HarperLee

Joan Z. Shore, Huffington Post, May 13, 2008

I would have loved to vote for America's first woman president. But it wasn't meant to be.

Hillary Clinton, the woman who could have made history, simply let me down.

She let me down five years ago when she voted for the war in Iraq. And she let me down all these years since, by never repudiating her vote or apologizing for her mistake.

She let me down -- and lost my respect -- by continually using the pronoun "I". "I'll be ready the first day in office." "I'll be the one to answer the phone at 3 a.m." Like some egomaniac, she seemed to forget that there are 300 million other people in this country.

Barack Obama didn't forget this. His most-used pronoun is "we". While Clinton billed herself as a one-woman act, Obama focused on the ensemble, on plurality, unity and cooperation, That's not showmanship -- that's statesmanship.

And Clinton's favorite verb? "Fight." Thanks, babe -- that's what they're doing over in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, and in Lebanon, and in too many places around the globe. I don't want a fighter in the White House; I want a peacemaker.

As an active feminist all my life, I see exactly where Clinton went wrong. She was using the old paradigm: To beat them (the men) you've got to be like them. Tough, aggressive, pragmatic. But what a difference it would have made if her campaign had employed some "feminine" qualities: compassion, conciliation, generosity.

She must have taken Margaret Thatcher as her role model. She should have copied Golda Meir instead, who was known to greet foreign dignitaries in her housedress, and brew them a cup of tea in her kitchen.

I do, of course, sympathize with Hillary's marital predicament. As many wives discover, a husband can be both a help and a hindrance, an embellishment or an embarrassment. I think she would have been a lot wiser to leave hubby home, tending the lawn in Chappaqua.

Most likely, Hillary herself will not be willing to return home next year and take up domestic chores. Nor should she. She will make a fine elder stateswoman. Chastened by this campaign, she may yet become a mellow voice of reason, of tolerance, of understanding, of moral rectitude and responsibility.

She is finished running with the wolves. Now it's time to lick her wounds and be a woman again.

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__________________
Oliver Stone on George W. Bush: "the banality of evil"

Jonesy

Maybe she can still vote for the first woman President. Is the author scheduled to die within the next 4-8 years?

HarperLee

Good point, but Hillary has done no favors for women who might run for the presidency in the future.

Even I am not old enough to remember
Jackie Robinson's debut in the big leagues and I will apologize in advance for the tortured metaphor, but what if Robinson during his first months with the Brooklyn Dodgers had tried to fix games, had
refused to take the blame for his own errors, had polarized his teammates, had whined and acted like a martyr?

Another little essay about why women were let down by Hillary, Why Hillary Lost My Daughter and Me, by Mona Gable, May 13, 2008:

This morning I asked my 15-year-old daughter what she didn't like about Hillary Clinton.

"I mean at the beginning, before she started going negative and attacking Barack Obama," I said, trying to rewind history.

My daughter was sitting at the kitchen table, where thousands of impassioned conversations in America have taken place last year about the historic possibility of the first female president. She didn't have much trouble answering. Not simply because she's a thoughtful young woman, an unabashed feminist, who relishes a good political argument as much as her mother.

Compared with that other historic candidate, for her there was no contest. "I didn't find her inspirational at all," she said flatly of Clinton.

As for Barack Obama, she heard in his soothing voice, his brilliant speeches, his very demeanor, the language of her generation. The language of inclusion and hope. "He talks about change, and I believe him," my daughter said, her face lighting up.

We've heard a lot about the power of inspiration during this long heated race. From the beginning Hillary was roundly dismissive of such talk. Oh, those naïve young people! she condescended. Those starry-eyed kids drinking the Obama punch! Maybe if she had been less tone-deaf, less a political weathervane changing her message and her campaign staff (remember Clinton loyalist Patti Solis Doyle?) almost as often as her suits, Hillary might not have caused such angst and handwringing among feminists. Even as older women and feminists icons like Gloria Steinem rallied to her, many young women found her stuffy, rigid, imperious -- a throwback to establishment politics.

As Obama supporter Courtney Martin wrote on Glamour magazine's blog last month about part of her discomfort with Hillary: "She reminds me of being scolded by my mother."

Obama's ability to inspire young people is precisely what has energized my daughter, whose enduring memory of the presidency has been the nightmarish Bush years. She doesn't feel conflicted in the least. And it's hard for me to blame her. This is why the daughters of Caroline Kennedy and Claire McCaskill -- hardly feminist "traitors" as Hillary defectors have been so absurdly called -- were able to persuade their politically savvy mothers to come out for Obama. His promise of change.

Unlike my daughter, part of me feels sad for Clinton as her campaign sputters to an end. Part of me wanted her to succeed. Not because I believed her to be "ready on Day One" to use her embarrassingly hackneyed claim. Or because of her tireless efforts to reform health care, another tragic failure of the Bush years. Or because she embodied for me all the times I had seen women earn less for doing the same job as men. A reality that continues to afflict working women in this country with little progress in sight. My reasons are purely emotional. I have friends who believed in Hillary. I understand their disappointment.

If only she had been the right woman at the right time. And this is what it comes down to, not only for my daughter but for millions of young, middle-aged and older women in America. They placed their faith in Clinton's candidacy, only to find her wanting. Perhaps it was partly our fault. We saw in her defeat in Iowa, in her victories in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, and now tonight surely in West Virginia, a symbol of what women had fought for - -the right to not just sit at the table but to actually lead.

But mostly I feel sad for her female supporters, the ones I saw last night standing behind her at a rally in West Virginia. The elderly women gamely waving their Hillary signs before the TV cameras cut away. Trying to put on a good front. Knowing that their dream is about to die.

Jonesy

Seems Pelosi is the better woman for the job (no offense to Hillz). She's more self-made rather than a product of her husband. Hillary supporters can eat a cock, 'cause they need their protein, but would Hillary be anywhere politically if she wasn't first-lady and didn't have direct access to all her President husband's political resources?

HarperLee

No.

__________________
Oliver Stone on George W. Bush: "the banality of evil"

Jonesy

The first woman President should be fit for the bill, not someone you weasel in after your opponents run a catastrophic Presidency.