I knew that I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton once I talked to my dad. If he votes his conscience, my dad will vote for Kucinich. He is also probably the most tolerant person I know, and a man who raised three feminist daughters. That said, he hates Hillary Clinton. He can’t really articulate why, exactly, or, when I have pointed out that the reasons he gives could just as easily be said about Bill Clinton, he just says that he "can’t trust her" and that "she is calculating and manipulative." If she winds up the nominee, he’ll probably hold his nose and vote for her, but just barely.
And I guess I’ve figured that if even my dad despises her, she doesn’t have a chance in the general election. Is this a question of Clinton specifically? Or does it reveal something more disturbing about America’s response to female politicians? I have tried and wanted to believe that it is the former but after the famous "crying" incident yesterday, I can no longer do so.
I avoided watching the incident all day, but then seeing it was somewhat anticlimactic. At the end of a brutalizing campaign, before a primary she would most likely lose and after months of vicious attacks, Clinton’s eyes welled up a bit. Big deal. And this has been replayed over and over online and on the television news as evidence of either: a) her lack of toughness, or b) her manipulative desire to appear to have emotions. Both of these interpretations seem both sexist and utterly besides the point.
Why, might I ask, are we so interested in whether or not Hillary Clinton has emotions? We don’t demand emotional openness from any other candidate in the race—not even from the robotic Mitt Romney. Yet somehow Americans seem disturbed that Clinton seems cold or distant, and her advisors and defenders seem to always need to assert that she is actually very warm in person. Who the hell cares if she is a good hugger? Why is this a relevant quality for who is going to be president of the United States?
People may try to justify their hatred for Clinton as something else—as a sincere reaction to her policies or a disgust towards her advisors—but the viciousness of the attacks on Clinton throughout her public career far exceeds such rational calculations. Republicans say she is too liberal, Democrats (myself included) say she is too centrist, but neither of these explain the kind of degrading personal attacks Hillary Clinton has been subject to. And it is so much easier to deride those hecklers who tell her she belongs in the kitchen than to examine the discomfort that Hillary Clinton inspires even in self-professed and self-believing liberals. My dad would swear up and down that his dislike for Hillary Clinton does not stem from the fact that she is a woman. But how do you explain that so many stereotypical antifeminist tropes—the harpy, the witch, the bitch—are resorted to so easily? It is one thing to disagree with a candidate, but the hysterical response to Hillary Clinton far exceeds rationality.
Watching CNN last night, I also saw a report on the women’s vote, which argued with a straight face that women like Obama because they like "relationships" and so are drawn to his post-partisan rhetoric. Meanwhile, Jonathan Alter in Newsweek says, by way of analyzing Clinton's campaign that:
Male candidates can establish a magnetic and often sexual connection to women in the audience. (Just watch Bill Clinton, Obama or Edwards work a rope line.) Women candidates can't use sex appeal (except in France), which leaves them playing the sisterhood card.
So then do women candidates not inspire a magnetic or sexual connection among male voters? (Not to mention, what happens for queer people?) Are men just not attracted to powerful women? (I ask naively but even I know the answer.) Why is it that male voting reactions are judged as logical to the point where they aren’t even thematized as such, while women behave as a result of emotional (and hence irrational) desires? Somehow, in all of this, the female and male hysteria inspired by Hillary Clinton is not analyzed as an emotional response but rather as a problem with Clinton herself.
John Edwards has lost my vote with his classless assertion that "I think what we need in a commander-in-chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are tough business, but being president of the United States is also tough business." Well, yeah. But I would say that Clinton’s ever-so-slight display of emotion hardly seems to qualify as a lack of strength or resolve. How small, Mr. Edwards, how small.
Just about the only even remotely graceful thing I heard all day about this non-incident was Barack Obama’s refusal to comment aside from a remark that "this process is a grind."
The side of America that has been revealed during this campaign is an ugly one. Frankly, it makes me just want to cry.
UPDATE I am not saying, as some in the comments seemed to imply, that this is "all about gender" or that any opposition to Hillary Clinton is a display of sexism. I am actually not a Clinton supporter. And I think it is possible to be anti-Clinton without being a sexist (at least I hope so, otherwise I will have to turn in my feminist card) just like it is possible to be anti-Obama without being a racist.
That said, what I am disturbed by, and what I do find sexist, is the degree of rancor and the personal attacks directed towards Clinton that well exceeds either what has (so far) been directed at the other candidates. I am bothered that these attacks have conformed so closely to already extant stereotypes about women, and that this has been often echoed not only by the right-wing machine but by the MSM, as well as many on the left who I respect on other issues.