Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
No sooner had Hillary Clinton proceeded from the Democratic
presidential debate to a speech at Wellesley College last week than the
wailing began.
Barack Obama hit the "Today" show accusing her of
playing the "don't pick on me" woman and a chorus line of media pundits
denounced her for having hurt the cause of feminism by acting like the
injured girl and dealing the "gender card."
Tomgram: Susan Faludi, Hillary Clinton and the Rescue Card
Whatever fears Americans have at the moment -- and with oil heading into the once unimaginable $100-a-barrel range and the housing market in freefall, fears are not unreasonable -- they do not add up to Fear with a capital "F," as in the days and weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001. They do not add up to the kind of abject fear that proved so useful to the Bush administration as it prepared to launch its Global War on Terror and future invasion of Iraq by scaring Americans into passivity.
As Mark Danner wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times, war is a godsend for politicians, "for glowing at its heart is that most lucrative of political emotions: fear. War produces fear. But so too does the rhetoric of war." Right now, that rhetoric -- specifically the fear of terrorism -- is not much at the forefront of American minds. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that a modest 17% of Republicans and a vanishingly small 3% of Democrats put "terrorism" among their top two concerns. This may be one reason why the leading Republican candidates, with little to offer and saddled with seven years of George Bush, are so over the top on potentially fear-inducing subjects like war with Iran.
Of course, this is the present situation -- but it should never be forgotten just how close to the surface, how easily flushed from cover such Fear can be, given the right circumstances, which could easily enough arrive in 2008 on the wings of terror, via American planes heading Iran-wards, or in ways as yet unimaginable. No one has offered as stunning a vision of how this all worked after 9/11 as Susan Faludi in her remarkable new book, The Terror Dream, Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. No one has offered anything like the stunning description and analysis of just what dreams and terrors the deadly duo of al-Qaeda and the Bush administration conjured up from the deepest reaches of American consciousness.
When al-Qaeda played the terror card and the Bush administration cunningly responded with the "rescue" card, it took Americans deep into their cultural past, right back to the earliest seventeenth-century bestsellers (captivity narratives of young women taken by Indian raiders on the "frontier" of New England) as well as into a more recent past of cowboy rescuers, the sort who saved helpless young women in the darkened movie theaters of George's and my own childhoods. Playing that rescue card was, as Todd Gitlin wrote recently at Truthdig.org, the "second hijacking" of 9/11. It took Americans from a confrontation with real enemies into a fantasy world that called up the most stereotypical roles in our gender dictionary. ("Welcome to war against an Axis of Injuns to protect the honor of the wimmenfolk.") It is an amazing, if thoroughly chilling, tale that we are not yet done with. The book is simply riveting, a must-read. The fantasies conjured up are still wildly, unpredictably at play including in the present, strange presidential campaign that Susan Faludi anatomizes below. Tom
They Always Play the Gender Card
But Hillary Shuffles the Deck
by Susan Faludi
No sooner had Hillary Clinton proceeded from the Democratic
presidential debate to a speech at Wellesley College last week than the
wailing began. Barack Obama hit the "Today" show accusing her of
playing the "don't pick on me" woman and a chorus line of media pundits
denounced her for having hurt the cause of feminism by acting like the
injured girl and dealing the "gender card."
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd contended that Clinton was trying to show "she
can break, just like a little girl…. If she could become a senator by
playing the victim after Monica, surely she can become president by
playing the victim now." FOX News' Mort Kondracke preached: "I think it
is very unattractive for a general election candidate, who wants to be
the Commander in Chief of the free world, to be saying 'They're ganging
up on me!' I mean, this is the NFL. This is not Wellesley versus Smith
in field hockey."
These indictments were conjured from the
slimmest of evidence. Even the New York Times, while "piling on," had
to do contortions to pin the victim label on Clinton's comments. As a
November 5th Times article put it: "Mrs. Clinton denies playing the
gender card -- at least in the traditional sense of saying that as a
woman she should be exempt from the traditional rough-and-tumble of
campaigns -- and her remarks on the subject have certainly been
oblique." For oblique, read frustratingly nonexistent. What she did say
-- at her alma mater before a whooping and roaring crowd of more than
1,000 young women -- was: "In so many ways, this all-women's college
prepared me to compete in the all-boys' club of presidential politics….
Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it, not now. So
let's roll up our sleeves and get to work together. We're ready to
shatter that highest glass ceiling."
What about that was so girl-with-her-finger-in-her-mouth frail?
The
indignation of Clinton's opponents may have a motive more genuine than
their desire to defend feminism. They are mad because they feel robbed.
Clinton, in fact, didn't play the victim card. The gender card she
played was the one every successful recent male presidential candidate
has played -- the rescuer card.
Rescuing Americans from the "Wolves"
Keep
in mind: The gender card is always played. It's even played in
presidential campaigns where all the candidates are men (or rather, as
Kondracke prefers, quarterbacks). Given the political culture -- and
for reasons embedded in our history -- that card usually involves a
morality play in which men are the rescuers and women the victims in
need of rescuing.
Bill Clinton understood the power of that
formula when he showcased his boyhood efforts to "stand up" to his
abusive stepfather and shield his mother from blows. When facing George
H.W. Bush, Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis learned
this lesson too late -- after he failed to fly into a vigilante-style
rage in response to an infamous televised debate question in October
1988 that went like this: "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and
murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?"
Dukakis' un-Duke-like reply about his wife -- "No, I don't, and I think
you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life" --
whacked his approval ratings from 49% down to 42% overnight and was
pivotal in denying him the election; as was that other failed
protection drama that dominated the campaign: the specter of black
convict Willie Horton ("every suburban mother's greatest fear," as one
of the Republican ads that inundated the airwaves put it), who raped a
woman after being furloughed in Massachusetts while Dukakis was
governor. His campaign belatedly, lamely, tried to counter in kind --
with an ad about a convict who escaped from a federal treatment program
and raped and killed a mother of two.
Post-9/11, with the
nation facing the constant threat of "savage" attack, the inclination
to play the gender rescue card became an imperative -- as was in full
evidence during the 2004 presidential campaign. "Every suburban
mother's greatest fear" was now not a black man's mug shot but a Muslim
terrorist's, and every suburban mother was recast as a Security Mom (a
mythical creature, as it happened, but that's another story).
Victory
on Election Day went to the candidate who best understood how to deal
from that deck. Both George W. Bush and John Kerry worked hard to
position themselves as the King of the Wild Frontier. (Both granted
long interviews to hunting and fishing magazines; both bragged about
their gun collections; Bush whacked at sagebrush and tree stumps; Kerry
stalked wild animals and waved their bloody pelts at journalists.)
Kerry's handlers, however, failed to put into play the female part of
the rescue equation. They counted on the Senator's decorated service in
Vietnam to qualify him for the hero role, especially in contrast to
Bush's AWOL record. What they were missing was a woman to rescue.
Bush's
advisers knew better, as was apparent in their political commercials.
In "Wolves," set in a dark forest invaded by a pack of wolves (read:
terrorists), a trembling female voiceover warned voters that Kerry
would make cuts in U.S. intelligence "so deep they would have weakened
America's defenses -- and weakness attracts those who are waiting to do
America harm." Kerry, in fact, had no plans to make such cuts, but that
hardly registered. "Wolves" engaged America's terror-dream, which the
GOP was going to vanquish with a cowboy swagger…. and a commanding
daddy "hug."
In the final weeks of the race, Bush's backers
unveiled "Ashley's Story," a 60-second commercial featuring the
President hugging a teenage girl named Ashley Faulkner, whose mother
had died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Ashley -- shown lying in a
hammock in her backyard, reading a novel with a Victorian lady on the
cover -- says: "He's the most powerful man in the world and all he
wants to do is make sure I'm safe."
The $14 million worth of
air time purchased made it the single most expensive political ad of
the race. Broadcast more than 30,000 times, it achieved saturation
level in the crucial swing states. In Ohio alone, the spot ran 7,000
times, a bombardment intensified by an Internet, phone, and direct-mail
campaign that distributed 2.3 million brochures showcasing The Hug.
Exit poll studies later concluded that "Ashley's Story" was critical to
the election results. Political analysts scored it "the most effective
ad" of the political season and post-election surveys found it to be
one of the two most remembered ads (the other being its evil twin, the
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth commercial attacking Kerry's combat
credentials).
Like Dukakis' campaign, Kerry's belatedly went
looking for women to protect. "No American mother should have to lie
awake at night wondering whether her children will be safe at school,"
Kerry insisted in a Philadelphia stump speech in September, seizing
upon a much-publicized school hostage crisis in Russia as an eleventh
hour opportunity to position himself as America's guardian. "When we
look at the images of children brutalized by remorseless terrorists in
Russia, we know that this is not just a political or military struggle
-- it goes to the very heart of what we value most -- our families. It
strikes at the bond between a mother and child." As president, he said,
he would regard it as "my sacred duty" to be able to say "I am doing
everything in my power to keep your children safe."
After
"Ashley's Story" aired, the Kerry campaign struggled to catch up with
two commercials featuring "Jersey Girl" 9/11 widows. In one, Kristen
Breitweiser said, "We are no safer today. I want to look in my
daughter's eyes and know that she is safe"; in the other, Mindy
Kleinberg tartly noted that her three children needed more than a "hug"
to feel safe. But when the Kerry's strategists raced to air the ads,
they discovered they'd been trumped: The Bush campaign had bought up
the commercial time in the big swing states.
It's doubtful the
ads would have helped, anyway. Throughout the presidential race, the
media largely ignored the Jersey Girls' efforts on behalf of the Kerry
campaign. Their grueling traveling and speaking tour for the candidate
yielded little coverage, and they were quickly deemed, in the words of
the New Republic, "virtual nonentities." By reminding Americans that
their protectors had failed them -- "We are no safer today" -- the
Jersey Girls' testimony not only violated the terms of the rescue
formula, but essentially put their guardians on trial.
The point is: this had as much to do with gender as security, something any successful candidate understood.
In
this election, the gender card has proved harder to play than usual. No
one's talking about security moms anymore. For their part, Democratic
candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards have not been running
security-scare -- and, by extension, gender-scare -- campaigns. And the
GOP candidates, while playing the security card for all it's worth,
have yet to find a way to assign a little Ashley to their twenty-first
century John Wayne -- though, no doubt, that will come.
Auditioning to be a Feminist John Wayne
So
far, the only person who has a lock on rescuing women is the one female
candidate. Accusations that she was promoting herself as a feminine
victim were not only ludicrously overplayed, but often outright
inaccurate, and in any case missed the point. Take for instance,
ABCNews.com's attempt to give new legs to the victim canard with a
November 5th headline: "Pelosi: Clinton Camp Played Gender Card."
Actually, as a quote in the article made clear, Speaker of the House
Nancy Pelosi made the opposite point: "[Sen. Clinton] said it best:
They're 'piling on' -- or whatever the words were -- 'because I'm the
front-runner.' That's why they're piling on…. If she was in third
place, they wouldn't say, 'Let's go attack a woman.'"
Hillary
Clinton's rescue of women departs from the previous male version. In
the old model, helpless women were saved from perilous danger by men.
In the new, women are granted authority and agency to rescue
themselves. Understanding the distinction is essential to an evaluation
of current American politics.
The clash between these two
rescue scenarios was on vivid display in late 2001, when President Bush
signed the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act (before a
window-dressing crowd of invited feminists) and declared that "the
central goal of the terrorists is the brutal oppression of women." His
concern for women's rights came to a halt, however, as soon as the
Taliban was driven from power and Afghanistan was theoretically
secured.
"Right now we have other priorities," a senior
administration official told the New York Times when asked (only two
and a half weeks into the Afghan war) what role women's rights would
have in a future government. "We have to be careful not to look like we
are imposing our values on them." Tellingly, even as the President was
trumpeting female oppression as a casus belli and part of his global
rescue scenario, his administration was deep-sixing an initiative that
would have provided financing for women-run NGOs in Afghanistan. After
all, if women proved capable of fending for themselves, if they laid
claim to self-determination instead of violation and dependency, the
rescue drama fell to pieces.
The Bush administration was no
more inclined to promote female strength at home than overseas; witness
the ways it sought to roll back women's progress on many fronts -- from
reproductive rights and employment equity to military status. By
hugging girls while trying to gut equal-opportunity programs, the White
House was working hard to institute its own cult of victimhood. But in
the end, 1,001 Ashleys couldn't save Bush -- nor the Republicans who
will inherit his mantle -- from the electorate's knowledge of his
multiple rescue failures, culminating in the image of our
Commander-in-Chief playing guitar while the citizens of New Orleans,
female and male both, cried for help.
This year, as always,
the presidential candidates must contend with the rescue formula,
complicated by the fact that Bush has so devalued its currency. In this
climate, Hillary Clinton can do what her male counterparts cannot. She
is, indeed, reaching for the gender card -- just as her accusers claim.
It's just a different card than they imagine. She is auditioning for
the role of rescuer on a feminist frontier.
She returned to
Wellesley to tell the female undergraduate "hostages" that she was
there to free them; she was there to help them "roll up our sleeves"
and "shatter that highest glass ceiling." As such, she latched onto a
crucial element of presidential races past, and possibly to come --
that at the core of all American political rescue fantasies is a young
woman in need.
In the general election, whoever the candidates
may be, they will be tempted, perhaps required, to show just those bona
fides. Clinton may be the only one who can do so without betraying the
signature of a disgraced cowboy ethic.
Susan Faludi is the
author of The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9-11 America. She
wrote the bestselling Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American
Women and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, and has written
for many publications, from the Wall Street Journal to the Nation.
Writings 
No sooner had Hillary Clinton proceeded from the Democratic
presidential debate to a speech at Wellesley College last week than the
wailing began. 
Subscribe to this comment's feed