The Misogynistic Media Lynching of Hillary Clinton

What kind of progressive American leader would stand silent, supporting with the cold reserve of ambition the disgracefully sexist, blatantly anti-feminist attack on a well-respected woman of the same party, a political foe perhaps, but a national Democratic leader?

Barack Obama - so far.

Make no mistake, Obama's breakthrough says something positive about the state of racial politics in our nation - or perhaps the lack of racial politics - and the involvement of young people in politics.

But his silence in the case of the cynical media lynching of Hillary Clinton by a national press corps obsessed with her gender is telling.

And unless Barack Obama speaks out, his campaign's chilling acceptance of the gender bias stirred by our national media will also remind many of Ronald Reagan's acceptance of the race-baiting southern strategy.

If Obama accepts the presidency, at least in part, because of abject sexism, a brutal gender attack on a female rival - the most famous female Democrat in history - he will set feminism in our country back a generation.

The Old Misogyny: Fear of Powerful Women

In Hillary-Hater land, the hostility toward Clinton tends to be expressed in bafflingly vague and emotional terms.

Discussions with self-declared enemies of Hillary Clinton, prominent and not, across the country yield a head-spinning barrage of motivations for their ill will, but one thing is immediately clear:

Few if any have anything to do with the mandated insurance coverage of Clinton’s health care plan (or HillaryCare, in hater parlance), her carefully triangulated position on Iran, or her incremental shift against the war in Iraq.

Instead, they say she is an extremist left-wing flower child masquerading as a moderate, or a warmongering hawk disguised as a liberal.

She’s a liar and a lesbian (short hair! pantsuits!), a cold fish and an adulteress.

She has no maternal instincts and is hobbled by a debilitating case of insecurity, for which she compensates by acting like a thug.

She is the spineless wife of a habitual cheat, and the willful enabler of her husband’s affairs.

She’s in politics to keep Bill around, and she ran for the Senate, and then the presidency, to exact revenge for his philandering. She has no God, or her devoutness is frighteningly fundamentalist.

She’s a condescending elitist who sees people—even her friends—as steps on a stairway to the presidency. She is a partisan, a panderer, the personification of everything that is wrong with America.

She is, to them, an empty vessel into which they can pour everything they detest about politicians, ambitious women, and an American culture they fear is being wrested from their control.

Misogyny Trumps Racism

Frontrunner Sen. Barack Obama says this presidential campaign is not about race. Or gender. Or any of the other dirty little creatures that have inhabited the id of American politics for so long.

"The choice in this election is not between regions or religions or genders," he says in that beautiful baritone of his. "It is not about rich versus poor, young versus old. And it is not about black versus white."

What voters are really choosing, he says, is between the past and the future.

The future to which he refers, of course, is him. He will take Americans to a colour-blind, rational, humanist place where a common good will overpower narrow self-interest.

This promise moves Obama's fans close to rapture. And it appears to be making millions of other Americans feel pretty good, too.

It is a lovely idea, after all, if utterly ungrounded in reality. And one suspects that the senator from Illinois, for all his transcendent rhetoric, knows that.

Sometimes he even lets on that he knows, as he did following the Super Tuesday primaries earlier this month.

"There is a segment of women," he said, "particularly older women, who feel a great affinity for [Hillary Clinton's] candidacy. And there's nothing wrong with that."

In other words, I'm telling you this contest is not about age or gender, but the old ladies sure like Hillary, don't they? A race about race

Obama was right, though, in his electoral assessment: Women did tend to vote for Clinton, especially older women.

And while Clinton would have been ill advised to do so, she could have said this in reply: "There is a segment of the population, particularly black people, who feel a great affinity for Obama's candidacy."

She would have been just as accurate. In state after state so far, the man who says this race is not about race has collected between 80 and 90 per cent of the black vote.

That is probably because Obama, despite his speeches about straddling ethnic worlds — citing his black, Kenyan father and white, Kansan mother — also chooses to describe himself as an African-American.

When he mounts the pulpit in Martin Luther King's old church in South Carolina, his groomed Harvard diction falls away and he rouses the congregation in the distinctive drawl and cadence that would sound ridiculous coming from a white man.

The tribes are heard from

He does make the very good point, however, that in large measure, his blackness is a factor others hung on his shoulders. Voters in black neighbourhoods, he says, tend to regard him as black.

As for the reaction of white Americans to his colour, says Obama, "I also notice when I'm catching a cab, nobody's confused about that, either."

But in a way, Obama himself is adopting the old one-drop-of-blood rule of the Jim Crow South, something that once guided race laws in the U.S. and has somehow seeped back into modern identity politics: It is that anyone with any African ancestry, no matter how little, is black.

Latino voters appear to agree with him. They have broken for Clinton in a noticeable way, perhaps confirming the popular wisdom that they are reluctant to support a member of that other ethnic group, with which they are vying for the title of dominant minority.

Other tribes are making their choices, too

Young people, by and large, have voted Obama. Older people, in the main, have voted Clinton, in some cases by huge margins. The rural states of Middle America remain conservative.

On the Republican side, evangelicals have tended to stick with Mike Huckabee, the former Baptist preacher (and governor) from Arkansas.

In fact, the only demographic that seems inclined to cross the old lines in large numbers is the white American male, especially the affluent white male.

That group tends to support Obama, although there's a lively debate here right now about the white man's motivation.

Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton addresses a campaign rally in Ohio, Feb. 14, 2008. (Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press)

A woman in the White House?

Some say that this shift of white males from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama only proves misogyny trumps racism, as columnist Maureen Dowd put it in the New York Times.

Adding to this sentiment, Republican strategist Matthew Dowd declared it is easier for a black man to capture the White House than for a woman.

There might be something to that. No one ever speaks openly about such ugly motivations, but anonymously authored political T-shirts, bumper stickers and buttons, of the sort that were being hawked this week at the ultra-right Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., are always informative.

The ones attacking Hillary Clinton are devised with no pretense of restraint. They are personal, laced with hatred and seem to take particular exception to her gender.

"KFC Hillary special," says one. "Two fat thighs, two small breasts and a left wing." "Stop Mad Cow disease," proclaims another. "No Hillary in 2008."

The mildest of the group read: "Life's a bitch, don't vote for one."

The anti-Obama slogans, by comparison, are almost polite. "Barack Obummer" just doesn't carry the pure sneer of the stuff thrown at Clinton.

Nor does "Obama: All sizzle, no steak," or the piercingly clever "Obama Sucks."

Tellingly, the T-shirt sloganeers have not tried the race angle on him. But others have, in particular the preening loudmouths who egg on this country's ideological slanging match from their perches on cable networks and talk radio shows.

Talk show host Glenn Beck questioned Obama's claim to blackness, saying he "might as well be white." Right-wing buzzsaw Ann Coulter said his first big accomplishment was "being born half black."

None of these jibes, however, really caught on.

Rush Limbaugh test-drove the moniker "Osama Obama" on his huge conservative radio audience, but that did not gain much traction so he switched gears and aired a song titled Barack the Magic Negro sung to the tune of Puff the Magic Dragon.

In modern America, that sort of stuff sounds like something from another century, which it is.

Racking up one primary victory after another, Obama barely seemed to notice the conservative jabs, although he did characterize Limbaugh's song parody as "dumb."

One suspects, though, that Obama will not be able to float above it all forever.

Eventually, if he wins the Democratic nomination, the conservative forces arrayed against him will likely devise more virulent ammunition.

But his persona is remarkably muck-resistant. He does, indeed, seem to inhabit two worlds and, so far at least, he has nimbly managed to exact advantages from both.

tags: hillary clinton  misogyny  sexism  media  president  2008  

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