[NYTr] Hope, Change and Sexism: Hillary and Obama Manipulate the Voters

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[It seems fairly obvious that Hillary's more "humanized, less imperial"
persona during the last week in New Hampshire was calculated. So was
Bill Clinton's kvetching about the press coverage and the short
interval between Iowa's Caucus and the NH Primary. Hillary had to show
she's not the Leona Helmsley type of Demopublican like the awful and
already-detested promise-breaker Nancy Pelosi, and make an effort to
counter her well-deserved power-broker reputation.  Cynics may even
wonder if the "Iron My Shirt" male chauvenist pig incident at one of
her NH appearances was staged, precisely to highlight the fact that
sexism is alive and well in the USA.  Could be it was all as phony and
opportunistic as Hillary's claiming she, too, was an agent of "change,"
the buzz word of the week by all the candidates.  However, the comment
below by Seymour Joseph is still valid.  See also Maureen Dowd's
column below. 

Both Obama and Clinton are shamelessly, brazenly manipulating voters'
emotions. In New Hampshire, it worked enough for Hillary so that she
regained enough votes from women to win the election. -NYTr]


sent by Ed Pearl - Jan 9, 2008

Portside Tidbits

Tidbits - January 8, 2008

  Re: Hillary Clinton

This is not an assessment of Hillary Clinton's
politics. It is a fed-up comment on the double-standard
assessment of male and female politicians. When a man
comes off as macho, as George W. Bush did during his
campaigns, and, especially in his cowboy persona
following 9/11, he is regarded as a true leader. But
when a woman shows strength in her public life she is
viewed as hard, cold, arrogant, whatever.

ABC's Charles Gibson, the moderator of the debate the
other night, asked her to respond to the charge that
she is "not likable." Sticky, yes? But she answered it
just right. She blushed with a smile and said it made
her feel terrible. The audience laughed, and then she
bit into the charge, noting that the early assessment
of George Bush was that "you could have a beer" with
him.

Then came the big news of the day: Hillary became
choked up during comments she made at a lunchtime
meeting in New Hampshire! Good Lord! What next? Not
since the Tin Man shed a tear at the end of "The Wizard
of Oz" has there been such a contradiction of
character.

An entire article in the Washington Post was devoted to
this earth-shaking event on Tuesday. It was titled "A
Chink in the Steely Facade of Hillary Clinton," by
Robin Givhan. It ends with the following paragraph:

"A lifetime of work, sacrifice, frustration, patience
and defiance seemed to be compressed in a few
sentences. There was a little bit of disappointment in
her words. A hint of exasperation. Her voice sounded
heavy with tearful emotion. Not crocodile tears, but
real ones. Not because she's a wimp. But simply because
she's human."

Would Hillary Clinton make a good president? If our
judgment is based on her record and her campaign we
would have to conclude that she might not be the best
choice. But will it be possible for that judgment not
to be colored by the media's incessant harping on her
"steely" nature? Why do we look for steel in men and
tears in women?

Seymour Joseph

                      ***

The New York Times - Jan 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/09/opinion/08dowd.html

Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?

By MAUREEN DOWD
DERRY, N.H.

When I walked into the office Monday, people were clustering around a
computer to watch what they thought they would never see: Hillary
Clinton with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes.

A woman gazing at the screen was grimacing, saying it was bad. Three
guys watched it over and over, drawn to the “humanized” Hillary. One
reporter who covers security issues cringed. “We are at war,” he said.
“Is this how she’ll talk to Kim Jong-il?”

Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet
she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.” He added dryly: “Crying
doesn’t usually work in campaigns. Only in relationships.”

Bill Clinton was known for biting his lip, but here was Hillary doing
the Muskie. Certainly it was impressive that she could choke up and
stay on message.

She won her Senate seat after being embarrassed by a man. She pulled
out New Hampshire and saved her presidential campaign after being
embarrassed by another man. She was seen as so controlling when she ran
for the Senate that she had to be seen as losing control, as she did
during the Monica scandal, before she seemed soft enough to attract
many New York voters.

Getting brushed back by Barack Obama in Iowa, her emotional moment here
in a cafe and her chagrin at a debate question suggesting she was not
likable served the same purpose, making her more appealing, especially
to women, particularly to women over 45.

The Obama campaign calculated that they had the women’s vote over the
weekend but watched it slip away in the track of her tears.

At the Portsmouth cafe on Monday, talking to a group of mostly women,
she blinked back her misty dread of where Obama’s “false hopes” will
lead us — “I just don’t want to see us fall backwards,” she said
tremulously — in time to smack her rival: “But some of us are right and
some of us are wrong. Some of us are ready and some of us are not.”

There was a poignancy about the moment, seeing Hillary crack with
exhaustion from decades of yearning to be the principal rather than the
plus-one. But there was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking
up. What was moving her so deeply was her recognition that the country
was failing to grasp how much it needs her. In a weirdly narcissistic
way, she was crying for us. But it was grimly typical of her that what
finally made her break down was the prospect of losing.

As Spencer Tracy said to Katharine Hepburn in “Adam’s Rib,” “Here we go
again, the old juice. Guaranteed heart melter. A few female tears,
stronger than any acid.”

The Clintons once more wriggled out of a tight spot at the last minute.
Bill churlishly dismissed the Obama phenom as “the biggest fairy tale
I’ve ever seen,” but for the last few days, it was Hillary who seemed
in danger of being Cinderella. She became emotional because she feared
that she had reached her political midnight, when she would suddenly
revert to the school girl with geeky glasses and frizzy hair, smart but
not the favorite. All those years in the shadow of one Natural, only to
face the prospect of being eclipsed by another Natural?

How humiliating to have a moderator of the New Hampshire debate ask her
to explain why she was not as popular as the handsome young prince from
Chicago. How demeaning to have Obama rather ungraciously chime in:
“You’re likable enough.” And how exasperating to be pushed into an
angry rebuttal when John Edwards played wingman, attacking her on
Obama’s behalf.

“I actually have emotions,” she told CNN’s John Roberts on a
damage-control tour. “I know that there are some people who doubt
that.” She went on “Access Hollywood” to talk about, as the show put
it, “the double standards that a woman running for president faces.”
“If you get too emotional, that undercuts you,” Hillary said. “A man
can cry; we know that. Lots of our leaders have cried. But a woman,
it’s a different kind of dynamic.”

It was a peculiar tactic. Here she was attacking Obama for spreading
gauzy emotion by spreading gauzy emotion. When Hillary hecklers yelled
“Iron my shirt!” at her in Salem on Monday, it stirred sisterhood.

At Hillary’s victory party in Manchester, Carolyn Marwick, 65, said
Hillary showed she was human at the cafe. “I think she’s really tired.
She’s been under a lot more scrutiny than the other candidates — how
she dresses, how she laughs.”

Her son, David, 35, an actor, said he also “got choked up” when he saw
Hillary get choked up. He echoed Hillary’s talking points on the
likability issue. “It’s not ‘American Idol.’ You have to vote smart.”

Olivia Cooper, 41, of Concord said, “When you think you’re not going to
make it, it’s heart-wrenching when you want something so much.”

Gloria Steinem wrote in The Times yesterday that one of the reasons she
is supporting Hillary is that she had “no masculinity to prove.” But
Hillary did feel she needed to prove her masculinity. That was why she
voted to enable W. to invade Iraq without even reading the National
Intelligence Estimate and backed the White House’s bellicosity on Iran.

Yet, in the end, she had to fend off calamity by playing the female
victim, both of Obama and of the press. Hillary has barely talked to
the press throughout her race even though the Clintons this week whined
mightily that the press prefers Obama.

Bill Clinton, campaigning in Henniker on Monday, also played the
poor-little-woman card in a less-than-flattering way. “I can’t make her
younger, taller or change her gender,” he said. He was so low-energy at
events that it sometimes seemed he was distancing himself from her. Now
that she is done with New Hampshire, she may distance herself from him,
realizing that seeing Bill so often reminds voters that they don’t want
to go back to that whole megillah again.

Hillary sounded silly trying to paint Obama as a poetic dreamer and
herself as a prodigious doer. “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized
when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act,” she said. Did any
living Democrat ever imagine that any other living Democrat would try
to win a presidential primary in New Hampshire by comparing herself to
L.B.J.? (Who was driven out of politics by Gene McCarthy in New
Hampshire.)

Her argument against Obama now boils down to an argument against
idealism, which is probably the lowest and most unlikely point to which
any Clinton could sink. The people from Hope are arguing against hope.

At her victory party, Hillary was like the heroine of a Lifetime movie,
a woman in peril who manages to triumph. Saying that her heart was
full, she sounded the feminist anthem: “I found my own voice.”