AMAZING Op-Ed by Erica Jong in today's Washington Post making the case for Hillary's candidacy from a "feminist" viewpoint. Jong has been a bit of a shill on The Huffington Post, but the op-ed has an entirely different tone, passionate and wistful at the same time, something only a novelist or poet could do.
Sleazy Bill Kristol gave Jong a gift on Sunday when he said: "White women are a problem, you know. We all live with that." And that is how she starts:
Bill Kristol has been much criticized for his war mongering, arrogance, poor writing and lack of fact checking. But at least the guy is honest. He considers women a problem -- especially white women. And he feels confident enough as an alpha male to be open about it. "I shouldn't have said that," he demurred. But he can say anything he likes and still fall eternally upward. He's a white man, lord of all he surveys -- including Hillary Rodham Clinton.
She uses that as a means to review her own - and at the same time our national - relationship with Hillary over the past 16 years, thereby showing how truly transformational a figure Hillary has been and will be as president.
Linik, excerpts, and anaylsis after the flip - WITH some comic relief from Roseanne!
Here is the link: Erica Jong's Hillary vs. the Patriarchy
What I love most about Jong's piece is the tone and style. She gets at Hillary's symbolic power using the novelist's power of idenitification, pointed observation combined with big picture overview. She gets to the heart of Hillary as a character and in doing so points out the extraordinary STRENGTH of her character.
I'm hardly the only woman who sees my life mirrored in hers. She's always worked twice as hard to get half as far as the men around her. She endured a demanding Republican father she could seldom please and a brilliant, straying husband who played around with bimbos. She was clearly his intellectual soul mate, but the women he chased were dumb and dumber.
Nothing she did was ever enough to stop her detractors. Supporting a politician husband by being a successful lawyer, raising a terrific daughter, saving her marriage when the love of her life publicly humiliated her -- these are things that would be considered enormously admirable in most politicians and public figures. But because she's a white woman, she's been pilloried for them.
She's had to endure nutcrackers made in her image, insults about the shape of her ankles and nasty cracks from mediocrities in the media like Rush Limbaugh, Chris Matthews and Kristol.
When she decided to run for the Senate she was called a carpetbagger. When she won the hearts of her most conservative constituents by supporting their actual needs, the same poisonous pundits who said it couldn't be done attacked her.
Nor are poisonous women pundits any more kind. Maureen Dowd regularly gives her a drubbing. And "progressives" from Susan Brownmiller to Oprah Winfrey sport Obama buttons.
We rarely stop to think that Hillary's ability to weather, absorb, and survive these massive and often irrational assults on her character are an indication OF her character. Or that everything she has been attacked for would have been celebrated if she had been a man. She has been attacked for her ambition, for her moral fervor, her clearsightedness when it came to what mattered in her marriage.
Jong, more than anyone else I have read, ever, sees Hillary as daughter, wife, mother, and woman in her own right all at the same time. And she sees this as something worth celebrating. Here she talks about how Hillary navaigated the tretcherous road of "fame" by being grounded in those very roles:
Hillary made it without self-destructing. She was a tower of strength to her husband, who seems to have little impulse control, and her daughter whom she obviously loves and whom she never exploited even in the worst of times.
She cannot have enjoyed her husband's playing around. She certainly never condoned it. But he was clever enough for her, he supported her dreams, and they both loved their smart and beautiful daughter.
And, quite beautifully, she address the problem of the marriage, about which everyone continues to speculate:
Besides, what does anyone know about anyone else's marriage? As a novelist I understand that I can't even invent the complexities most people live with, the compromises made, the deals negotiated and renegotiated. If it works, let's say hallelujah, rather than pick and quibble. It took me three marriages to find my soul mate. Maybe Hillary was luckier.
This seems so true to me. And it makes me realize that so many of the things that have been said about Hillary and Bill as regards their marraige have largely been irrational projectons by a mass audience who have made their own individual and solitary compromises in their own relationships and marraiges. And the attacks by women who may be resentful of the compromises they have had to make, or have been held back, and, for whatever reason, don't want to see a woman succeed.
And I love that Jong invokes the European model for marriages, political or otherwise, when she says that in the aftermath of Monica and thwarted impeachment, Hillary
...was wise enough to know what it did and did not mean. She did what smart European and Asian women have done through the ages: She kept her marriage but changed her focus to her own ambitions.
And, of course, people attacked her for that too.
But amazingly - or NOT - as a seantor she has totally won over the Republicans in upstate NY who once said they would never ever vote for her under any circumstances. Because they they found out they actually LIKED her when they finally met her in person. And because she truly did work for them and their everyday needs.
Jong acknowledges - and certaintly DOES NOT dismiss - Hillary's taking politically motivated positions on the Iraq war vote - and I commend her for assessing that issue in this way:
As a senator she has learned compromise and negotiation. She has gotten to know red America as well as blue. If she could win over the rednecks in upstate New York, she can win over any American. She knows this country is full of "security" moms as well as soccer moms. Since she is a woman, she has to show she's ready to be commander in chief. Hence her "triangulation" on Iraq and her signing the absurd Lieberman-Kyl resolution, which calls on our government to use "military instruments" to "combat, contain and [stop]" Iran's meddling in Iraq.
By the time it came up she must have known the Cheney-Bush war profiteers would never embrace even partial peace. She had to win over her America and theirs.
I love that Jong sees the vote for what is was, without shrugging it off, and without excusing it; yet she still puts it in perspective. And that is what she does: put it in perspective.
BUT, the best part of the piece, for me, is the end, where she assesses Obama - and gives - I think - the most sophisticated reading of what he signifies to date:
You will point to Hillary's complicity. You will quote crazy-like-a-fox Ann Coulter, who claims to be voting for her.
You will also quote left-wing bloggers who love Barack Obama, and MoveOn.org peaceniks (I am one) who see no evil in him (nor do I). But I see little experience either. Obama is smart and attractive. Maybe he'll be president someday.
He was lucky enough not to be in the Senate when the Iraq war resolution was floated after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell lied about WMDs. That was the true tragedy of race: a black man lying for a corrupt white administration that was using him as a token, much as they use Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice now.
Obama is also a token -- of our incomplete progress toward an interracial society. I have nothing against him except his inexperience. Many black voters agree. They understand tokenism and condescension.
Beautifully stated! Without fear, too. I think there is so much truth in that statement. A truth so few people are willing to acknowledge openly.
And I love her final endoresement:
I understand my hopeful friends who think an Obama button will change America. But I'm sticking with Hillary. I trust her because all her life, her pro bono work has been for mothers and children. And mothers and children -- of all colors -- are the most oppressed group in our country. I trust her to speak for our children and grandchildren -- and for us. She always has.
Now, these are not the only reasons to vite for her. But it is, I think, a beautiful and real and sad portrait of the female experience in this country. It is sad that young women have been so blindsided by the media and so indoctinated by a fairly conservative and still highly sexist culture that they don't see the value and importance in Hilllary's candidacy - and often join in the attacks on her.
So, I am sticking with Hillary, too!
NOW, for some comic relief from that bete-noir, Rosanne, former "domestic goddess:"
Someone said last night that they foresee Oprah finding out something bad about Obama, and then bringing him on her show to humiliate and chastise him...that would be for sweeps...then she can give everybody a free blender.
And Rosanne on Oprah's hypocracy:
"There may be no credible moral defense for Hillary's vote to go to war, but Oprah is just as guilty as Hillary for using her own respective platform, her vastly popular TV show, for promulgating the propaganda that war was both necessary and unavoidable. In the months prior to us invading Iraq I watched her trot out political guests that were always there to rationalize the need to topple Saddam. At different times before and after the invasion she had on Judith Miller, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Thomas Friedman, Ken Pollack, Laura Bush and others-- never one that I saw who was ardently opposed to it."
Oprah, I think, has done mre harm to the cause of women than any other woman in America! And her participation in the campaign has been fascinating and - I think - telling of what would come from Obama. It is not poltics at all - but that vague self-help secular religion that is so strange, so strangely American, and so motivated by consumerism. But more on that another time.