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The Weepy Witch and the Secret Muslim
by Katha Pollitt The media are hopelessly sexist and relentlessly trivial. So much we've learned from the mass hysteria over Hillary Clinton's "emotional moment" in New Hampshire.
(Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Robert L. Jamieson: "She morphed into a 'compassion brand' -- like, irony of ironies, Kleenex"; New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: "Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?").
Even Southern charmer John Edwards couldn't resist observing that a commander in chief needed "strength and resolve" -- a view echoed by Fox commentator Dick Morris ("There could well come a time when there is such a serious threat to the United States that she breaks down") and given full misogynous display by nationally syndicated cartoonist Pat Oliphant's "Madam President Meets the Bad Guys," portraying a dumpy, tearful Hillary surrounded by Osama, Kim Jong Il and similar.
All this fuss over a welling of the eyes so brief that if you blinked your own you'd miss it. I have moments like that every day! This was the Dean Scream all over again: a nano-nothing whipped into a self-congratulatory media typhoon.
[Republished at PFP with express Agence Global permission.]
Barring an Edwards upset, the Democratic Party is going to
nominate either a white woman or a black man as its presidential
candidate. But if the campaign becomes a competition on race and
gender, the winner will be a white man from the GOP.
In the 24/7 chat room, reality never dawns: The narrative is
tweaked, not junked. Thus, when Hillary dared to win the New Hampshire
primary although pundits had already gleefully hustled her off the
stage, the script was quickly rewritten from Tears Sink Woman to Tears
Save Woman: 46 percent of women voters, the silly dears, supported a
"humanized" Hillary, according to exit polls. (Bill Maher: "They wanted
to see the robot cry.")
But maybe women supported Hillary this one time
to protest cable blowhards like Chris Matthews, who capped his long
career of insane Hillary hatred with this zinger: "The reason she's a
front-runner is because her husband messed around." Or perhaps, as
Susan Faludi and Gail Collins suggested, middle-aged women see in
Hillary a calm and competent multitasker like themselves. Lost in the
kerfuffle: Hillary won not only among women but also among voters over
40 and those without a college degree.
I've written many
times about sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton as an old, ugly,
castrating witch-and-what-rhymes-with-it, but Gloria Steinem's New York
Times op-ed in defense of her, "Women Are Never the Front-Runners," was
not helpful, to put it mildly. "Gender is probably the most restricting
force in American life," Steinem wrote. "Black men were given the vote
a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot,
and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to
the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of
obedient family members in the latter)." Yes, black men got the vote
first, although they could be lynched for using it. Shirley Chisholm,
the black Congresswoman who ran for President in 1972, did famously
write, "Of my two handicaps, being female put many more obstacles in my
path than being black."
But Barack Obama is only the third
black senator in the modern era; Deval Patrick is only the second black
governor. It may be true, as Steinem suggests, that "the sex barrier
[is] not taken as seriously as the racial one." But that doesn't mean
the racial barrier really is less serious. It just means that the
public expression of racism is beyond the pale in a way that the public
expression of misogyny is not.
True, nobody's likely to
compare Obama to Kleenex; there will be no cartoons involving
watermelon and fried chicken. Instead, as his campaign becomes more of
a threat, opponents will try to remove his "postracial" mantle.
Already, e-mails circulate claiming he's a secret Muslim who took the
oath of office on a Koran -- indeed these rumors are so widespread
MSNBC's Brian Williams asked Obama about them in the Nevada debate.
Hillary's campaign strategist Mark Penn, and Hillary supporters black
billionaire Robert Johnson and Representative Charles Rangel, have
reminded the world of Obama's self-confessed teenage drug experiences.
(The Clinton campaign claimed that when Johnson referred to Obama
"doing something in the neighborhood -- I won't say what he was doing,
but he said it in the book," he merely meant community organizing.
Yeah, right.) Most recently, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen,
mainstreaming attacks that have been bubbling for weeks in the
right-wing blogosphere, floated the question of anti-Semitism because
Obama belongs to a black megachurch run by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright
Jr., whose house magazine last year honored Louis Farrakhan. "It's
important to state right off that nothing in Obama's record suggests he
harbors anti-Semitic views," Cohen writes, before going on to suggest
exactly that. "I don't for a moment think that Obama shares Wright's
views on Farrakhan. But the rap on Obama is that he is a fog of a man.
We know little about him, and, for all my admiration of him, I wonder
about his mettle." (In fact, Obama has denounced anti-Semitism many
times and has said of Wright, "We don't agree on everything.")
Meanwhile,
Mitt Romney practices Mormonism, which until a 1978 "revelation"
explicitly preached black inferiority and is still explicitly sexist in
about a thousand ways. Mike Huckabee gets a free pass from the media
for being a Southern Baptist minister who in 1998 went on record
supporting the denomination's new doctrine of wifely submission.
Barring
an Edwards upset, the Democratic Party is going to nominate either a
white woman or a black man as its presidential candidate. This is
indeed a testament to how far we have come. Still, it wouldn't take
much innuendo and truth-twisting to turn Barack Obama into the Muslim
Al Sharpton -- surely no more than it's taken to turn Hillary Clinton
into the lesbian Lady Macbeth. That's why it's crucial not to get into
an oppression sweepstakes. If the campaign becomes a competition
between race and gender -- Frederick Douglass versus Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, as one New York Times graphic put it -- the winner on election
day will be whichever white man the Republican Party nominates.
Katha
Pollitt is a regular columnist for The Nation magazine. Her new book is
Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories (Random House).
Agence
Global is the exclusive syndication agency for The Nation, Le Monde
diplomatique, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Mona
Eltahawy, Rami G. Khouri, Peter Kwong, Patrick Seale and Immanuel
Wallerstein.
-------------------
Released: 18 January 2008
Word Count: 980
Rights & Permissions Contact: Agence Global, 1.336.686.9002, rights@agenceglobal.com
-------------------
Wake up Democrats! written by William Ward,
January 23, 2008
Boy! Man! Woman, this is just what I have been thinking; it's a "Trap" per the Rapper TI. It the party getting dumber or has the quest for making history clouded the judgement of the democratic leadership. I want change in our leadership in this country and I think Obama offers us the best hope, Edwards can't unify the country unless it is done on a reacial basis. I'd like to see Oboma in the Whitehous and the Clinton's in the Vice President quarters! If she wins the nomination in our exist world of coopetition and media speak, I will wear out my shoes and voice to support either combination. The question is will either be bold enough to pick the other, once nominated?
Writings 
The media are hopelessly sexist and relentlessly trivial. So much we've learned from the mass hysteria over Hillary Clinton's "emotional moment" in New Hampshire. 
But maybe women supported Hillary this one time
to protest cable blowhards like Chris Matthews, who capped his long
career of insane Hillary hatred with this zinger: "The reason she's a
front-runner is because her husband messed around." Or perhaps, as
Susan Faludi and Gail Collins suggested, middle-aged women see in
Hillary a calm and competent multitasker like themselves. Lost in the
kerfuffle: Hillary won not only among women but also among voters over
40 and those without a college degree.
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