Matt nails one of the most irritating aspects on the periphery of the Hillary Clinton campaign: the implication, both spoken and unspoken, that voting against Hillary Clinton is an act of sexism. I think it's pretty much indisputable that Hillary Clinton has played the gender card far more than Barack Obama has played the race card, and I think it's also pretty telling that Obama has played the gender card against Clinton, while the converse is completely untrue. Obama has run his campaign in such a way so as to show his own personal decency, and Clinton has run her campaign in such a way as to show her own venality and lust for power, all the while using feminists like Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan as useful idiots to convince her aged female supporters of the historical importance of her campaign to feminism, when it is difficult to make the case based on the evidence that Clinton cares at all for their cause. That she attacked Barack Obama's record on female issues before New Hampshire is telling--Obama's pro-choice and has supported all of the various anti-discrimination laws and so forth. Were Clinton a true feminist, she would have applauded Obama's commitment to women's issues and found some other grounds upon which to attack him. To Clinton, though, feminism is just another cudgel to be applied in the heat of a campaign. And then there's her husband, a man whose peccadilloes make the insistence, on the part of Steinem and that crowd, that he's so good on women's issues little more than a self-serving and cynical crock.
Are there some people who attack Hillary Clinton because they're afraid of strong women? Certainly. But you can't argue that sexism is worse than racism on one hand as a way of generating empathy for your candidate on one hand while simultaneously arguing that Clinton is more electable because Americans are so damn racist. After all, growing up in a Republican family in Illinois and marrying an ultra-successful politician on your way to becoming a political celebrity and multimillionaire and serious presidential candidate is, well, not exactly a story of The Man (literally) holding you down. The Clinton campaign's argumentation on this subject, as well as most subjects, is quite schizophrenic and is due in no small part to the Clintons' desire to have it every which way in order to score more political points. And I'm having a hard time seeing their core convictions because it seems like the only things they ever really campaign on are those things that happen to be in the Democratic mainstream, or those things that would increase their political power, like NAFTA or Welfare Reform. When viewed through that lens, everything starts to make sense. Why else would Hillary Clinton talk like Joe Lieberman when the war was popular, then start talking like John Edwards when it isn't? Remember when she wouldn't shut up about balanced budgets? Not so much anymore. Hillary Clinton is like John McCain (and most politicians, I suppose) in that they'll not only do anything to gain more power, but they'll say exactly what their base wants them to say in order to get elected. At least Bill Clinton grasped that free trade and welfare reform were necessary (and he was right on both counts, substantively and politically), although he seemed more interested in getting more corporate donors to write checks to the DNC than in, well, any number of other things. Still, he was right about those things and he deserves credit. I'm tired of these people.
