Thursday Reads: #WeWontBeErased

Good Morning!!

This is going to be a truly consequential election. Electing a woman to the presidency of the U.S. is going to be more difficult and more radical than electing a African American man in 2008 was. Some day America will elect an African American woman as president. How long with that take?

This is how change happens–very very slowly. In the beginning of this country only white men who were landowners could vote. It took until the mid-19th century for most states to allow universal white male suffrage. In 1870, African American men won the right to vote, but most states found ways to keep them from exercising that right. It wasn’t until August 18, 1920 that the 19th Amendment was ratified and women finally could vote in the U.S.

So it’s not surprising that an African American man was the first to break the white male hold on the presidency. If we really want to have a woman president in 2016, we are going to have to speak up loudly and demand it! And finally, more women are doing that. On Tuesday I wrote about how supporters of Hillary Clinton were able to get Twitter to remove the misogynistic hashtag #WordsThatDontDescribeHillaryClinton from its list of trending topics.

Yesterday female and male supporters of Hillary took it a step further after being inspired by a brilliant post by Joan Walsh at The Nation despite the magazine’s endorsement of Bernie Sanders. I know many or most of you have already read the piece, but I still want to quote from it today. Why I’m Supporting Hillary Clinton, With Joy and Without Apologies. I’ve come to feel passion for Clinton herself, and for the movement that supports her.

Walsh begins by admitting she was hesitant to “come out of the closet” as a Clinton supporter because she is a journalist, but she spontaneously did so while talking to a woman in France who asked her if Americans–especially American women–were really ready to vote for a woman for president. She had turned down the opportunity to write a response to The Nation’s endorsement of Sanders, but while watching Monday’s CNN Democratic Town Hall, she changed her mind.

The town hall itself was great; Clinton, Sanders, and Martin O’Malley all looked admirable and presidential, in contrast to their awful Republican rivals. Democrats have a lot to be excited about this year.

But one moment got me particularly excited, and not in a good way. It came when a young white man—entitled, pleased with himself, barely shaving yet—broke the news to Clinton that his generation is with Bernie Sanders. “I just don’t see the same enthusiasm from younger people for you. In fact, I’ve heard from quite a few people my age that they think you’re dishonest. But I’d like to hear from you on why you feel the enthusiasm isn’t there.”

That Catch-22 question–sort of analogous to asking a man “when did you stop beating your wife?” enraged Walsh, as it likely did millions of women.

“I’d like to hear from you on why you feel the enthusiasm isn’t there.” I’m not sure I can unpack all the condescension in that question. I heard a disturbing echo of the infamous 2008 New Hampshire debate moment when a moderator asked Clinton: “What can you say to the voters of New Hampshire on this stage tonight, who see a resume and like it, but are hesitating on the likability issue?” Yes, the “likability” issue. I found myself thinking: Not again. Why the hell does she have to put up with this again?

My problem wasn’t merely with the insulting personal tone of the question. It was also the way the young man anointed himself the voice of his generation, and declared it the Sanders generation. Now, I know Bernie is leading among millennials by a lot right now in the polls. Nonetheless, millions of millennials, including millions of young women, are supporting Hillary Clinton. And my daughter, as Nation readers know, is one of them. I find it increasingly galling to see her and her friends erased in this debate.

That’s it. We are continually erased. Women are more than 50% of the U.S. population, but the issues that are important to us are casually dismissed by many (most?) male politicians, including Bernie Sanders. Sanders turns every discussion of racism or sexism back to his core issue of income inequality, seeming to deny that people of color and women are held back not just by economic factors, but also by bigotry and prejudice based on skin color and gender.

When I’ve disclosed that my daughter works for Clinton—in The Nation, on MSNBC, and on social media—we’ve both come in for trolling so vile it’s made me not merely defensive of her. It’s forced me to recognize how little society respects the passion of the many young women—and men—who are putting their souls into electing the first female president. It’s one thing to note that Sanders is winning among millennials; that’s true. It’s another to impugn the competence and dignity of the literally millions of millennials who support Clinton. Social-media trolls have had several fascinating and stunningly sexist reactions to the news of my daughter’s position. Obviously, she can’t be competent; I must have gotten her the job (in fact, she got it through a high-school friend who worked for Clinton and recommended her.) Obviously, she can’t think for herself; I must have indoctrinated her to support Clinton over Sanders. Or the flip side: Obviously, I have no integrity, and I support Clinton over Sanders only because my daughter is on her payroll.

This article by Joan Walsh is huge. She is a well respected, influential writer who frequently appears on T.V. and who is highly visible on social media. Yesterday her article made a big impact on Twitter. Hundreds of women thanked her for speaking up and describing what so many women had been thinking and feeling when that entitled young man insulted one of the most admired and respected women in the world.

Then Peter Daou suggested a hashtag, #WeWontBeErased that hundreds of people used. It even got on the trending list for awhile.

This is so true. We have been erased again and again in my lifetime. We were erased in school when we were told that girls couldn’t participate in sports, that we couldn’t do math or science, that we couldn’t grow up to have “serious” careers. No. We should be housewives and mothers period. And if we were really so desperate as to want a paying job, we were told we could be teachers, nurses, or secretaries–certainly not lawyers or doctors or university professors.

We were erased during the political struggles of the 1960s and ’70s when we demanded our rights, when we wanted rape to be prosecuted as a serious crime, when we demanded that child abuse and incest be seen and punished, when we wanted equal pay for equal work. Our years of work for an Equal Right Amendment were also erased.

We were erased in the 1980s when the fight against AIDS and the struggle for gay rights took precedence over our silly demands for equality with men. We were erased in the 1990s when the Senate ignored Anita Hill’s claims of sexual harassment and put her abuser on the Supreme Court. We were erased in recent decades as right wing Republicans (and even some Democrats) passed laws that restricted reproductive choices and voted against laws to protect women from gender-based violence.

When will it end? The election of a woman president could be a beginning of the end. To the “progessives” who think the election of an African American man was transformational, to those who argue that electing a 74-year-old man who identifies as a socialist would be a “transformational moment”: electing a woman as President of the U.S. would be even more “transformational.” It would be radical.

Maybe I’ll be mocked for saying this–as Hillary was mocked in 1993 for her speech in Austin and for her vision of “love and kindness.” I don’t care. I’m excited and enthusiastic at the prospect of electing a woman to the presidency. Not only that, I’m exited and enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton as that person we will elect.

I wholeheartedly agree with Joan Walsh:

I appreciated Sanders supporter Kathy Geier’s acknowledgment here in The Nation that her candidate once again came off as tone-deaf on an issue of gender. Yet Geier seconded Sanders’s assertion that these two groups fighting for reproductive justice deserve to be termed “establishment”—and therefore unfavorably compared to the upstart, grassroots, and genuinely radical groups that back Sanders.

I just don’t see it that way. I think there are few issues as radical as advancing the reproductive autonomy of women. And I think it’s hard to be truly establishment when dangerous men are shooting up your clinics, and the Republican Congress is persistently voting to strip you of your funding. Yes, Planned Parenthood and NARAL have worked hard to become respected political players in the last 30 years, because the women they represent need political clout, not just services. But I’m old enough to remember when feminists were told that our issues—“cultural” issues like abortion and contraception—were costing Democrats elections, so couldn’t we pipe down for a little while? Now we’re the establishment?

Just like my lefty friends who praise Sanders for loudly promoting the single-payer solution to healthcare because it’s important to raise the issue’s standing and profile, I praise Clinton for making repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which bars Medicaid from paying for abortion for poor women, a major public campaign issue. I acknowledge Sanders has voted the right way, and I’m grateful for it. But Clinton is leading on it, the same way she brought up the vile Planned Parenthood video hoax in the very first Democratic debate. That leadership matters to me.

Dorothy Rodham and Hillary Clinton

And this:

Finally, I’m struck by the insistence among Sanders supporters that Democrats who support Clinton—and right now, we are still the majority—are doing so joylessly, like party automatons.

Because our enthusiasms and excitement don’t count–see how it works? Our words, our thoughts, our wishes, our dreams, our goals are erased because we are just silly women. Well, I won’t be silent. I’m sick and tired of being told there is no enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. I’m enthusiastic about her and so are millions of other women and men. If Hillary is elected, we’ll face more of this garbage, but we have to get her elected if we want real change and a real voice in government for women.

Please post your thoughts and any links you want to share in the comment thread. We’ll have a live blog later for tonight’s GOP debate.

Tuesday Reads: Getting Knocked Down and Getting Back Up

Clinton speaking at the University of Texas in Austin in 1993. Courtesy Clinton Library

Good Afternoon!!

Apologies for the late post. I had to spend my morning getting my bearings. When I first get up, my routine is to get some tea or coffee and open up Google News to see what people are talking about. Lately I’ve been looking at Twitter too.

The first story that caught my eye on Google is this one by Collum Borchers at The Washington Post.

Why Hillary Clinton is struggling, in 3 CNN audience questions.

Boy, did Hillary Clinton get a dose of reality in Iowa, where polls are all over the place but show her losing ground one week before the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. Right out of the gate, questioners hit the former secretary of state with some of the least flattering narratives about her.

This was the first question from the audience:

It feels like there is a lot of young people like myself who are very passionate supporters of Bernie Sanders. And, I just don’t see the same enthusiasm from younger people for you. In fact, I’ve heard from quite a few people my age that they think you’re dishonest, but I’d like to hear from you on why you feel the enthusiasm isn’t there.

And this was the second:

Secretary Clinton, earlier this month Vice President Joe Biden said you were a newcomer to the issue of income inequality, while praising Senator Sanders for his authentic voice on the issue. How do we know that you will keep this issue a top priority? ….

Even the third question, which came from a man who identified himself as a strong Clinton supporter, introduced the troublesome topic of Benghazi. (The man said he was impressed by Clinton’s performance during a congressional hearing on the 2012 attack last fall.)

When compliments come with that kind of baggage, you’re having a rough night.

Borchers admits that Hillary gave good, non-defensive answers, but gosh–those questions!

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a CNN town hall at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, Monday, Jan. 25, 2016. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Reporters do this again and again. Maybe Borchers needs to take a look in the mirror and ask where the “narratives” about Hillary Clinton came from. Obviously, it’s from the media. Republicans attack Hillary, of course; but the media is responsible for their decades of ugly, sexist reporting and opinion pieces on this “narrative” they created and pushed.

Besides, does anyone really believe CNN didn’t screen the questions and choose those? Give me a break.

After that, I took a look at Twitter. This hashtag was trending: #WordsThatDon’tDescribeHillary. I hated to look at it because I already knew what I would see–vicious misogyny, sexism, and probably violent threats. But I clicked anyway and I found just what I expected.

What did surprise me is that many Twitter users pushed back and eventually Twitter took down the hashtag. Of course one of them was Peter Daou, a tireless fighter against the war on women.

and Tom Watson.

And Twitter took it down!

And there were thank yous.

Suddenly I saw that there are good people in the world too. The Bernie bros are probably not even the majority of people who support Bernie Sanders. But they are hurting him badly with undecided voters who witness their behavior. If you need evidence of that, look at this tweet from Sanders’ “rapid response director.” He even pinned the tweet to top of his feed.

I don’t know how Hillary does it. She was wonderful last night–friendly, warm, genuine, and willing to answer every question–unlike grumpy old man Bernie Sanders. But what Bernie bros (sadly, a lot of them are women) heard was just the ugly voices in their heads.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton greets attendees after a CNN town hall at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, Monday, Jan. 25, 2016. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

I guess we’ll find out next Monday whether the Bernie bro strategy works on Iowa voters. Meanwhile, I’m going to follow Hillary’s lead and “get back up” every time I get “knocked down” by this garbage.

Last night RalphB shared a wonderful article on Hillary by Ruby Cramer at Buzzfeed. (That’s where I found the photo of Hillary at the top of this post.)

Hillary Clinton wants to talk to you about love & kindness.

On this particular day, after a routine campaign event at a college in Manchester, New Hampshire — after taking photos and giving a speech, after getting a question from the audience about the women who’ve alleged they were sexually assaulted by her husband and answering it without hesitation or alarm, after moving onto the noise and chaos of a crowded rope line —Clinton is shepherded away to the quiet of an available room: the building’s industrial-style kitchen. And it’s in this setting, seated in a fold-out chair at a small table, that Clinton seems almost surprised by the most basic line of questioning: why she runs.

“I think most people who interview me never ask me,” she says. “They nibble a little bit around the edges but there’s very—” Clinton turns to the one aide present, her press secretary, also seated at the table, and asks him to think back: “I don’t know of very many instances in the last 14 years that we’ve had these kinds of conversations.”

She has been asked every day, for decades, what she thinks, but rarely why. And here, next to a dishwasher, Clinton slides right back into the subject. Her words are slow and deliberate and she takes the conversation to this discussion she’s been trying to talk about, to bring up on the trail, as she is again ensnared in a campaign that’s more difficult than expected, in an election dominated by the language of anger and fear.

“I am talking about love and kindness,” she says.

As Clinton sees it, she’s really talking about a “shorthand” for her personal and political beliefs, for all the impulses that shape what she does and how she does it. She is talking about the core of “what I believe and who I am.” Even if no one views her that way. Even if she’s never been quite able to explain it. Even if she still isn’t known for the vision she’s been trying to share for decades, going back to the beginning. Even if her earnest efforts to connect with people are hampered not just by her image, but by the actual barriers of public life. After so many years, how do you convince a nation full of people who think they know everything about you that they don’t?

Hillary Clinton during giving her keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2008.

The article goes back to Clinton’s early days as First Lady, and how she was “mocked” and ripped to shreds by the DC Villagers.

This was 1993. She is first lady — a few months into the job, head of her husband’s health care effort, split between the White House and the hospital room in Little Rock, Arkansas, where her father lies brain-dead, 18 days after a stroke. There is a speech she can’t get out of — 14,000 people at the University of Texas — and on the plane ride to Austin, in longhand, she sketches out a second appeal for the same “mutuality of respect.”

“We need a new politics of meaning,” she tells the crowd. “We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring… a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”

Again, she makes news. Again, reporters come calling. And again, Clinton tries to explain. That spring, she gives a series of interviews on the subject of her beliefs — political, philosophical, and spiritual….

The speech and subsequent interviews — earnest, unembarrassed, and decidedly open — are laughed at in Washington. Columnists call her a New Age “aspiring philosopher queen.” One compares her remarks to “a cross between Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech and a term paper on Siddhartha,” with all the “distinctive marks of adolescent self-discovery.” The New Republic asks: “It is good to hear the First Lady is also pro-meaning, but before we sign on, one question: What on earth are these people talking about?”

Another two decades pass, and Hillary Clinton doesn’t sound like she did then.

This was 2015, back at that small table in New Hampshire, a couple weeks before Christmas….This was the day in June after nine people were gunned down, mid-prayer, inside their church in South Carolina. Clinton had even been there that day, in Charleston, and received the news of the shooting on the plane ride out. She was speaking at a conference on the West Coast, and that’s where it slipped out for the first time. “I know it’s not usual for somebody running for president to say what we need more of in this country is love and kindness,” she said. “But that’s exactly what we need more of.”

What an amazing article! It will be lost on the Bernie bros and the other Hillary haters, but let’s remember that Hillary Clinton is very popular in both Iowa and New Hampshire. In 2008, after Barack Obama and John Edwards ganged up on Hillary in a debate (“you’re likable enough,” Obama said) New Hampshire voters went out to the polls and gave Obama the shock of his life so far when Hillary won the primary. It’s never over until the votes are counted.

Hillary and NH Sen. Jean Shaheen

Here’s New Hampshire Senator Jean Shaheen, a Hillary supporter on the polls in her state:

“Well, listen, I think it’s always nice when you’re ahead in the polls, but I’ve been involved in politics long enough to know that the polls don’t mean much. They’re a snapshot in time and they’re based whoever you happen to reach in your polling sample,” the New Hampshire senator said to WKBK Radio on Wednesday.

“They’re gonna fluctuate. They’re go up and down,” she added, citing Clinton’s win in New Hampshire in 2008 after several polls showed that she would lose.

Sanders leads Clinton 60% to 33% in a recent poll from WMUR/CNN of Granite State voters.

“The thing that I think is important about this poll is that it shows almost half of the voters in New Hampshire that plan to vote in the Democratic primary still haven’t decided who they’re gonna vote for. So there’s still lots of room for movement in the race,” she said.

We’ll find out in the next couple of weeks.

More interesting stories, links only:

Poynter: Media strains to analyze Dems’ Iowa town hall.

Michael Cohen at The Boston Globe: Could President Sanders defeat a Republican Congress?

LA Times: Sanders turns confrontational and Clinton emphasizes her record in Iowa town hall.

Des Moines Register: Students to choose between class, caucus.

Jill Abramson on why many young women pick Sanders over Clinton: ‘Hillary, can you excite us?’: the trouble with Clinton and young women.

Rebecca Traister on Samantha Bee’s new late night show: Smirking in the Boys’ Room.

Mother Jones: This Is What Happens When We Lock Children in Solitary Confinement.

That’s all I have for you today. I hope you enjoy the rest of your Tuesday.