Double Double Standard Standard
Obama supporters, feminists, young voters, Hillary Clinton | Salon Life
Yet some female voters have begun to express nearly as much disenchantment with the Obama-mania of their peers as with their Clinton-promoting mothers. And even while they voice dismay over the retro tone of the pro-Clinton feminist whine, a growing number of young women are struggling to describe a gut conviction that there is something dark and funky, and probably not so female-friendly, running below the frantic fanaticism of their Obama-loving compatriots.
Fair-minded though this article might be (most of the subjects actually are Obama supporters), I find this troubling--just not in the way Traister intended.
Hillary Clinton has behaved so badly in this campaign that I, someone who proudly planned to vote for her until well after her first losses, and someone who has seldom had a kind word for her opponent, have been driven to despise her. She is now clearly fighting to preserve her chances at '12, this season a total wash. Obama cannot ever again be a viable candidate if she's to return to the White House, so she has to take him down despite the fact that he is certain to be the nominee. The degree of selfishness inherent in this plan of action is staggering; she may well be dooming hundreds of thousands of Iranians to death and millions of Americans to abject poverty by giving McCain a free ride. But she will not stop.
What, though, is to be our response? Can men not hate her? Why is "I want to punch her lights out" not a valid reaction to what she's doing? I've hated politicians of both sexes for far less. (Reread some of my screeds on Bloomberg or, well, any Republican pol.) Can we not hate women in the same way we hate men--can they not handle it? What do we have to do, pull our punches because she's a girl, lest other girls get upset and start crying?
Is this seriously what feminism hath wrought? There are still ugly associations to male anger against women, but when individual men--even progressives, even gays--can't be openly angry at individual women who are public figures who are behaving disgracefully, there's a problem. You worry that we're going to lose you? You're losing us.
That said, this is something that I think Obama could be good at addressing. At the root of his words on racism is the simple imperative that we need to learn to empathize with one another, and perhaps eventually understand if not forgive prejudice against ourselves. It applies just as well to all groups that figure in identity politics. There's an unhealthy degree of tension between men and women as well as between people of different races, and we certainly need to have an uncomfortable dialogue about that, too.
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I skimmed through this article last night and it made me mad. It had a number of quotes along the lines of "people who oppose Hillary make comments that just seem sexist but I can't put my finger on how." Accusations of sexism without any evidence other than "it just seems like it" is just unfair, because it's the kind of charge that's very difficult to refute once you've been accused of it.
It's as if the fact that she ran an awful and cynical campaign and voted for war for political reasons and has shamelessly repeated lies and voted for tougher bankruptcy laws that harm poor people while saying she's on their side is not a good enough reason to hate her guts.
I really wish Mark Warner had run for the nomination. I would have been a big supporter. It's ridiculous that the polls for the general election are nearly tied right now. NY Magazine's cover story this week is about John McCain, and this description of McCain got me going:
"A candidate, that is, who poses an existential question for Democrats: If you can’t beat a guy like this in a year like this, with a vastly unpopular Republican war still ongoing and a Republican recession looming, what precisely is the point of you?"
Interesting point. Until I read this post, it never occurred to me as odd that the media created a narrative where Romney had to give "the religion speech" and Obama had to give "the race speech", but Clinton has not been cast as having to give "the gender speech".