DC Domestique: 3/4/07

Hillary Rodham Clinton. Former first lady. Looking to be first female president. She is the topic of our regular Friday Rant column here at Domestique.

One Sunday afternoon a few weeks back, I had a delicious little brunch with my lovely partner in crime, Misha, at this neighborhood place called Café Luna. I highly recommend it. We were discussing the Domestique’s endorsement of Obama, and how in the comments Mindy asked “No love for Hillary” and I responded with some long-winded explanation of “No.”

Misha, being infinitely more brilliant than even I, saw through my bullshit and started asking tough [actually they were pretty straightforward] questions like “Why do you like Obama?” and “Why don’t you like Hillary?” And they were tough because when I layed out the case against Hillary, I basically just threw out the oft-repeated criticisms of her. Let’s review some of them, before we get too far along:

She’s a woman and America is not ready for a female president (unelectability, part I)
She’s too polarizing, another popular strand of the “unelectability” theme
She wouldn’t be where she is today if she had not been married to a president, AND/OR she doesn’t deserve to be in the position she is in today
She’s just power hungry, she has no real values and will say/do anything to get elected
She’s pro-war
She’s become soft on choice and has made other concessions on issues as part of a move to the middle

Now, two of these arguments are partisan in nature and more or less exclusive to Democrats: pro-war and centrist/triangulator. So let’s leave them aside for now. The rest of the arguments are generally thought of as widely held beliefs about Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC), and are therefore freely and often repeated in the mainstream news media (MSM) when analyzing her candidacy.

Misha essentially rebutted each of theses popular critiques of HRC by showing how they are all inherently sexist, that is, the critique is unfairly leveled against her primarily because of her gender. Some of these critiques get made by people not intending to be sexist, while others are very deliberately doing so. We talked about this a lot and it really got me thinking that she was right. But are all the HRC-haters out there misogynists? Or at the very least, are a lot of people out there unknowingly promulgating sexist biases?

In this post, I’ll do my best here to recount my Sunday morning discussion on gender issues in the context of the 2008 presidential campaign. Remember, the criteria for sexism here is that she is being critiqued solely because of her gender. I will start with the critiques leveled at HRC due to some version of her being unelectable. [Side note: Thank you Howard Dean for shitting the bed in Iowa and creating the myth of unelectability. This will come back to haunt liberal politicians until liberal stops being a bad word.]

Critique: She’s a woman and America is not ready for a female president (unelectability, part I).

Why this is sexist? Ummm, because it says she can’t be president because of her gender. Pretty obvious one, really. The polls do not indicate that the public has a problem with her gender. In the mid-Feburary Gallup/USA Today poll, for example, 88% said they would vote for a woman (78% comfortably, 10% with reservations). That leaves just 12% saying no (11%) or no opinion (1%), who are essentially admitting their own bias. Of course, there is the thing that happens, primarily in the South, where people will say they’ll support a Black candidate or a female candidate in a poll, but only because it’s the polite thing to say, and in reality, when they get to the polls, they vote for ole man Whitey. I am not sure of the prevalence of this, but DC-conventional wisdom generally accepts this happens to some extent in certain parts of the country some of the time. Regardless, those who say America is not ready for a female president are wrong, cynical, and/or just plain sexist (potentially all three).

Critique: She’s too polarizing (unelectability, part I)

Why is this sexist? This one is sexist because it is misconstrues poll results by only telling half the story. Sure, her unfavorables are high. But ya know what? Her favorables are high too! Let’s take a quick look at some poll results to confirm this. From the March Gallup/USA Today poll:

I included some other top tier candidates for the WH08 race so that we can get a sense of how her fav/unfav ratings compare. At first blush, we see HRC has a 42% unfavorable rating, much higher than her Dem competitors Obama (18%) and Edwards (28%). But just 3% of those surveyed didn’t have an opinion of her (and every single person surveyed was at least familiar with her name). Yet 21% of the survey had never heard of (9%) or had no opinion of (12%) John Edwards, while 24% had never heard of (15%) or had no opinion of (9%) Barack Obama. Point being, HRC’s high unfavorables have a lot to do with the fact that everyone already knows her. They also all know she is a Democrat, which means that every Republican already is unfavorable to her already. Watch, if Edwards/Obama become the eventual Dem nominee, you will see their unfavorables climb somewhere into the mid-30s range as Republicans learn who the hell these guys are and start disliking them too for partisan reasons.

You ever hear that Bill Clinton was so popular he would have been elected to a third term? It’s probably true, but you know what? His unfavorables commonly poll as high or higher than his wife’s, and he’s a “beloved ex-president” to most.

To say that HRC is too polarizing to become president is a shorthand way of saying that either you don’t know enough about polling and are making the mistake of blindly repeating something you heard someone say, and therefore inadvertently being sexist; or you are saying that you do get how polling works, and you are taking advantage of the fact that HRC is a known commodity already you are touting her high unfavorables in order to deceive others, and therefore you are being covertly but undeniably sexist.

Further, some people tout that even Democrats don’t like and won’t get behind HRC. Really? I know a lot of Dems who may be lukewarm on her, but no one in the party hates her (unless Dick Morris is still a registered D somewhere). Yesterday, the NBC/Wall Street Journal released these new poll results that show HRC as the Democratic primary favorite among self-identified Democrats.

Yet, the very next question asks those same self-identified Democrats if there is any Democratic candidate currently running for whom they would NOT vote for in the primary, and HRC wins again, getting 16% to Dennis Kucinich’s 11%, Joe Biden’s 9% and Edwards’/Dodd’s/Obama’s 7%. You are probably saying “Wait a minute, I thought you just said her party liked her?” Well I did and I mean it. I think those 16% are people who for whatever reason believed it when they heard it on the news or read it in the paper that there are doubts that HRC is electable, and Democrats are scared shitless of this electability issue in the post-9/11 world. And you know what else? Dems are not impervious to sexism, most of the parties leaders are old white men, just like the Republicans. But look, the percentage of people who say they’ll vote for HRC is going up over time, not down. Obama saw a big bump, but he still trails HRC considerably. She is the favorite among Democrats, a clear plurality. Look at how Democrats in this February ABC/Washington Post poll rated the three front-runners on a variety of statements:

Clearly, when you look at this table (sorry if it's hard to read, you can find the results here), you can see that Democrats see Hillary as the most viable candidate and the best candidate. She is the closest to Democratic voters on the issues, has the best experience, and is the strongest leader. This is just one example of the numerous polls out there that show the enormous support for HRC as the Democratic nominee for president.

The reason people say she is polarizing is because she is a woman, and some people are alarmed and put off by the notion of a woman as president. They are saying, “She is polarizing to me, and that is sexism. Moving right along…

Critique: She wouldn’t be where she is today if she had not been married to a president, AND/OR she doesn’t deserve to be in the position she is in today.

Why this is sexist? It is sexist because we are saying that she does not merit her position today as US Senator and leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for president because of the fact that her hubby used to be President, and you are discounting all of her experience, ambition, intelligence, and everything else about her due to her marital status and mate.

Now, this becomes a difficult argument to label sexist, because we use this all the time when we see nepotism in politics. We leveled this charge most recently against Dubya, who really only was in a position to become president because his father was (well, actually because he was the hugely popular governor of our second largest state, but he never would have become that had Rove and his father’s old cronies not pushed him to run back in ‘94). Some other notable people who benefited from nepotism: both Presidents Roosevelt (you didn’t think it was a coincidence they shared the same last name, did you?), the Kennedy family in MA, the Taft family in OH, the Bush family in New England/TX/FL/CA, the Gore family in TN, the Ford family in TN, the Humphrey family in MN… the list is actually endless and goes all the way back our earliest founders, check out all the familiar names here.

So why is it sexist in this case? What is unique about this case is we normally level this critique against the sons of rich/famous/notorious men. Here we are using it against a woman, and saying that had she not married the man that she did, she wouldn’t have achieved all that she has today. Yet, HRC is nothing if not hyper-ambitious. Who are we to say she would not have become a successful politician in her own right, had she married some other dude she met at Yale Law? For chrissakes, she went to Yale Law, people!!! For all we know, she probably had to sacrifice some of her own early career objectives and ambition numerous times to be a supportive wife of a highly public husband (remember that Bill ran for Congress as a carpetbagger in Arkansas back when he was just 28 years old). Had she not married Bill, it is entirely possible that she would have become president already! Maybe. The point is, anytime we say that she does not deserve her current lot in life because she is the wife of a former president, we are not allowing for the merits of her candidacy to come through. We end up not judging her by her words, actions, and deeds, but by her role as a wife… and that is sexist.

Critique: She’s just power hungry, she has no real values and will say/do anything to get elected.

Why this is sexist? For which politician running for president can we not say this for? Perhaps Obama, who for all intents and purposes is running because he is the most popular kid in class. Don’t get me wrong, a presidential run was always on his mind and on his long term agenda (IMO), I just think he was forced to do it earlier than he had originally intended. Basically, we are accusing HRC of doing something that all presidential candidates do: pander to the people who can get you elected. It is a sad political truth, but it is not an action exclusive to HRC, and when we say it is, we are probably just doing it because we are alarmed at the thought of a female president, and being acknowledgingly or not, being sexist.

The point of this blog post is by no means a defense of HRC as presidential nominee, but rather to say that we need to be very careful when articulating our reasons for not supporting her, because it is too easy to fall into lazy critiques that are based on how well or unwell she fits societal gender roles. Nevertheless, the reason you should not support her is because she is/was/and will continue to be wrong about the war in Iraq. The reason you should support Obama is because he has been right about the war from the start. One last point to make on how the media treats the HRC candidacy… when the MSM refers to her as Hillary Clinton and not Hillary Rodham Clinton, they are being sexist by giving her husband’s last name only. For that reason, I tried to refer to her always as “HRC” in this post.

So there you have it folks. Your Friday Rant. I look forward to your comments.