Now that the Democratic primary season is finally over the post-mortems are beginning in ernest. I read a long one in the Washington Post, and one sentence about Clinton stuck out for me:
"She started to see gender inequity in a more profound way than she ever has," one top adviser said.
Hillary Clinton, like many women in the privileged upper classes, had in some ways led a charmed and sheltered life. She went straight from her father's house to college and then to grad school, where she met her husband and moved in with him. No doubt she experienced sexism--it can't have been easy to be a woman law student and lawyer in the early seventies--but it never interfered with her ambitions.
The article goes on to point out that there is plenty of empirical evidence that sexism was not what brought Hillary Clinton's campaign down. There is a whole list of problems--mismanagement, her husband's loose-cannon behavior, and a starry-eyed optimism that made them unrealistic about their chances at times.
Ace Smith had been sent to North Carolina after pulling off important victories in California and Texas. snip
In late March, the Clinton team gathered at the candidate's home in Northwest Washington, and there, according to several present, Smith offered an optimistic assessment of North Carolina. Smith declined to comment about what he said was a private meeting. But, he said, "we were cornered and we had to fight that battle, and when you go into fight a battle you'd better be optimistic or you're doomed to failure from the beginning."
Others did not begrudge Smith his determination to fight for all the resources he could muster from a team that believed the best outcome was holding Obama to a single-digit margin of victory. But the campaign's problems were compounded by the enthusiasm of the Clintons themselves, who thought they were making progress in the state. North Carolina, Hillary Clinton told an audience days before the primary, could be a "game-changer."
Nothing the campaign could say later could roll back her confidence.
The loss in North Carolina was a shock to the Clintons, as was the media reaction to her narrow victory in Indiana, where her internal polling had Obama ahead by eight or nine points early on.
Hillary and Bill Clinton were optimistic as they approached primary day on May 6. They dipped once again into their personal fortune, lending her campaign $1.4 million more in the week before the Indiana and North Carolina votes. At least three campaign officials described the Clintons as furious when they saw the results in the two states.
Indiana proved to be the bigger disappointment, even though Clinton won there. What irked her advisers was that Clinton got no credit for what they saw as a come-from-behind victory. Even more irritating was that, because ballots were being held back in the Obama stronghold of Lake County, across the state line from his home town, Chicago, the networks declined to call the race for Clinton until after midnight.
It became clear to the campaign staff that the dream of Hillary becoming the nominee and perhaps the first woman president was over.
From the beginning, Clinton counted on women to deliver her victory. She described in virtually every speech how she was struck by two kinds of people at her events: women in their 90s who were born before women were allowed to vote, and parents "lifting their little girls and their little boys onto their shoulders and whispering, 'See, you can be anything you want to be.' "
Later in the campaign, some female staff members suggested taking that line out of her speech, fearing it was no longer true. "We have to stop saying that; we've proven the opposite," one woman argued. (emphasis mine)
We've proven the opposite. !?!
It seems clear that through the course of the campaign some of Hillary's staff and supporters came to conflate the dream of electing a woman president with the dream of electing Hillary Clinton president. (Hillary herself didn't see it that way, as she used the line in her endorsement of Obama.)
Some of the most fervent Hillary supporters, of course, don't share the dream of a woman becoming president. They want Hillary, a particular candidate, in the same way supporters of Ron Paul will accept no substitutes.
But for a lot of Hillary supporters, the dream is about electing a woman as president. Hillary was just the first truly viable candidate to come along.
In the past few days I've encountered several on this site who have argued that we don't need a woman president. We just need a president who supports women's issues. Clearly, Barack Obama is a strong feminist and supporter of women's issues, and he enjoys a close relationship with his wife, who gives him insight into the experience of being a woman. In addition, he was close to his mother, remains close to his sister, and is a devoted parent of two young daughters. I have no qualms about Obama being a great president for women. And in fact I don't have a dream of a woman becoming president. I would like to see a government that represents America, with the demographics of the House and Senate roughly approximating the American demographics in terms of race and gender, but I don't vote based on race or gender, I vote on issues and have voted for a man over a woman multiple times (including in the Presidential primaries this year.)
However, and this is important, the Democratic party is a coalition. There are voting blocs within our party, and one big bloc that has become very prominent during this primary season is the bloc of people (mostly women, mostly older) who want to see the Democratic party demonstrate a commitment to the goal of electing a woman president.
Now, I know this might not be your goal, and it might even seem silly and pointless to you. But being part of a coalition means making compromises. And is stating, up front and in clear terms, that we will do all we can to support women in politics so that someday a Democratic woman will become president, a terrible compromise to make? What could it hurt?
There are already organizations in place that do this very thing--try and help women become candidates for office.
Emerge America is the premier training program for Democratic women inspiring them to run and honing their skills to win. By identifying, inspiring and training more Democratic women to run for office, we are building a pool of highly qualified candidates that reflect the breadth and diversity of the Democratic Party.
Women are 51% of the U.S. population, but make up only 16% of our elected officials in Washington, DC. Republicans have already recognized this disparity and have training programs like Emerge in 16 states, while Democratic women have been left without comprehensive long-term training or alumnae networks. (emphasis mine.) Until now.
I had never heard of Emerge America until this election cycle. It is apparently pretty new. I am distressed to learn that the Republicans have been at this for a while now, and that they are ahead of the curve on this.
Another organization that helps women get elected is Emily's List.
In 1985, 25 women, rolodexes in hand, gathered in Ellen Malcolm's basement to send letters to their friends about a network they were forming to raise money for pro-choice Democratic women candidates. These "founding mothers" pioneered a new concept in fundraising: a donor network that would provide its members with information about candidates and encourage them to write checks directly to the candidates they choose.
At that time, no Democratic woman had been elected to the U.S. Senate in her own right[meaning, not appointed or elected to replace her husband], no woman had been elected governor of a large state, and the number of Democratic women in the U.S. House of Representatives had declined. Frustrated by the barriers that prevented women from making it to the top political offices, these women founded EMILY’s List to elect more women to the House and Senate, and as governors.
Since that day, EMILY's List has grown to more than 100,000 members, raised millions of dollars, and helped elect record numbers of women to office. An acronym for "Early Money Is Like Yeast" (it makes the dough rise...), EMILY's List has become the nation's biggest political action committee.
Emily's list is currently out of favor with some progressives, partly for their support of a woman congressional candidate over a man that many feminists consider more progressive.
All the Obama campaign needs to do is
1.Throw Obama's considerable star power behind the cause of electing women in 2008 as he did in 2006 (either via EMILY's list or independently). Here's part of the remarks he made at the EMILY's List 2006 annual luncheon.
Your efforts haven't just sent women to Congress, you've sent champions - champions for the right to choose, for the right to equality, for the millions of women who ask only that their voices are heard too. [emphasis added]
- After the election, throw the power of the presidency behind establishing chapters of Emerge in all 50 states in conjunction with the DNC's current 50-state strategy.
Why is helping women to run for elected office a good idea right now, when we need to win over women disheartened by Hillary's loss? Because so many women in the Democratic party know that women candidates were treated poorly by the DNC. Times may very well be changing, but the DNC's track record was not great for a long time. I personally know two Democratic women who ran for congress in the 90s under two very different circumstances. One, Susan Davenport Darrow, was the Democratic candidate in a heavily Republican district (the type of candidate sometimes jokingly called a "sacrificial lamb.") The other, Charlotte Koskoff, ran a heart-wrenchingly close race against a momentarily vulnerable Republican, Nancy Johnson, in a majority Democratic district in Connecticut. Johnson was temporarily vulnerable because she called Newt Gingrich a "visionary leader" and the quote didn't sit well in her overwhelmingly blue district.
[Johnson's] biggest scare came in 1996, when Charlotte Koskoff, who previously ran against Johnson but was still a relative unknown, nearly unseated her.
Both these races took place during the Clinton years. Afterwards, both women told me about the terrible treatment they received at the hands of the DNC. Darrow didn't expect to receive money from the DNC, as she had little chance of winning against a popular incumbent. However, she was dismayed that the DNC repeatedly called her and asked her for donations for other races. Each time she informed them that she herself was a candidate for congress, but apparently a notation of that fact never got made in the DNC database. (As a person who managed a database in the early 1990s, I can vouch for the fact that the technology to keep track of that type of information was readily available.)
Meanwhile, Charlotte Koskoff, who was in one of the races that should have received money, made repeated pleas to the DNC for financial help, pleas that went ignored. It would take ten more years to finally unseat Johnson.
Although it is hard to believe that this district was on very few pundits' radar screens only half a year ago, it's plain to see now that Democratic state Sen. Chris Murphy of Cheshire has emerged as one of the out-of-power party's best hopes for defeating a well-entrenched House GOP moderate. The last time Murphy was this actively engaged in a race for Congress was ten years ago, when he was in his early twenties and served as campaign manager for Democratic challenger Charlotte Koskoff, who capitalized on a 1996 Democratic surge in the then-6th District to almost pull off a stunning upset against GOP Rep. Nancy Johnson.
What happened during those ten years? Johnson voted in favor of the Impeachment of Bill Clinton. She was a strong supporter of Republican policy on health care and the Iraq war. In 2005, Johnson supported the White House plan to partially privatize Social Security and voted for a measure sponsored by then Majority Leader Tom DeLay that would have weakened House Ethics rules.
Why didn't the DNC help Koskoff, either by infusing the campaign with cash or at least helping out with fundraising? It was a different time, a time when the DLC reigned supreme and Howard Dean's 50-state strategy didn't exist. Was this some grand strategy to disenfranchise women candidates? I doubt it. Would men in the same position have received the same shabby treatment? Very possibly--maybe even probably. But I think it is fair to judge the party on results, and on results, they have not done a very good job of putting women in office, and that really bothers a lot of women, including women who have been good soldiers for the party, writing checks, stuffing envelopes, and knocking on doors, women who's hearts are aching right now, wondering, "When will it be our turn?"
How can we deny those women a place of honor at the table right now? How can we not console them?
Now, maybe this (or something like it) is already the plan. I don't have an inside track in the Obama campaign, but this is the kind of initiative I can see him getting behind. The point of this diary is twofold: to advocate for this type of initiative on the part of the campaign, and to reach out to Obama supporters and help them to embrace the part of the Democratic party coalition that dreams of seeing a woman in the highest office in the land.
There's been a lot of talk about the stages of grief on this website. One of the stages is anger. The thing about grief, though, is that not everyone successfully works through the all the stages and gets to acceptance. Some people need help.
Here's a letter that appeared in Salon this weekend about this very subject.
In anger, there is tremendous power. Women absolutely should not squander this anger.
Barack Obama, what are you going to do for WOMEN and the economic and political power of women here in these United States?
You want my vote? You'd better win it!
Maybe this woman's anger is irrationally aimed at Barack Obama, who can't be held responsible for the DNC's relative disinterest in promoting women candidates in the past, but that doesn't mean we can afford to dismiss her and others like her with the comforting refrain, "she'll come around."