STEPHANIE SALTER: Is the deck stacked against Hillary or women, in general?

February 12, 2008 10:03 pm

— One of the more common sentiments expressed this campaign season about Hillary Clinton goes something like this: “I’d really like to see a woman president, but not this woman.”
Uttered by women and men, alike, the sentiment is sincere, but is it honest? Because it is difficult to separate Hillary Rodham Clinton from her, well, Clinton-ness, we may never know.
From the moment the Clintons emerged in the national arena, they rubbed a segment of society the wrong way. Both were reviled and targeted by that segment of folks, who had the energy and money to hound the couple every step of their political way.
This crusade of disdainful pursuit was launched long before Whitewater, which turned out — after a lot of expense and a long investigation — to be about as scandalous as a church bingo game. It was set in motion long before Monicagate, which was — for all the sound and fury — never about passing secrets to enemy spies or invading a sovereign nation as a preventive measure, but about a sexual affair between consenting adults. One of them was older, married and lied about it; the other readily boasted of instigating trysts in the hallway.
The crusade was on even before the failed health care initiative of the first Clinton term or the charges of “carpetbagger” that followed the Clintons’ New York residency.
As reflexively adored as Barack Obama and John McCain are, so far today, is how reflexively despised Hillary Clinton is and has been for at least 15 years. Nothing, including the keys to the real situation room, will change that for millions of Americans. Ever.
But for those who are not caught up in the I-just-hate-Hillary frenzy, there may be some object lessons in this first viable run by a woman for the White House. The overall lesson: For a female, the U.S. presidency remains close to mission impossible.
Despite a lot of talk about equality, American political women are still struggling with (or surrendering to) many of the same prejudices they faced when Geraldine Ferarro won the Democratic vice presidential nomination, or Shirley Chisholm and Pat Schroeder made brief primary season attempts at the presidency.
All the double-standard clichés from the 1960s still apply: A woman is pushy, a man is a go-getter. She’s rigid, he sticks to his guns; she’s narrow-minded, he’s a man of conviction; she’s cold and secretive, he’s composed and keeps his own counsel; she’s overly-ambitious; it’s his destiny to serve the nation.
A woman politician (or corporate executive) is expected to be all things to all people. No exceptions. Smart, but not too smart. Brave, but not Rambo. Feminine, but not girly. Commanding, but not masculine. Emotive but not emotional. In control but not frosty. And, no matter her age, she’d better be slender, reasonably pretty and wear high heels with her pantsuits.
On national and global security, many Americans want no less than a ball breaker, but they can’t stand a ball-breaking woman. They want a woman to be “genuine,” which means nothing because it can mean anything to millions of individuals.
A woman must be soft and hard at the same time. Soft on the right issues, like children and old folks, but hard on the new Axis of Evil and whoever else frightens us with their potential to hurt us. So what happens when a leader has to be hard on funding for children and old folks or open to talks with the evil ones?
Feminist author Robin Morgan took on this disconnect and double standard in a scathing essay now making its way around the Internet. Most of what is being lobbed, unashamed, at Hillary Clinton, wrote Morgan, “is not ‘Clinton hating,’ not “Hillary hating.’ This is sociopath woman-hating.”
Among a flurry of examples, Morgan included “Carl Bernstein’s disgust at Hillary’s ‘thick ankles’” and a Nixon campaign meister whose “new Hillary-hating 527 group,” forms an acronym that spells out one of the most vile names anyone can call a woman.
Morgan also cited John McCain answering, “How do we beat the bitch?” with “Excellent question!”
“Would he have dared reply similarly to ‘How do we beat the black bastard?’ For shame,” Morgan wrote, and noted several more examples of slurs against Clinton that never would be tolerated were they aimed at Obama or any man of color or minority ethnicity:
“When a sexist idiot screamed ‘Iron my shirt!’ at HRC, it was considered amusing; if a racist idiot shouted ‘Shine my shoes!’ at BO, it would’ve inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint analyzing our national dishonor … [T]he HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs. If it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged — and they would not be selling it in airports … the most intimately violent T-shirts in election history, including one with the murderous slogan ‘If Only Hillary had married O.J. Instead!’ Shame. …”
How about another Iron Maggie?
Almost as common a sentiment as, “A woman, just not Hillary,” is the suggestion, “Someone like Margaret Thatcher.”
Please. We may speak the same, general language, but the U.S. is not the U.K. They have universal health coverage there, for one thing, a prospect we embrace for the elderly of all economic levels but run from in terror when it’s proposed for all who need it.
There is no capital punishment in Great Britain, either, and the prevailing abortion movement is to liberalize existing law, not limit or overturn it. There’s a royal family, a parliamentary system of government and taxes that make complaints about the chunks taken out here sound like aristocratic whining.
Besides, Margaret Thatcher might have a tough time getting elected prime minister in today’s United Kingdom and she sure wouldn’t sweep to presidential victory in the USA. She might not even survive the national vetting of her matronly wardrobe and hair, facial wrinkles, piano legs, diplomatic intractability, unfeminine bellicosity and harsh disdain of soft, domestic issues. Snarky insinuations about the virility of her husband, Denis, would no doubt surface, too.
Among the trillions of words that have been written about Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is a book called, “Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary.” In it, well-known women writers “reflect” on the female who would be president. As Michiko Kakutani observed in her review of the book for the New York Times:
“Few of these contributors addresses Mrs. Clinton’s record as a senator … practical electoral matters (just how electable is she?) or questions about her managerial style (how would the controlling, poll-driven instincts of her campaign team inform her approach to running the White House?). Instead, like voters and commentators obsessed with the ‘likability’ factor, these writers zero in on vague feelings about Hillary’s karma, her self-presentation or her femininity.”
In one telling example, Kakutani quotes novelist and travel writer Susanna Moore’s essay in which “she wishes Mrs. Clinton possessed ‘a certain … sensuousness’ — as if this were a quality necessary for being commander in chief.”
The hideous prospect: In a woman commander in chief, a certain sensuousness is a necessary quality for more Americans than we’d ever care to admit.
Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.