By the following year, progressive forces looking for a new candidate—not just in the Senate but for the presidency—were approaching him with offers to, as Obama said, “drink the Kool-Aid.” Though he resisted at first, the draft effort gradually became a movement with a life of its own. Though such African American leaders as Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and Reverend Jesse Jackson had run, Obama became the first with a serious chance of being a major-party candidate. Together, he and Hillary could turn this election into the first in history with candidates who looked like the country. It wasn’t campaign season yet, but wherever I went, from campuses to living rooms, questions about the possibility of a new kind of president were being raised.
Though Obama was younger, with less national, international, and Senate experience than Hillary, I still thought it was too soon for the country to accept a woman commander in chief. Moreover, Obama’s Kennedyesque appeal created a rare and precious chance to break the racial barrier. But to me, their shared content was way more important than different forms. She was a civil rights advocate. He was a feminist. They were a modern-day echo of the abolitionist and suffragist era, when black men, black women, and white women—the groups white male supremacists had worked so hard and cruelly to keep apart—turned this country on its head by working together for universal adult suffrage.
Whenever I was on the road before the primaries, I saw a revival of this unconscious coalition in audiences that were interested in politics as never before. There was enthusiasm for these two new faces that stood for a shared worldview. In audiences from very blue states to very red ones, support was more like a Rorschach test than a division by race and sex. For instance, 94 percent of black Democrats had a favorable view of Hillary Clinton, compared to an 88 percent favorable view of Obama. After all, he was new on the national stage and the Clintons had earned a reputation for racial inclusiveness that caused African American novelist Toni Morrison to famously call Bill Clinton “the first black president.” Both white and black women were more likely than their male counterparts to support Hillary Clinton—and in my observation, also more likely to believe that she couldn’t win. Male and female black voters were more likely than white voters to support Obama and also to believe he couldn’t win. Each group was made pessimistic by the depth of the bias they had experienced.
Some mostly white audiences seemed to hope this country could expiate past sins by electing Obama. As one white music teacher rose in an audience to say, “Racism puts me in prison, too—a prison of guilt.” Many parents of little girls, black and white, were taking them to Clinton rallies so they would know that they, too, could be president. Older women especially saw Hillary Clinton as their last and best chance to see a woman in the White House. And not just any woman:7 as one said, “This isn’t just about biology. We don’t want a Margaret Thatcher, who cut off milk for schoolchildren.” They wanted Hillary Clinton because she supported the majority interests of women. On the other hand, many young black single mothers said they supported Obama because their sons needed a positive black male role model. A divorced white father told me that Obama’s life story had inspired him to drive hundreds of miles to see his son every week. “I don’t want to be the father Obama almost never saw,” he explained. “I want to be the father he wished he had.” In Austin, Texas, an eighty-year-old black woman said she was supporting Hillary because “I’ve seen too many women who earned it, and too many young men who came along and took it.”
But the press, instead of reporting on these shared and often boundary-crossing views as an asset for the Democratic Party—after all, Democratic voters would have to unify around one of these candidates eventually—responded with disappointment and even condescension. They seemed to want newsworthy division. Soon frustrated reporters were creating conflict by turning any millimeter of difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama into a mile. Since there was almost none in content, they emphasized ones of form. Clinton was entirely summed up by sex, and Obama was entirely summed up by race. Journalists sounded like sports fans who arrived for a football game and were outraged to find all the players on the same team.
It dawned on me that in the abolitionist and suffragist past, a universal suffragist movement of black men and white and black women also had been consciously divided by giving the vote to black men only—and then limiting even that with violence, impossible literacy tests, and poll taxes. Now, this echo of divide-and-conquer in the past was polarizing the constituencies of two barrier-breaking “firsts,” never mind that the candidates were almost identical in content. As in history, a potentially powerful majority was being divided by an entrenched powerful few.
Maybe attributing a divide-and-conquer motive was unfair in a country that treats everything like a horse race, but there had to be some reason why the press did not consider what I witnessed on the road—delight in two “firsts” with similar purpose—worth reporting.
Soon, a person or a group’s choice of one candidate was assumed to be a condemnation of the other. I could feel fissures opening up between people who had been allies on issues for years. The long knives of reporters—plus a few shortsighted partisans in both campaigns—deepened those fissures until they bled.
To make a case for linking racism and sexism instead of ranking them—and for unifying around one of these two firsts in the national election—I wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “Coalition vs. Competition.”8 I called either/or media questions “dumb and destructive,” since the two candidates were so much the same on issues. Also, it was way too soon to know who could survive the primaries, so I ended this way: “We could double our chances by working for one of these candidates, not against the other. For now, I’ve figured out how to answer reporters when they ask if I’m supporting Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. I just say yes.”
As the New York primary approached, I certainly wasn’t against either candidate, but I still had to decide who to vote for. So I sat down with a yellow pad and made a list of pros and cons for each. On the issues, there were differences of emphasis, but both wanted a country in which individual futures were not limited by sex or race, class or sexuality. Both advocated a foreign policy that was less about oil and support for dictators and more about support for democracies and the environment. Hillary had voted in the Senate for the first U.S. military action in Iraq—and some Obama supporters were making much of that—but Obama himself was honest enough to say that had he been in the Senate at that time and given the same false information about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction,” he didn’t know how he would have voted. The only obvious difference was experience. As a partner, Hillary Clinton had spent twelve years in state government, eight in the White House, plus eight more on her own in the U.S. Senate—all of them fighting the right-wing extremists who controlled what once was the Republican Party; the next president would face the same opposition. Obama had crucial multicultural experience growing up, time spent as an organizer in Chicago that meant a lot to me, seven years in a state legislature, three years in the U.S. Senate, but much less experience fighting and being attacked by the political ultra-right wing. Both the good and the bad news was that he was a peacemaker and skilled in the art of finding a middle path. This primary race was a rare case in which the female candidate was more experienced in big-time political conflict than the male candidate. She was more familiar with extremists for whom there was no middle ground.
I knew that outside the women’s movement, I would be better liked if I chose Obama. Women are always better liked if we sacrifice ourselves for something bigger—and something bigger always means including men, even though something bigger for men doesn’t usually mean including women. In choosing Hillary, I would be seen as selfish for supporting a woman “like” me. But that was a warning, too. Needing approval is a female cultural disease, and often a sign of doing the wrong thing.
There was one more note on my yellow pad. Because I still believed it was too soon for Hillary or a
ny woman to be accepted as commander in chief, I wrote: If I were Obama, I would not feel personally betrayed by lack of support from someone like me, a new ally. If I were Hillary Clinton, I might feel betrayed by a longtime supporter who left me for a new face. In other words: Obama didn’t need me to win. Hillary Clinton might need me to lose.
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ONCE AGAIN THE ROAD educated me—by showing me what voters were subjected to. I began to think that the wait for a female president might be even longer than I imagined. At airport gift shops, a nutcracker made to look like Hillary Clinton was sold as an election novelty. Her legs were handles, and her crotch was the place for cracking nuts. When I asked a sales clerk in the Washington, D.C., airport if there were complaints, she said yes, there had been a few, but it was selling well. When I asked her if there were similar nutcrackers of the male candidates, she said, “Certainly not!”
On campuses, I saw young men wearing T-shirts that said TOO BAD O.J. DIDN’T MARRY HILLARY. All the wearers I saw were white. When I asked students what they thought about this slogan, they agreed it was uncool. They assured me most guys just put on their T-shirts and Facebook pages BROS BEFORE HOS.
I watched as MSNBC political analyst Tucker Carlson said of Hillary Clinton, “I have often said when she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.” I thought: No wonder that nutcracker is selling well. Also on MSNBC, Chris Matthews announced, “Let’s not forget—and I’ll be brutal—the reason she’s a U.S. senator, the reason she’s a candidate for president, the reason she may be a frontrunner, is her husband messed around. That’s how she got to be senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn’t win there on her merit.”9
A woman reporter for The Washington Post wrote about a Hillary suit jacket that disclosed a bit of cleavage and called it “a provocation.” No such charge had been leveled at male presidential candidates, from John F. Kennedy to Obama, when they were photographed on the beach in bathing suits. About Hillary, Rush Limbaugh asked: “Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older on a daily basis?” According to another Fox News analyst, “If that’s the face of experience, I think it’s going to scare away a lot of those independent voters.” At CNN, women correspondents told me they had been cautioned not to wear pantsuits on camera—they might look too much like Hillary.
All this reductionist commentary might have been fair game, had it been directed at all the primary candidates: say, Senator Joe Biden’s obvious hair transplants; or Senator John Edwards’s resemblance to a Ken doll; or Governor Mitt Romney’s capped teeth and dyed hair; or Senator John McCain’s special shoes to make him taller; or Governor Bill Richardson’s resemblance to an unmade bed; or Senator Obama’s ears, about which he himself made jokes. But it wasn’t.
No wonder such misogyny was almost never named by the media. It was the media.
In making my list about the pluses and minuses of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, I discovered I was angry. I was angry because it was okay for two generations of Bush sons to inherit power from a political patriarchy even if they spent no time in the White House, but not okay for one Clinton wife to claim experience and inherit power from a husband whose full political partner she had been for twenty years. I was angry because young men in politics were treated like rising stars, but young women were treated like—well, young women. I was angry about all the women candidates who put their political skills on hold to raise children—and all the male candidates who didn’t. I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one. And I was angry because the media took racism seriously—or pretended to—but with sexism, they rarely bothered even to pretend. Resentment of women still seemed safe, whether it took the form of demonizing black single mothers or making routine jokes about powerful women being ball-busters.
In other cases of unadmitted bias, I had used the time-honored movement tactic of reversing the race or sex or ethnicity or sexuality involved, then seeing if the response would be the same. Fueled by months of repressed anger, I asked: What might have happened if even an empathetic man like Obama had been exactly the same person—but born female?
I called the result “A Short History of Change.” The New York Times op-ed page changed it to “Women Are Never Front-Runners.” Published on the morning of the New Hampshire primary, it asked why the sex barrier was not taken as seriously as the racial one.
The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.
I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together….
It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.
I added that I was supporting Hillary Clinton based only on her greater experience. About Obama, I wrote, “If he’s the nominee, I’ll volunteer….To clean up the mess left by President Bush, we may need two terms of President Clinton and two of President Obama.”
The first response was overwhelmingly positive. Because Hillary Clinton unexpectedly won that New Hampshire primary, my column was even given some of the credit. The New York Times published a letter from a voter there to that effect. It was as if I’d written what many people were thinking. Most just seemed glad that I’d spoken up about the humiliation of a good woman.
But then a few calls came in from interviewers assuming that by supporting Hillary I was ranking sex over race—despite my lifetime of arguing that sexism and racism were linked, not ranked, and despite writing in that same op-ed that the caste systems of sex and race could only be uprooted together, I was seen as asking people to take sexism more seriously than racism.
When I went on a television show, an Obama supporter, a black woman academic, accused me by saying that “white women have been complicit in the oppression of black men and black women.” She talked many times more than I did, mentioned lynching, and said, “To take this kind of position in The New York Times struck me as the very worst of what feminism can offer.” I was left saying things like “I refuse to be divided on this” and pointing out that whether Hillary or Obama won the primary, she and I would be united in the general election. Afterward I felt as if I had been hit by a Mack truck.
From then on, every morning brought new attacks. I came to dread the particular ring of my cell phone. Though I had been called many things, from a baby killer to a destroyer of the family, those had come from people with whom I really disagreed. These attacks came from people whose opinion I valued and who were accusing me of holding a position I didn’t hold.
Online, I discovered part of the reason. The Times had used an ambiguous pull-quote to characterize the whole op-ed: “Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House.” I meant that in terms of pervasiveness, kitchen to White House, not that it was more—or less—important. However, I realized with a sinking heart that I should have known, in this context, that most is a four-letter word. Only conflict is news, and in agreeing to edits on the phone I had failed to make every sentence bulletproof. Definitely my fault. That quote was going around the world on the Web, and was seen by many more people than read the op-ed. I withdrew the whole thing from syndication by The New York Times, but it didn’t matter. The attacks grew increasingly virulen
t.
—
ANYBODY CAN BE WITH YOU when you’re right, but only friends are with you when you mess up. Many called to comfort me. At least one prominent African American woman leader said she had been asked by the Obama campaign to launch a major attack against me, and had refused. She told them I had earned the right to say what I thought.
If hard things ultimately have a purpose, then they aren’t so hard anymore. Therefore, I listed what I had learned:
1. It’s easy to forget that people can think you think what you don’t think.
2. Don’t write when you’re angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don’t.
3. A writer’s greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer’s greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both.
I also thought suddenly of the wisdom of my speaking partner, the late generous, outrageous, matchless Flo Kennedy. She found value in conflict, no matter what. “The purpose of ass-kicking is not that your ass gets kicked at the right time or for the right reason,” she often explained. “It’s to keep your ass sensitive.”
Remembering her words made me laugh out loud.
—
ONCE OBAMA WON, a few wise people in his and Hillary’s campaigns—who had been in touch all along—knew there had to be a healing.
With my friend and colleague Judy Gold, who was in charge of women’s issues for Obama’s campaign, I planned what we knew would be the first of many healing meetings. There were heartbroken older women who now knew they would never live to see a woman in the White House. There were younger ones who had grown up being told they could be anything, then been shocked by Hillary’s treatment and defeat. African American women and men who had supported Hillary also worried that some would punish them for working across racial lines. Oprah Winfrey and other women in public life who had supported Obama paid a price, too. Some criticized them for not supporting Hillary Clinton, since women were their main supporters and constituency. This was also true for Karen Mulhauser, a white woman and an important and longtime feminist leader, who supported Obama. I had written and spoken in support of their right to choose Obama, and now they, too, helped to heal the wounds of Hillary Clinton’s defeat.
My Life on the Road Page 18
