I’m fascinated by Hillary’s campaign for presidency. Here we have a strong female candidate with a real shot at the White House. How is she doing things differently from the men?
Hillary has some high cards in her hand. She’s got the campaign bucks. She has experience. She’s got name recognition. All good stuff, and she’s playing those cards heavily.
But is being a woman a good card? If she spoke to women and their particular policy issues, wouldn’t she nail 50% of the voters? I don’t think she’s playing the chick card seriously. I haven’t heard her say with any seriousness, this and this and this are women’s issues and if you vote for me, I’ll take care of your interests better than any of these other jokers running for office.
Why isn’t she playing the chick card?
Maybe she realizes that playing the chick card won’t help her cause with women, and it would end up alienating the men.
Women haven’t been rallying around Hillary. The prominent women bloggers and pundits are siding with Edwards. He’s more to the left on economic issues than Hillary.
If Hillary spoke more about women’s issues, would they side with her? I’m not sure. The problem is that women can’t decide what women’s policy issues are. Younger women say that birth planning is their biggest issue. For women in their thirties and forties, it’s family matters – family leave policies, education, health care for children. Older women are struggling to become CEO in a world that doesn’t know how to deal with women leaders. We’re fighting amongst ourselves and looking towards the male pundits for voting cues.
I’ve heard rumors that Hillary has a plan to put more women in positions of power in her new administration, but she’s keeping that plan quiet. She doesn’t think that it will bring in enough women voters to compensate for the male voters who would be freaked out by such a plan.
I think that we shouldn’t be above identity politics. If we put in all our chips and said that we were going to back Hillary, because she’s a woman, maybe she wouldn’t be so shy about championing our causes. If we said that, for a short time, we would stop fighting with each other for a while and find commonalities, could we end up with a candidate that actually spoke to our needs?
It would be nice.
Apt. 11d 
“The problem is that women can’t decide what women’s policy issues are.”
Very true.
“Younger women say that birth planning is their biggest issue.”
Really? I have my doubts.
Personally, I suspect that some of the most burning issues that women have aren’t traditional “women’s” issues. Housing affordability and the mortgage meltdown are a big deal, as is the question of retirement. If you listen to Dave Ramsey’s radio show (which I like to do while doing housework), on any given day there are half a dozen women calling in for advice as to how to deal with a looming foreclosure.
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Guess what? Hillary Clinton is the only candidate that has these 4 attributes (there are more but I forget): integrity, honor, patriotism, and compassion. I double dog dare you to find another candidate with these attributes. I got $35 in the bank that says you won’t be able to find one.
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She’s already put more women into power in her campaign than her male competitors.
As Molly Ivins was wont to say, there are three ways to predict a politician’s future performance in office. They are: look at the record, look at the record and look at the record.
If elected president, Hillary will put more women into power, in part for the time-honored reason that key people from her campaign will get plum jobs in the administration — and in this case those key people will be women.
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But Ivens wouldn’t want us just to look at Clinton’s staff hiring — she would want us to look at Clinton’s legislative — and First Lady — records. And that begs the question, does Clinton have an especially feminist political record? I’m not sure. It’s an unfortunate fact that her private life strikes me, and many women I know IRL, as not especially feminist. I’m loathe to take that into account when casting my vote, however, and certainly it should be balanced against her long-ago pre-marriage feminism, when she was in the feminist vanguard.
OTOH, does Clinton deserve the votes of women and feminist constituencies simply because she’s a woman? Obviously the women to whom Clinton will appeal wouldn’t vote for Phyllis Schalfly on the grounds that women should vote for a woman.
I’m one Democratic women who remains unenthusiastic about Clinton and is not convinced that the mere femaleness of Clinton promises enough in terms of her ability or desire to address my major political concerns — whether they’re “women’s issues” or not.
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Yeah, Jody. I’ve read similar thoughts all over the blogosphere. Democratic women aren’t running to Hillary with open arms. So, that Bill stuff really bugs you still?
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It’s already been a long time ago, but does anyone remember how ten years ago just about everyone (including liberals, too) had grown weary of the Clintons? (The same thing has been happening to Bush, but I’d argue that that is a natural feature of the last few years of a two-term run. Eight years is a long time, and people are thoroughly tired of a president around the six year mark.) Arguably, HC’s first year in office is going to feel like her ninth year. I’m not saying that this phenomenon will keep her from getting elected, but I do think it may hold her down to a single term.
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Here are some more ideas with regard to women’s issues:
The savings rate is low (negative, even, they say) and for a lot of people, their house is their only asset and was supposed to serve as their retirement. However, home prices are going to be decreasing for the foreseeable future, so the classic sell-big-house-buy-small-house-live-on-difference move isn’t going to work as well as in the past. This is a women’s issue because women live longer than men, so women are more likely to experience widowhood with no savings, perhaps after a husband’s nursing home stay exhausts their resources.
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Jody: “It’s an unfortunate fact that her private life strikes me, and many women I know IRL, as not especially feminist.”
Why? Is it just the handling of Bill’s extramarital affair(s)? Is there a feminist way to deal with that?
This just strikes a chord with me because I’m not sure I would divorce my husband if he had an extramarital affair. He also knows I feel this way, fwiw. Also fwiw, I don’t feel this way because I have any belief in the sanctity of marriage.
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Wendy,
I think your position is admirable, but HRC went rather beyond that. She chose to spend a big chunk of her adult life tidying up the messes left by her husband’s affairs and possibly nonconsensual indiscretions.
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Amy, I think we’d all have to agree first on what it is Hillary Clinton has done. I’m not sure I buy what you’re alluding to.
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Well I’ll tell you one thing Hillary did all by herself that I just cannot get past: how about voting for the war in Iraq? I may not love Obama, but at least he’s untrammeled in that regard.
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Amy, I can’t agree with you on the “everyone got tired of Bill and Al’s excellent presidency” idea. Check the approval ratings at the end of his term. Nor can I agree with you on the general view of Bush. Again, check the approval ratings. They’ve been in Nixonian territory for about a year, and Nixon resigned from office in disgrace. GWB is apparently going to hang around and see if there are more depths to plumb. (And if people were tired of Bill and Al, then eight years of GWB has been a useful corrective, just as it has been to the idea that there’s not a dime’s difference between the two major parties.)
HRC is, as you say, a known quantity, so there won’t be that giddy feeling of a new era beginning, even though it will be. The first woman elected president of the United States of America. Whenever that happens (and 2008 is a pretty good bet), it will be a historic watershed. Clinton will probably not live up to the expectations set by that lofty ideal, but what practical politician could? On the other hand, she might just be the first of many: there are eight female governors (though one is retiring and one a naturalized citizen). Given how far from parity politics is, each of these is by definition a star, and a potential president. Watch Kathleen Sebelius work her magic and keep converting Republican office-holders into Democrats, for instance.
I’ll bet that a Hillary presidency will be a lot like Bill’s, though I hope without either sex scandals or impeachment. Progressives will find her too corporate, too willing to compromise and too reluctant to attempt a major shift in America’s center. Republicans will be apoplectic most of the time, and a lot of the major media will follow their lead. The big-league chatterers will breathe a sigh of relief when she’s done, and shortly thereafter many people will look back, realize how good she was and wonder why they didn’t see it all along. Clip this last paragraph, call me in 2017 and tell me I didn’t nail it from the start.
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Doug,
You had me for a minute, but now that I think of it, I don’t think those high poll numbers tell the whole story–if the Clinton era was so loved, why didn’t Al Gore get voted into office by a landslide? (Although I suppose you can make the case that Gore didn’t have a meaningful part in the Clinton-Gore presidency, and voters understood that and wanted to save the presidential goodies for the more deserving HRC.) I think there was actually a lot of ambivalence underneath those polls. I was in grad school (an almost monolithically liberal/left environment) taking women’s lit and cultural studies and what not during those years, and there was no warmth towards the Clintons. Similarly, I’ve read that there was a lot of discontent with Reagan from conservatives during his second term. My feeling is that the second term may be when ideological allies start to turn on a president, realizing that the term is almost over and they haven’t gotten theirs, and probably won’t ever.
I’ve actually warmed up towards HRC quite a bit over the past few years. There is a place for chilly ruthlessness in our politics. The problem is that I suspect that she will probably direct it mostly at her own political enemies.
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Erm, Al was hated by the Washington journalists who shaped the national perception? Al took some bad advice and ran away from the achievements of the Clinton-Gore administration instead of running on them? Lest we forget, he also won the popular vote in 2000.
No doubt there was a lot of ambivalence about Bill and Al in a grad-school environment, because for people firmly committed to the left side of the American spectrum, there was a lot to be ambivalent about. The Clinton-Gore administration governend firmly from the center, sometimes even from the center-right. If you’re a social democrat by disposition, that’s got to be very frustrating: the closest party to your views that America has gets into power, and what do they do? They put up Lloyd Bentsen and then Robert Rubin at Treasury, they make a fetish of balancing the budget, they triangulate, the screw up the push for national health care royally, and they give in to Republicans when they don’t need to.
Hillary’s not going to get much love from that direction either. It’s interesting that the white man from the South is the major Democratic candidate with the most liberal positions. Books and covers.
It’s interesting that you’ve warmed up to HRC a bit. I think she was so demonized from the right, that when she shows up without cloven hooves and not reeking of brimstone, people are giving her a second look and thinking hm, maybe not so bad after all.
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The case for HRC is that she generally knows what is good for her political career, and most of the time, what is good for her politically will coincide with what is good for the US. Obviously, there’s a lot of fine print.
I think HRC the senator has been quite distinct from HRC the First Lady. Being a senator may just suit her better than the ill-defined yet constricting role of First Lady. HRC the president may be yet a third personality.
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Another factor (which is unfair to HRC, but nonetheless real) is that at least on some subliminal level, voters recognize the possibility that WJC is still “dating” and the huge potential humiliation for HRC and the US generally if there is another huge sex scandal involving WJC.
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I love your prediction, Doug. You may be correct, but I’m hoping that Hillary does have some hidden progressive agenda. I think that she’s purposefully playing a really safe game right now. She’s letting the women and leftie pundits go for Edwards now, because she knows she’s going to win the primary. She doesn’t want to get into the trap of appearing too extreme in the primaries and getting in trouble for that in the general election. She’s writing off the leftie women right now, but I’m hoping that she’s got some plans up her sleeve for after she wins. And unless something really strange happens, she’s going to win.
Maybe the women pundits are going for Edwards, because they know that Hillary has it locked up. They can afford to flirt with the progressive man in the hopes that it pushes Hillary more to the left. I wonder if they would be supporting him, if the race was a little closer.
I also wonder if women voted more as a block, instead of based on economic issues, we would be seeing more women’s issues on the agenda.
I agree with Amy that women’s issues are broader than just having kids or not having them. I think that women have broader policy issues than that. Education policy is certainly an issue that women feel strongly about. Housing may be, too.
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Laura, I note that I have “firmly” twice and you have “broader” issues standing in for women’s issues. Apparently we’ve both been reading too much of the innuendo at Unfogged.
Glad you liked the prediction. For whatever it’s worth, that’s not even my furthest-ranging prediction on a blog. (I’m on the record saying that Turks will vote in elections to the EU Parliament by 2019.)
I forget where, but I think that I have been reading that Hillary’s support is stronger among women with some or no college than among women with degrees. This will correlate somewhat with leftiness. Her pursuit of women slightly down the status list is very shrewd, I think. First, iirc, “some college” is still a larger category than “college graduate”, and second the graduates are probably not going to jump to the Republican candidate in the general, at least in any great percentages. She’s probably also more of an aspirational figure for the “some college” segment.
As for women voting as a bloc, my suspicion is that the range of interests among women is presently greater than the common interests of women. But as a possessor of a Y chromosome, I’m mostly just guessing here. More thoughts on that question, anyone?
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Doug,
You’re on to something. An octogenarian widow may feel differently about the school levy than a mother of school-aged children. A mother of a disabled child may want him mainstreamed, while the mother of a typical child wants the disabled child in a separate class. A nanny and her employer may have different interests, as may a doctor and her receptionist. A renter who is currently priced-out and a homeowner are going to feel differently about a slumping housing market. First wives may feel differently about child support and alimony than daddy’s new wife does. And lastly, but not least importantly, even though abortion rights are often described as a women’s issue, women are famously split right down the middle on abortion.
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Here’s another big one: women with decent insurance versus those without.
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I don’t think any part of Hillary Clinton’s marital history demonstrates a feminist commitment. It demonstrates a commitment to the pursuit of power, I will grant you that. Maybe there’s something feminist there. But I haven’t felt that Hillary Clinton has ever much used her power to do anything other than buttress … her own power. Obviously I’m a cynic about her, and about Bill at this point, too.
I’m not enthused by any of the candidates, and Hillary’s lack of strident left-wing rhetoric doesn’t bother me in the slightest. She’d be an idiot (and not true to her joint history with Bill) if she were trying to do anything but capture the rational middle.
I get a nagging sense from time to time that Hillary Clinton is being anointed by the Democrats for some of the same reasons that George W. Bush was by the Republicans, and the comparisons only get more scary as I pursue that train of thought.
Of course it would be nice having an Imperial president who supported my policy objectives for a change (and I do think Clinton does, for the most part) but I’d rather have no Imperial president at all. And I don’t think any of Hillary Clinton’s behavior in the 1990s demonstrates anything but a fine appreciation for the joys of power.
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Jody, I get you’re a cynic about Clinton, but I am still curious about specifics. If I stay with my husband if he cheats on me, it’s anti-feminist? Or is it only so if Hillary stays with him?
I think the issue is not that she’s anti-feminist but that you hold her to a different (higher?) standard. There may be legitimate reasons to do so, but I’m really not thrilled with your trying to attribute this to feminism or lack thereof.
What I see with Hillary Clinton is a woman who has been a partner with her husband in many ways. Whether we like what they’re partnering up to do is a separate issue, but she has been a working mother, an intellectual equal who forged her own career with her own hard work *after* her husband’s presidency, not based on his record. She has been a good mother whose child is a credit to her parenting. This is someone I admire as a feminist.
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But knowing his proclivities, would you go on national TV, saying that reports of his philandering were the product of a vast right wing conspiracy? At some point, an honest woman would say, “I love you, but you got into this yourself bub, and you’ve cost yourself the presidency. Let’s go home to Arkansas, you can write your memoirs, I can do pro bono work, and Al Gore can run the country.” Think how differently things might have gone had the Clintons been big enough to leave Washington DC, and had Al Gore finished up the term and then been re-elected. But the only problem with this plan is that there wouldn’t have been a viable HRC candidacy.
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I was trying to point out that her decisions before the marriage weren’t that terribly “feminist” (although I think we’d have to start by defining the term, and I don’t know how we’d do that).
I don’t think there’s anything particularly feminist or anti-feminist about decisions people make when their spouses have affairs. Some feminists would argue that open marriage is a particularly feminist choice. I wasn’t actually talking about the affairs — although certainly Hillary Clinton’s vigorous defense of her husband’s multiple affairs with lower-status women, and her vindictive attacks on those women, don’t strike me as especially driven by a regard for other women.
I was actually referring more to the fact that Hillary Clinton’s entire political career prior to 2000 was marked by her subordination to her spouse. She gained power through marriage. I believe she could have pursued power in her own right after college and law school, but for whatever reasons (they could even be romantic ones, I suspect they were), she chose to subordinate her own political ambitions in service to her husband’s. Then she sought power through him.
I don’t think seeking and holding power through one’s spouse is an especially feminist thing to do. Bluntly, if I had been a New York resident in 2000, I wouldn’t have voted for her, for precisely that reason. What had she ever done on her own?
As I said, I see parallels to George W. Bush in more areas than one. Liberals wanted to believe he was a compassionate guy, and now they want to believe Hillary is a closet progressive. Fool me once….
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Jody, there was a nice line about Hubert Humphrey once: “Wear the mask long enough, and when you try and take it off, your face has frozen to fit”
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Jody – I’m not sure that I agree. Hillary married Bill before he had power. I think that they made a pact that he would would get the first crack at power and then he would sit quietly, and let her have her shot. She’s no Kimora Lee Simmons.
Sometimes I think that women are too hard on other women. Look at all the men in power who are there because Daddy was a powerful man. Gore, W., Kennedy. Men ride coattails all the time.
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Gore was clearly (especially with hindsight) not happy to be riding Daddy’s coattails. Kennedy hardly seems like a shining example of mental health or political prowess, either. Do we really aspire to dynasties?
And in any case, none of those men chose their families.
I have no idea what bargains were or were not made in the Clinton marriage. I’m only saying that they don’t strike me as especially “Feminist” — part of my larger point, which is that I don’t see much record that Hillary Clinton has been able to deliver on feminist goals. Whatever those might be — there’s a difference between “what different groups of women want/need” and “what feminists want/need,” and that’s before you start parsing the term feminist.
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I’m just saying that men ride the coats of other men all the time and no one gives them a hard time about it.
I’m on board with a feminist policy agenda. I think there are policies that can be objectively shown to have positive outcomes for women. However, I have big problems with the idea of a feminist lifestyle. It’s just one more unreachable ideal that women have to live up to. It feels oppressive. I think we should judge Hillary on whether or not she delivers the feminist policy goods and not based on whatever arrangement she has with Bill.
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“She has been a good mother whose child is a credit to her parenting.”
That’s most likely true. An alternate explanation (and impossible for an outsider to know) is that her daughter has to be the best-little-girl-in-the-world to compensate for disappointments elsewhere in her mother’s life. I believe that this dynamic is not uncommon in super-dysfunctional families, with a child having to become prematurely super responsible to compensate for the childishness of one or both parents. As outsiders, we don’t know which it is.
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Laura,
Fair enough with a feminist policy agenda. My original point, way back at the beginning, is that I don’t see anything much in Hillary’s record, public or private, that demonstrates a commitment to feminism per se. Her work with Marion Wright Edelman might be marshaled to refute that claim — I’m not sure.
I agree that the ideal feminist lifestyle is a mirage and a trap. There’s something about this particular woman’s particular choices in her private and public lives, particularly given the way that they’ve intersected throughout her adult life, that gives me the creeps. I’d like to shake that feeling. I don’t know that it reflects terribly well on MY feminist commitment.
Interestingly enough, the women of my mother and MIL’s generation seem overwhelmingly enthusiastic about Hillary. At least the ones I know off-line. They are THRILLED with her campaign. Almost disconcertingly so. Maybe there’s a generation-gap issue at stake?
I can’t get onboard with the idea that, having given men a pass on the coattail-riding, we’re obligated to give women a pass. I wish we hadn’t given the men a pass. Certainly I didn’t think the fact that George W. was nominated because (a) his name was recognizable; (b) his ties to his father were supposed to testify to his qualifications; and (c) because he had a family-built network, he had the overwhelming donor advantage — has worked out terribly well, all things considered.
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“her husband’s affairs and possibly nonconsensual indiscretions”
Rape?…. If Clinton raped someone, should we be calling it an “indiscretion”?
“There is a place for chilly ruthlessness in our politics”
I’ve never seen any evidence for her “chilly ruthlessness” – any more than any other politician. Maybe I don’t read widely enough.
“At some point, an honest woman would say, “I love you, but you got into this yourself bub, and you’ve cost yourself the presidency” […] Think how differently things might have gone had the Clintons been big enough to leave Washington DC
Clinton should have resigned the presidency over an affair?
I personally don’t like Hillary, mostly for the hints at what her foreign policy would look like (she’s too close to the hawks).
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“indiscretions”
There was also the alleged groping, flashing and propositioning, etc. I was trying to avoid going into the sordid details.
“Clinton should have resigned the presidency over an affair?”
For all intents and purposes, the Clinton presidency was over after the Lewinsky scandal. I think even people who liked the Clintons would concede that point (although some people might date the end of the Clinton presidency even earlier). In the same way, the Bush presidency has been over for a while. I suspect that a single six year term would work a lot better than the current norm of two four-year terms.
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A single six-year term would just swap one set of structural problems for another. Mexico and, I think, other Latin American countries have taken that route. The various states regulate governors’ terms of office differently as well, so there’s basis for comparing the role of the chief executive.
Intervention in Kosovo seems like a pretty big deal for something undertaken after the Clinton presidency was supposedly over.
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Isn’t foreign policy where lame ducks limp off to do stuff and look important when they are no longer effective at home?
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Well, unless they’re our current administration, when they go off to do crazy stuff (or not do anything) that makes our world even more freakishly dangerous.
Although I dream of what could have happened if Gore was president in 2004 instead of what we have now, I do not see how the precedent that an American president resigns because one lied about performing consensual sexual acts would have been an useful one.
Lying to get us into a war, on the other hand, that sounds like grounds for resignation. I think there’d be a lot more scope for positive change on both the domestic and foreign policy front if Cheney & Bush had resigned at the beginning of the year, and left Nancy Pelosi in charge. In fact, I think a change of administration is absolutely required to make any progress on the foreign policy front, and that’s been true for a number of years now. We’re twiddling our thumbs for the next year waiting for that change.
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