As I begin to write this, My fiancé and I are sitting in the Wolfgang Puck bar at LAX watching the Indiana returns on my iPhone. When I shriek, "The margin's down to 16,000!" a woman at the end of the bar turns to her friends as says, "See! We should've been there. We would have counted!"
They are five women, three from Indiana, two from Chicago. We broach the topic gingerly: Who are you for?
"I have a bumpersticker on my car," says the first woman. "It says OBH." We ponder that for a moment. "Anybody But Hillary!"
"Shouldn't that be 'ABH?'" my husband-to-be whispers to me.
"She's drunk," I remind him. But the point is, we are now free to find out from these Midwestern white women what we want to know: Why are all they all for Obama?
Here it is the next day, and I awake in New York to the final tally, which is not as good as I hoped when I fell asleep at 5 a.m., but good enough that it seems over for Clinton. And I'm thinking about those five women sitting in a California airport bar hoping with all their collective might that Lake County would come through big time for Obama.
We quizzed each other. "What state are you from?" We wondered about past political affiliations. "Okay, it's true, I voted for Dole," one admitted. But mostly we talked about how all our lives we harbored a fantasy that one day a woman would lead the country. Just not this woman.
"I wouldn't have voted for Margaret Thatcher, either," said one.
So what did we -- we feminist women and men -- want in a woman president? I’m not sure it’s righteous to believe in essential gender difference; I’ve never been a Mars/Venus kind of gal. I simply believed at one point that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy would give us a chance to examnine some lingering sexist tropes, the kind Tina Fey referred to in her charming endorsement of Clinton on "Saturday Night Live." Yeah, she’s a bitch, and so am I. Bitches get things done.
The problem is, Hillary Clinton didn’t play like a bitch. She played like a dick, sliming her opponent behind the lines and attempting to trick the party that had been so loyal to her into letting her steal of couple of states’ primary votes. And while all this was happening I and other women found ourselves being instructed by the feminist establishment that we were colluding if we didn’t support her. Gloria Steinem wrote in the New York Times that she would vote for Clinton because "she has no masculinity to prove"; Geraldine Ferraro scolded that we just liked Obama because he's black (odd, that).
Meanwhile, Clinton was becoming ever more of "a mouthpiece for the patriarchy with a vagina," as Jane Fonda put it (though not in reference to Clinton herself. At least not explicitly).
I remember a few months ago reading a comment here from Jsn: "Saying Hillary Clinton has Executive Branch experience is like saying Yoko Ono was a Beatle." That nailed it for me: It’s not that Clinton has tried to palm herself off as a seasoned foreign diplomat when in fact she never had any power to sway international affairs; it’s not that she bragged about Oval Office experience when she was really little more than an unusually close by-stander. It’s that Hillary Clinton didn’t ever have to be an Executive Branch veteran to win us over. She just had to be the person many of us thought she was before she trotted out her tawdry and hateful campaign: the warm, dedicated public servant her New York constituency seemed mostly to regard her as. A public servant who, we could say with some relief, is also a woman.
Yoko Ono never called herself a Beatle because she was just fine being Yoko Ono; she knew that she was, in fact, every bit as extraordinary as Lennon, a creative force in her own right. Clinton, by contrast, didn't campaign on her strengths as a woman, or even as Hillary Clinton; she campaigned on her ability to pretend she’s a man, much in the same way her husband flaunted his ability to play a Republican.
Last October at the Bioneers convention in San Rafael, California, I heard Eve Ensler, creator of The Vagina Monologues and global feminist activist, give a speech that reduced some people to tears and others to rage. I was one of the ones in tears, if only because the absolute, adamantly woman-centric beauty of Ensler’s speech was something I hadn’t heard in so long. She spoke of women living under authoritarian regimes parading down the streets shouting "vagina" in their native tongues; she talked of healing, and consensus-building, and listening. She talked about the persistence of violence visited upon women around the globe, a disease we have not cured because, Ensler said, "We have not yet elected or become leaders who do not consider violence as an option."
I watched the DVD of Ensler’s brave speech again recently, Clinton's promise to obliterate Iran ringing in my ears, and started to think about all that was missing in Clinton's campaign. The rules of feminism as I learned it in the 1970s and ‘80s held that women would lead, if they got to lead, with an equanimity and patience that men had abandoned. We would tolerate difference, build consensus among bickering parties, listen before we spoke. We would talk to everybody, even to those with whom we disagreed the most.
By all these measures -- by every measure -- it's Barack Obama who has exemplified our lofty standards of feminist leadership. He values listening. He preaches unity. He promises to sit down with our enemies. He opposes war. And say what you will about how Obama responded to Rev. Jeremiah Wright: You cannot say this is a man who does not tolerate difference.
Ensler had something else to say about leadership. She quoted Benazir Bhutto, who in October still lived in exile. Bhutto, she said, claimed to have only one regret: That she had not led more as a woman. Maybe we can hope now that someday, Hillary Clinton will come to regret that she did not run her campaign as one, either. Whatever that means.
(Cross posted at my blog, Little Green Animals.)