Disclaimer: this is a rant, like most of my political posts are. For the record, I do not speak for or represent the Obama or Clinton campaigns in any way, and I reserve the right to be a righteous biatch and censor comments I find offensive 
Also, please note the following two important points before reading:
- This may sound like I somehow discount the views of all Clinton supporters, which is not the case; I have lifelong friends who support Clinton and whose opinions I respect, even if I disagree with their points of view.
- In this rant, I discuss a particular kind of Clinton supporter I have encountered frequently in the past couple of months and seen representing the campaign on many political shows. However, I want there to be no misunderstanding – while I discuss supporters who fall into one of the main Clinton demographics, that is, women 55-65, I do not mean that I have a problem with, disrespect, or dislike the vast majority of people who fall into this group. I am making an observation about some of her supporters who fall into this age/gender group, which, while perhaps controversial, in no way reflects my general views on anyone other than those specifically described.
Apparently, Greg Craig, a former Clinton administration official from the State Department, has finally hit on the issue with Hillary Clinton’s “experience” that has been driving me nuts ever since she announced her candidacy: that is, because she was married to the president, she has presidential experience.
Now, my husband is a computer science professor, and my father is a chemistry professor. I’ve spent my life around those in academia, and I spent enough time in graduate school to have a pretty good understanding of how it all works. I don’t, however, have the requisite experience to be a professor myself – that is, I don’t have a PhD. I have an M.S., and all of the coursework and a good start on a dissertation for a PhD in linguistics, but I don’t have the PhD.
So if I apply for a professorial position based on the fact that I’ve been intimately exposed to the academic life and have some of the experience necessary to get a PhD, even though I don’t have one, in most fields I will be laughed out of the room, and rightly so.
So how is this any different? Why does no one ever talk about this? Craig says Clinton is grossly exaggerating her role in the Northern Ireland peace process, and geez, how is this a surprise? It’s only new that someone who should know is actually saying something about it.
My theory is that it has something to do with the nature of a large majority (or at least the visible majority) of Clinton supporters, and note that this isn’t due to what I’ve read in polls or political analysis – it’s what I saw at my precinct’s caucus and the county Democratic convention where I was a delegate.
Not to say that there weren’t other people supporting Clinton, or that there weren’t more than a few women at or around the age of 60 supporting Obama, but the vast majority of women my mother’s age were rabid, and I do mean rabid, Clinton supporters. Before anyone jumps on my case, let me explain exactly what I mean here.
The bizarre thing about a caucus, for anyone who lives in a primary state, is that secret voting is not allowed. Not only do you see who everyone is voting for, but you are allowed to speak for a few minutes on behalf of your candidate. While you are not allowed to actually debate, you can respond to what has been said before you to some degree. And in my precinct, the precinct captain for the Clinton campaign and a few of her supporters were, from the get-go, pushy. Pushy, and I’m not exaggerating when I say this, really rude. They got up and explained how they’d been waiting their whole lives for this (the implication being, however subtle they thought they were being, that they wouldn’t live long enough to see their dream of a woman president fulfilled by someone else), and how Hillary was just a gem, and… then they each just echoed the talking points. “Ready from Day One”, and “vetted”, and “experience”, and… blah blah. We’ve all heard it by now.
But the surprising part was how aggressive, and dare I say, mean some of them were. One of them, just before the actual vote, actually came up and got up in the face of one of the Obama supporters and in her most intimidating screech said, “So, young man, have you changed your mind about Hillary Clinton now that you’ve heard about her experience and how ready she is?” And he, with wide eyes, said that no he hadn’t, and repeated something about her Iraq war vote, something that drove many of us present to Obama.
I would say I’m a feminist, though not a feminazi, and I was so repulsed by the righteous anger rolling off of some of the supporters that it only reinforced my dislike of the candidate in general (and she is much more likeable than those supporters present at my caucus, I promise). Let it not be said that I don’t have some understanding of what it’s like to be a woman in a man’s world – I worked in a male-dominated field, and from time to time would run across those who thought I was in my position only because I lacked dangly bits between my legs – but I’m not so rabidly angry about it that I want to tear the eyes out of anyone who doesn’t think every woman publicly trying to break the glass ceiling is a gift from God.
And then I went to the county convention, and Christ, it wasn’t just my caucus, it was a bit less than a third of the damned room (giving credit for those Clinton supporters who were normal human beings). It got so that I could almost always tell who supported what candidate before I ever got close enough to see the candidate preference on someone’s credentials. Female and between 55-65? Clinton. White male of any age? If alone or with another man, Obama. If with his wife, often Clinton. Under 50? Almost all Obama, with a few women going for Clinton. Over 65? Generally Obama.
But, as usual, I digress. My theory, such as it is, relates, as I said, to the nature of her supporters (and her campaign); those women who scared the crap out of me at my caucus? They scare the crap out of everybody. And I just couldn’t understand why they were being so rude – we were all impassioned, sure, but the Obama supporters were uniformly personally civil.
And then, talking with another female Obama supporter at the convention, we hit upon what made sense to us: those women think they’ve earned this. They think they deserve it, and damnit, no one is going to take it away from them, and definitely not these Obama kids.
And so why do I think that Clinton’s been given a free ride on the experience card? Because everyone is too afraid to say anything that might sound like “she was just the president’s wife“, for fear of being bitten by one of these particular supporters I describe, because their way of getting what they want is to bully their way into getting it. I’m sure it’s absolutely what they had to do in the 60′s and 70′s to be taken seriously, but it’s as if the only tool they have is a hammer, and everything they see is a nail. And the hammer is really, really intimidating.
But Hillary Clinton, for all of her life and career experience, was not the president, she was not a cabinet member, she was not a member of the State Department, and she did not have security clearances. She was a lawyer, probably an excellent one, and I have no doubt she was and is eminently competent – but as far as executive experience goes, she was just the president’s wife.
Just as, however good a programmer and analyst I may be, and however much I’ve seen as the wife and daughter of professors, I may be eminently competent at what I do, but I cannot claim professorial experience. Nor, for the sake of argument, can my husband claim to have been a systems engineer or a linguistics instructor just because I’ve been one, however awesome he is.
It’s a stupid, stupid argument, and I’m glad someone’s calling her on it, even if it means risking the righteous flaming wrath of the female demographic between the ages of 55-65. I wish the press would do it more often. If we’re going to talk about free rides from the press, let’s have it be an equal opportunity free ride.
For the record, I personally agree wholeheartedly with Susan Sarandon on Hillary: “There’s absolutely no reason why a woman shouldn’t be in that office, but I am not sure about this woman.”
ETA: Apparently, according to Jonathan Alter and some of the reporting on Olbermann tonight, many people in Congress involved in the drafting the SCHIP children’s health care legislation which Hillary is taking so much credit for are similarly upset with her claims and are stating that she is grossly overstating her involvement there as well. Surprise, surprise.
Professional computer geek and linguist living in Germany, doing infosec stuff and being the freakiest mother ever.
Do you have any suggestions about what should happen with possible “recounting” Democratic votes in Michigan and Florida? I’d be interested to hear what you think should happen.
I think it’s only even an issue because the Clinton campaign thinks it would benefit them – you did not hear Clinton or anyone else screaming “voter disenfranchisement” at the beginning of the campaigns, and so I think it’s kind of disgusting that it’s being spun that way now.
All of this campaign-related stuff aside, let me just say this: if you’re told the rules are one way, and you decide to violate them knowing the consequences, it’s really lame if you expect the consequences to be changed.
It looks too much like campaign-rigging. (And I’m not saying this because I dislike Clinton – I’m saying this because I think it’s unfair to change the rules in the middle of the game, regardless of who it benefits.) I think the only fair thing to do is to stick to the decisions made before the campaigns had anything to do with it.
And let me add that if tomorrow, a poll comes out showing that Obama would win new Florida and Michigan primaries by 60 points I’d still say it was the wrong thing to do. Just for the record. It has nothing to do with who would win them and everything to do with the fact that at every turn, the Clinton campaign keeps trying to game the system, muttering about possible voter intimidation and other problems when they think they are going to lose a state and going mysteriously quiet about it if then end up unexpectedly winning.
It’s not just cheap politics – it’s dangerous politics, especially given the questionable tactics of the last eight years.
It’s hardly the voter’s fault that the ..local party/poll organisers screwed it up, deliberately or not.
Being english and more prone to moan about abstracts than actually find things out.. I have no idea if whoever was responsible has been ‘sacked’ or not, seems bizarre to me that people responsible for such a thing would, as the imagination goes, get away with a slapped wrist. Deliberate or not, to invalidate 000′s of votes in a democracy, you may aswell be shooting the president for all the effect it may have.
Alice:
The story is this, and it’s sort of stupid: in the Democratic party primaries, a couple of states are supposed to always be the first to hold their primaries by party rules I guess, and this year for the first time states started to change their primary dates to try to be first, regardless of party rules. And so the party said, “If you do that, it won’t count.” All of the candidates agreed to this. They agreed to it, and then said they would not campaign there. I do not agree with any of this above, but it is what happened, unfortunately.
That in and of itself is stupid – and the original decision by the party to say that those states’ primaries would not count, and to furthermore tell the candidates to agree not to campaign there is also lame. THAT is when the disenfranchisement occurred.
My problem is totally not with the idea that the people of Michigan and Florida deserved their votes to count – my problem is that no one started complaining about it until they realized they could benefit from it.
Furthermore, after all of the candidates agreed not to campaign there, Clinton decided to stealth-campaign, having some of her congressional supporters robo-call and add campaign messages to their own in those states. She only decided to publicly pursue making those states’ votes count once she realized that she was not the inevitable nominee.
So here’s the thing – I totally agree with you in principle, and in practice, I think the whole pack of candidates should have been screaming bloody murder a year ago when this all started.
Because there’s been so many allegations of partisan election manipulation in the U.S. in the last eight years, the problem is that for many in the country, the idea of changing the rules in the middle of the game as being pushed by a candidate for her own benefit is just as democratically problematic as the original disenfranchisement.
Personally, I think the whole idiotic system sucks – having these staggered primaries and caucuses with states jockeying to be first is stupid, but those are the party’s rules. But then, I disagree with the whole two-party system which seems to be too decided by people in back rooms anyway. I just don’t understand why Clinton and company didn’t complain when it originally happened a year or more ago and fix the disenfranchisement issues when it could really be fixed – doing it now, well, is clearly only for personal benefit, and any results that come out of it will always be seen as tainted.
I’m not sure Americans can afford any more elections that look that way, frankly. There is a not insignificant number of my fellow countrymen who are convinced the last two national elections were rigged, and making one set of rules, agreeing to them, and then trying to change them smacks of the same nastiness.
In truth, I think it’s a no-win situation, but then, I think if this nomination goes on much longer, the Democratic candidates are probably going to screw themselves anyway…
Can’t argue there, give anybody enough room to talk and they’ll chatter themselves into a noose eventually.