close associate of the president, someone who appears to be on track as a member of the administration, says two things to the nations and diplomats she will engage:

1. Go ahead, piss on her. We do.
2. We don’t respect you enough to send someone we respect to treat with you.

My morning reading: women who run for president

Avedon says Katie Couric asked Hillary Clinton a creepy question: “Why do you think Sarah Palin has an action figure and you have a nutcracker?”

But Lance says the question is more telling than creepy.

I do think the question was a waste of time, under the circumstances. There was no way Clinton was going to answer it seriously. She was there to talk up Barack Obama’s performance in the debate and if there’s one thing Hillary Clinton is good at it’s staying on point.

But under other circumstances it could be an interesting and important question and I’d like to hear Clinton answer it. Couric might want to ask it again a decade or two down the road when Clinton’s coming to the end of her political career and the focus of an interview can be Hillary herself as a person and a personality and a personage exiting the public stage and entering the history books, when her feelings matter as much as her actions.

Because the way I took the question it was a playful way of asking why does one strong, intelligent, ambitious woman get treated by the Media and half the public as a castrating shrew and another embraced as warm, safe, lovable, and cuddly?

Put another way, why is Hillary Clinton hated and vilified and feared for doing what other politicians do as a matter of course?

…

The nutcracker is ugly but ridiculous and ultimately without power or threat. The action figure—the doll—isn’t as vicious, but it’s far from flattering because it too is ultimately without power. Both the nutcracker and the doll reduce the women in question to toys and jokes.

I urge you to read all of this post. It’s astute, and I’d like to hug him for this part, especially given that my husband likes to talk fondly about my own “Hillary cackle:”

So Couric might as well have saved the second question for another day.

Still, I’m glad she asked it.

It gave Clinton an opportunity to do something she does even better than stay on point.

Laugh.

But then I like her laugh.

We know what other people think of it. And we know what that means.

But after I read Lance’s posts, in one of those odd little serendipity things that happen from time to time, I decided to go have a look at some Powell’s book reviews that have been sitting in my in-box for well over a year waiting for me to get time to read them. And the one I happened to open was Christine Stansell’s review, originially in The New Republic, of Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President (in 1884). It begins like this:

Women’s biographies are the pre-eminent form of popular women’s history, and the only nonfiction books that female readers will dependably buy. In the past forty years, the genre has flourished, nourished by an unending curiosity about women’s lives that feminism generates. Famous men’s wives and sisters turn out to have amazing stories of their own (Vera Nabokov, Alice James, Zelda Fitzgerald). Sagas of sisters, spun from strands of rivalry and adoration, are mesmerizing (the Peabodys, the Mitfords). Writers, their struggles for art and life in equal measure inevitably complicated by their sex, are an endless store of plots (Virginia Woolf, Margaret Fuller, Colette). Family relations, marriage, motherhood, isolation, sex, social opprobrium, anger, friendship, and creativity: all are explored in the study of such women’s lives.

The same cannot be said about political power. Biographies of Jane Addams and Eleanor Roosevelt illuminate the achievements of women at the edges of formal politics. Of those who wielded institutional power, only Eleanor Rathbone, one of Britain’s first female members of Parliament, has merited a significant book. True, there are any number of biographies of queens and aristocrats who practiced politics in oblique and unusual ways; and true, there are many studies of women in protest politics, beginning with the great feminists of the nineteenth century (Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Stanton, Angelina and Sarah Grimké) and running through the civil rights movement (Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer). But it is undeniable that most biographies of women concern love, creativity, and the search for self, rather than ambition and the scramble for the nomination.

The obvious reason is that women have been barred from politics for so long that there are few figures of importance to observe and to study. Yet the absence of biography redoubles the difficulties in understanding the lives of those women who have gone into politics. From a distance, they seem a little dull. It is easier to haul them back into the familiar plots of modern womanhood — thwarted ambition, struggle for self-esteem — than to imagine what they mostly do and mostly care about: winning elections, lining up votes, passing bills, making policy.

This long and informative review also deserves to be read in full. Lockwood seems, in some ways, quite Clintonesque (and indeed it is interesting to see the way this essay addresses the Clinton candidacy, in that it was written before the primary and all the sexism and misogyny used against Clinton):

A story of Lockwood’s disappointments and sorrows winds through the book, but Norgren gives it short shrift. It wasn’t the woman’s nature to dwell on sadness. She struggled for money most of her life, saw the small fortune in fees she won in the Cherokee case dissolve in legal action with the clients, and lost both her children. At eighty-four, she also lost her home — then, as now, a premier measure of dignity for an aging woman. Yet she remained nonplussed: involved in world affairs, interested in younger friends, indifferent to the handicap of old age, and very proud of herself. At eighty-six she regaled reporters with the story of her feats. She died shortly after, in 1916.

Norgren has the great discernment to see Lockwood’s life as large and anticipatory rather than eccentric and half-realized.

The review also provides some insight into the split between African-American men and the suffragists:

The prewar movement, comprising men and women whose feminism was born of deep anti-slavery commitments, had gone into abeyance during the Civil War. It revived in the mid-1860s, only to split bitterly over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which guaranteed full citizenship and voting rights to the freedmen but not to the freedwomen, or to any other women. One group of suffragists endorsed the Republican Party’s judgment that the freedmen’s situation was so dire that it required immediate action, and that an attempt to institute universal suffrage would doom the entire enterprise. The other group, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, saw universal manhood suffrage as the Republicans’ capitulation to exigency and a betrayal of democratic principle. They denounced their old Republican allies and demanded a Sixteenth Amendment to enfranchise women.

And it also reminds me that I wanted to draw your attention to this radio diary at All Things Considered of Victoria Claflin Woodhull, the first woman to run for president (in 1872), of whom Stansell says:

The charismatic, scandalous Victoria Woodhull, the bad girl of women’s suffrage, had entered the presidential race in 1872, running on the imaginary ticket of the People’s Party (sprung unbidden from the mind of Woodhull). But she staged her bid as an outré performance piece, a one-woman show.

and also Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to run for president (in 1972).

I’ll close this post with Stansell’s closing paragraph, written in April, 2007:

In 1914, when Lockwood was eighty-four years old and still lacked the right to vote, she spoke to reporters about American women’s political prospects. She was typically optimistic and even-handed. Women would be elected to the Senate and the House, she predicted with confidence. (In fact, Jeannette Rankin’s election to the House from Wyoming was only three years away.) As for president, that, too, was within reach. “If [a woman] demonstrates that she is fitted to be president she will some day occupy the White House. It will be entirely on her own merits, however. No movement can place her there simply because she is a woman.” Is Hillary Clinton “fitted to be president”? The question will be answered over the next year, as she will be scrutinized for “her own merits.” But whatever voters decide, we owe her, and Nancy Pelosi, and the other female pols across the spectrum gratitude for devising a new plot. The biographies of these women will be composed of the workaday, disenchanted materials of political lives — perseverance, competence, canniness, and, yes, a facility for the quick grab — that Belva Lockwood cultivated and prized.

Where will nutcrackers fit in? Time will tell, I guess.

Second-Place Citizens

Susan Faludi nails it in the NYTimes:

Today, the United States ranks 22nd among the 30 developed nations in its proportion of female federal lawmakers. The proportion of female state legislators has been stuck in the low 20 percent range for 15 years; women�s share of state elective executive offices has fallen consistently since 2000, and is now under 25 percent. The American political pipeline is 86 percent male.

Women�s real annual earnings have fallen for the last four years. Progress in narrowing the wage gap between men and women has slowed considerably since 1990, yet last year the Supreme Court established onerous restrictions on women�s ability to sue for pay discrimination. The salaries of women in managerial positions are on average lower today than in 1983.

Women�s numbers are stalled or falling in fields ranging from executive management to journalism, from computer science to the directing of major motion pictures. The 20 top occupations of women last year were the same as half a century ago: secretary, nurse, grade school teacher, sales clerk, maid, hairdresser, cook and so on. And just as Congress cut funds in 1929 for maternity education, it recently slashed child support enforcement by 20 percent, a decision expected to leave billions of dollars owed to mothers and their children uncollected.

Again, male politicians and pundits indulge in outbursts of �new masculinist� misogyny (witness Mrs. Clinton�s campaign coverage). Again, the news media showcase young women�s �feminist � new style� pseudo-liberation � the flapper is now a girl-gone-wild. Again, many daughters of a feminist generation seem pleased to proclaim themselves so �beyond gender� that they don�t need a female president.

And Garry Trudeau nails it at Gocomics.com

Today is, of course, the anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment.
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Added: from Eric Boehlert:

What’s so startling in watching the coverage of the Clinton convention-speech story has been the complete ignorance displayed about how previous Democratic conventions have dealt with runners-up like Clinton. It’s either complete ignorance or the media’s strong desire to painstakingly avoid any historical context, which, in turn, allows the press to mislead news consumers into thinking Clinton’s appearance (as well as the gracious invitation extended by Obama) represents something unique and unusual. Something newsworthy.

Based on previous conventions, if a candidate had accumulated as many delegates and votes as Clinton did during the primaries and then did not have her name placed into nomination, that would represent a radical departure from the convention norm.

…

Even after all these months, I still don’t completely understand why Clinton’s essentially centrist campaign for the White House ginned up so much open contempt from the press corps, which has felt completely comfortable addressing her in an openly derogatory and condescending manner. The issue of her convention involvement simply allowed the press to whack her around like a pi�ata one more time, regardless of the facts.

Couldn’t be because she’s a woman?

If you read the whole thing, especially the last three bullet points, you might be led to believe that.

All I know is what I read in the papers

But I’ll start with Glenn Greenwald’s blog:

Chris Dodd went to the Senate floor last night to speak against the FISA bill and delivered one of the most compelling and inspired speeches by a prominent politician that I’ve heard in quite some time. He tied the core corruption of the FISA bill’s telecom amnesty and warranltess eavesdropping provisions into the whole litany of the Bush administration’s lawless and destructive behavior over the last seven years — from torture and rendition to the abuse of secrecy instruments and Guantanamo mock trials — with a focus on the way in which telecom amnesty further demolishes the rule of law among our political class.

That speech signals that the small minority in the Senate devoted to stopping this bill have made this a priority. Small, vocal, passionate minorities in the Senate — backed up by vocal, passionate and engaged citizens — can do much to prevent a bill’s quick and painless passage. Dodd’s speech can be seen and/or read here. I highly recommend it, and if I had one wish this week, it would be that any journalist who will ever write or utter the words “FISA,” “telecom immunity” or “Terrorism” would be forced to watch this speech from start to finish without distraction.

…

Beyond the FISA bill’s evisceration of the rule of law, the Fourth Amendment and surveillance safeguards, what has always been so striking with this controversy has been how transparently sleazy and corrupt it reveals the Congress to be. Right out in the open, telecoms have just led Congressional supporters of telecom immunity around like little puppets. It’s just amazing — though extremely common — that while negotiations over the bill occurred in total secrecy, with civil liberties groups and the public at large being completely excluded, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer “negotiated” directly with the telecoms over how the telecoms’ amnesty bill should be written.

Telecoms broke our surveillance laws, and then our Democratic Congressional leaders ran to them to take instructions on how to write the special law to protect them, and they didn’t even really bother to hide that.

White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail :

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency�s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.�s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.

Over the past five days, the officials said, the White House successfully put pressure on the E.P.A. to eliminate large sections of the original analysis that supported regulation, including a finding that tough regulation of motor vehicle emissions could produce $500 billion to $2 trillion in economic benefits over the next 32 years

Ideology-Based Hiring at Justice Broke Laws, Investigation Finds

Senior Justice Department officials broke civil service laws by rejecting scores of young applicants who had links to Democrats or liberal organizations, according to a biting report issued yesterday.
…
Former Justice Department officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations said the study underscores the challenge for the next president.

“The Honors Program at DOJ has always been the ‘A-list,’ ” said Nicholas M. Gess, a Justice official under President Bill Clinton. “The next attorney general will be stuck with many from the ‘B-list.”

High Medicare Costs, Courtesy of Congress

On Wal-Mart�s Web site, you can buy a walker for $59.92. It is called the Carex Explorer, and it�s a typical walker: a few feet high, with four metal poles extending to the ground. The Explorer is one of the walkers covered by Medicare.

But Medicare and its beneficiaries aren�t paying $59.92 for the Explorer or any similar walker. In fact, they�re not paying anything close to it. They are paying about $110.

For years, Congress has set the price for walkers and various medical equipment, and it has consistently set them well above the market rate, effectively handing out a few hundred million dollars of corporate welfare every year to the equipment makers.

But as of July 1, this system is set to change. Companies will instead have to submit bids � to compete with one another, just as Wal-Mart competes with Target � if they want to continue selling products to Medicare. Based on a pilot program, the price of walkers, delivery and setup included, will fall to about $80.

Now, would you like to guess how the equipment makers feel about this?

Right.

With the changeover looming, they have increased their contributions to Congress. They have also started publicly claiming that competitive bidding will, among other things, deprive some patients of oxygen equipment they need.

Hillary Clinton returns to the Senate:

But as she returned in defeat to her old home in the Senate yesterday, she was received as if in triumph. And, in a sense, her stature had increased during the failed primary battle: She left as a legislator but returned as the leader of an 18 million-strong movement of women and working-class voters — a group whose support Clinton’s Democratic colleagues fervently desire.

And so, as Clinton entered a private luncheon in the Capitol, these colleagues greeted her with cheers, hugs and high-fives. “It’s great to be here among my colleagues,” Clinton teased, “just another regular, plain old superdelegate.”

Clinton’s speech

Here is the full text of Hillary Clinton’s speech today, in which she thanked her supporters and endorsed Barack Obama.

It was an excellent speech that made it amply clear why so many people have voted for her this year.

Some clips are floating around but they only pull out the endorsement. I think you need to watch or read the whole thing, not the sound bite.

It was more than just a necessary endorsement of Barack Obama, though it contained that. It was a statement of principle. It was a concession, but there was not much of defeat in it.

To describe it, I yield to one more eloquent than I, Big Tent Democrat:

Hillary Clinton did something that is very difficult in my opinion, she made a great speech out of a concession endorsement speech. Why?

Because she conceded nothing on the issues nor in any way discounted what she and her supporters accomplished. And then she endorsed him, but the endorsement was not the standard stump endorsement. It was an intelligent, rational, respectful argument to her supporters for why she was endorsing Barack Obama. she would speak to the issues and punctuate her line with “and that is why we must elect Barack Obama President.”

She then recognized the historic nature of this election. As I wrote last Tuesday night, while a dream was realized when the Democratic Party nominated an African American as our Presidential candidate, a dream was thwarted also, that of a woman nominee. Hillary Clinton honored BOTH moments in this speech.

It was one of the best speeches I have ever seen.

I watched it on CSPAN, which I hear will re-run it later today.

Thanks to JimT:

Read also Rebecca Traister: Hillary’s Final Curtain

Oh my goodness! NOW we’re going to have a national discussion on sexism!

These national discussions just keep coming at us, don’t they?

Clinton Bloc Becomes the Prize for Election Day (I supply emphasis):

…Even the Democratic National Committee chairman is avidly trying to make up for accusations that he allowed sexism in the race to pass unchallenged.

�The wounds of sexism need to be the subject of a national discussion,� the chairman, Howard Dean, said in an interview. �Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers� toward Mrs. Clinton.

…

Former Gov. Madeleine M. Kunin of Vermont suggested in an interview that Mr. Obama promise to appoint women to half his cabinet positions.

Ms. Steinem advised that Mr. Obama deliver the same sort of ambitious speech about sex that he did on race. An aide said the campaign was considering such an address.

Jenny Backus, a Democratic consultant unaffiliated with either campaign, wondered whether Mr. Obama might give Chelsea Clinton a prominent role in his efforts.

When Mr. Dean reached out to Cynthia Ruccia, who started an organization of female Clinton swing-state voters threatening to vote for Mr. McCain, Ms. Ruccia asked that the Democratic convention include a symbolic first ballot for Mrs. Clinton�s delegates. Mr. Dean discouraged the idea on the grounds of unity.

He has belatedly recognized the cries of sexism, Mr. Dean said, particularly when a friend showed him a video compilation of broadcasters� comments about Mrs. Clinton.

�We all get over it when our candidates don�t win,� he said. �What you don�t get over is feeling like you�ve been insulted by some of the leading institutions in America and no one said anything about it.�

…

The Obama campaign will fight back, after waiting a respectful beat or two. In conversations with Mr. Obama and his aides, �I�ve tried to make sure that everyone understood that these women have a right to feel frustrated and angry,� said Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, an important ally who is one of his leading emissaries to women. �To try to make that less than real is a huge mistake.�

As he declared himself the nominee on Tuesday, Mr. Obama cut a particularly woman-friendly figure on stage, dedicating his speech to his grandmother and affectionately bumping fists with his wife, Michelle.

Indeed, descriptions of those women, along with his mother and daughters, will be regular features of Mr. Obama�s speeches, Ms. Sebelius said. Women will ultimately choose Mr. Obama not because of symbolic overtures, she added, but because of his stances on health care, the economy and education, areas where his positions closely resemble Mrs. Clinton�s.

The key, Ms. McCaskill said, is approaching Mrs. Clinton�s supporters with utmost humility. And, Ms. Backus added, that is not always the strongest suit of the young people who are some of Mr. Obama�s most enthusiastic supporters.

�Not nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh,� Ms. McCaskill said, making a taunting sound. �We need them very, very badly, and we shouldn�t be able to be afraid to say that we need them.�

H/t Big Tent Democrat

But they didn’t need us last week. Weren’t too worried about those adolescent commentators then either.

I wonder how many women are going to see this sort of Damascus Road conversion as conveniently timed? Sort of an “I’m sorry honey. I’ll never do it again.”

They might want to polish up that humble rhetoric too. To quote Paul Lukasiak, “these women have a right to feel frustrated and angry” is not the same as “women have a reason to be angry.”

While I’m not a woman, this “right to be” language is the equivalent of an “I’m sorry that you were offended”, faux-apology — its a failure to acknowledge that the anger is legitimate, and that its not just the media that is at fault, but the candidate and the party itself.

Paul thinks this is all misdirection to distract us from the corruption of the DNC.

And, after all, it is not just women who voted for Senator Clinton over Senator Obama. There’s the question of the “Appalachia problem.”

Speaking of Appalachia, I still want policy specifics. In Bristol, Virginia on Thursday, Senator Obama got an enthusiastic response to promises that he’d provide everybody with health care but he didn’t say how he plans to do that.

Gail Collins is relatively clear-eyed about what Clinton accomplished:

Here�s where the sexism does come in. If Barack had failed in his attempt to make history by becoming the first African-American presidential nominee, you can bet we�d have treated his defeat with the dignity it deserved. Even if he went over the deep end at the finale and found it hard to get around to a graceful concession. [Ed. note: I wish people would get over this meme. The timing of Clinton's concession is well within the tradition and will be perfectly graceful. See Anglachel.]

For a long time, Obama supporters have seen party unity as something that Hillary could provide by capitulating. It also requires the Democrats to acknowledge what she�s achieved. If that makes them feel like wimps, let them take it out on John McCain.

…

Over the past months, Clinton has seemed haunted by the image of the �nice girl� who gives up the fight because she�s afraid the boys will be angry if they don�t get their way. She told people she would never, ever say: �I�m the girl, I give up.� She would never let her daughter, or anybody else�s daughter, think that she quit because things got too tough.

And she never did. Nobody is ever again going to question whether it�s possible for a woman to go toe-to-toe with the toughest male candidate in a race for president of the United States. Or whether a woman could be strong enough to serve as commander in chief.

Her campaign didn�t resolve whether a woman who seems tough enough to run the military can also seem likable enough to get elected. But she helped pave the way. So many battles against prejudice are won when people get used to seeing women and minorities in roles that only white men had held before. By the end of those 54 primaries and caucuses, Hillary had made a woman running for president seem normal.

…

For all her vaunting ambition, she was never a candidate who ran for president just because it�s the presidency. She thought about winning in terms of the things she could accomplish, and she never forgot the women�s issues she had championed all her life � repair of the social safety net, children�s rights, support for working mothers.

It�s not the same as winning the White House. But it�s a lot.

We’re not buying

Watch at YouTube

Via Wolfrum

Here’s a link to the petition

On May 23, The Women’s Media Center, along with our partners at Media Matters, launched, “Sexism Sells, But We’re Not Buying It,” a new video and online petition campaign illustrating the pervasive nature of sexism in the media’s coverage. While Hillary Clinton’s campaign has cast a spotlight on the issue of sexism, this isn’t a partisan issue: it’s about making sure that women’s voices are present and powerful in our national dialogue. If you haven’t already, please click on the image at right to watch the video. You can also read a statement about the video from WMC president Carol Jenkins. Then sign on below to join our petition campaign.