Washington Independent has a fascinating article today from Anne Taylor Fleming. Titled "Gender Betrayal: Clinton Never Learned to Effectively Play the Woman Card," it compares and contrasts the role of identity politics in the Obama and Clinton race. This part really stood out for me:
Though one could argue that Obama's alliance with Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., a man whose extreme views he seemed genuinely not to share, was in effect a strategic--if also emotional--alliance, an attempt to be part of the black inner-city Chicago political world where he got his start. He is an operator, too. He didn't want to play the race card, but played it with oratorical flourish when forced to.
Not Clinton. She never played the gender card, never figured out how to make it work for her, for the rest of us -- how to summon up the old historical goose bumps by conjuring the days we stormed the barricades. The first woman president of the United States: it should or could have had resonance. Meaningful even for younger women who get bored by feminist memories of yore, but who might have been reminded at how few female leaders there still are--only a handful in high elective office.But she never played it, never reached and grabbed for the sentiment, never let us register any of the precedent-setting excitement her victory might bring. In fairness, she didn't want to be patronized as the "girl" candidate -- notice, for example, how often she is referred to as "Hillary" while Obama is called by his last name -- or accused of reverse sexism. Indeed, she was accused of precisely that when she dared to talk about the historic nature of her run.
There are so many things wrong here I hardly know where to start. I could point out, for example, that from day one until today, Sen. Clinton chose "Hillary for President" as her official tag line, a statement that one need look no further than HillaryClinton.com to find. I could point out the number of times throughout the campaign Clinton explicitly pointed to her strong support among women as one of the rationales for her candidacy. I could even point to how often Barack explicitly rejected racial arguments for his campaign in the earliest days of the campaign.
But were I to do all that, I'd miss the most fundamental point. And let me re-excerpt something before I continue:
She never played the gender card, never figured out how to make it work for her, for the rest of us -- how to summon up the old historical goose bumps by conjuring the days we stormed the barricades. The first woman president of the United States: it should or could have had resonance. Meaningful even for younger women who get bored by feminist memories of yore, but who might have been reminded at how few female leaders there still are--only a handful in high elective office.
Everything you need to know about why Clinton failed in her quest to be the first woman president is right there. Fleming laments the fact that Clinton did not summon up history "by conjuring the days we stormed the barricades." Just two sentences later, she recognizes that such references bore even younger feminists. This was the winning strategy Clinton somehow missed? Recalling the battles that bore even your ideological allies?
I think Fleming may have this precisely backwards. Clinton didn't need to explicitly call up the battles of yesterday because her entire life story almost reflexively brings those battles to mind. In another year, and against another candidate, that may have been enough for her to win the whole thing. But against a candidate who premised his campaign on ending all that? Who declared in his announcement speech that it is the mindset left over from those goosebump inducing battles that is in part responsible for our current political divisions? Against that, Sen. Clinton never stood a chance.
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