Hillary's Strange Journey
By Heather Wilhelm
Well, so much for female empowerment. Almost ninety years after women gained the right to vote and less than four weeks before the Iowa caucuses, America's first female presidential candidate has everyone talking. Unfortunately, they're mostly talking about her husband.
As Hillary races across Iowa, hubby Bill has been busy stealing the show. The man who once starred as the lead in a salacious national soap opera has been transformed, media-wise, into a symbol of dignity and a bit of a saint--a fun-loving, apple-cheeked Ghandi, beaming from the cover of an Atlantic Monthly celebrating his "campaign to save the world." The current GQ cover model and "Giving" author is now a central figure in Hillary's floundering campaign, dedicated to enhancing her "likeability." Bill, as we all know, is fun. Bill likes people. Hillary, well, she cackles.
It's almost enough to make you feel bad for the poor woman, that driven, goal-oriented Wellesley perfectionist who has worked so hard and has put up with so much. Well, okay, not really. On Monday's "Today" show, NBC's David Gregory hammered Clinton--not over her 90's healthcare debacle, not over her flip-flops on Iraq, but over comments her husband had made about her suddenly credible rival, Barack Obama. Most presidential candidates would cry foul when treated as a body double for their spouse. Not so Hillary, the great feminist, who treated Clinton's "roll the dice" comments as if they were her own.
She's probably smart to do so. Last week, a CBS/New York Times showed that 44 percent of Democratic primary voters say they were more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton because of her husband; meanwhile, only 1 percent said they were more likely to vote for Obama because of his supporter, Oprah Winfrey. Many Americans have readily admitted to pollsters that they're in it for Bill, not Hill. Like it or not, it's a joint campaign--a union between a widely-hailed symbol of female achievement and, yes, the White House's most celebrated philanderer.
The irony couldn't be thicker, but it has yet to penetrate the mainstream narrative about Hillary's "historic" campaign. Hillary Rodham Clinton may be "smart," as her supporters invariably say, but so are millions of other Americans not running for the most powerful office on earth. She may be "accomplished," but it's the cold, hard truth that her significant political accomplishments are few. She may be "empowered"--but oh, wait, she isn't. We are looking at a woman who is literally defined by her husband. Hillary would likely not be anywhere near a presidential candidacy, let alone a New York Senate seat, if it weren't for the man in her life--a man known for his legendary White House hijinks. So much for female empowerment.
Hillary's strange, self-conscious journey is just one of many odd ingredients in the 2008 "Are You Kidding Me?" presidential saga. It's a campaign where Chuck Norris matters (and, incidentally, can push the Earth down rather than doing a push-up) where the Boston Globe turns a church visit into a baffling tabloid gem ("Obama Confronts Rumor He Is a Muslim"); and where tepid Mormonism gets as much play as Islamic terrorism. It's also a campaign where identity politics reigns supreme, often edging out policy achievements: Huckabee the Evangelical, Mitt the Mormon, Obama the Minority, and, yes, Hillary the Woman. Not surprisingly, husband Bill got his own label last week, when a prominent civil rights leader joked that he was "every bit as black as Barack."
It's all profoundly unserious, of course, but hey, so is modern feminism. Forty years ago, the Hillary-era women's rights movement celebrated, among other things, independence and control: control over the body, over a career, over life choices. The implications of the feminist movement, still unfolding today, are sometimes positive; often, they're tragic. The most ironic, however, is consistently communicated though talk shows, women's magazines, and candidates like Hillary--the linkage of female empowerment with big government. Your husband won't take care of you (look at divorce rates, after all!) so the government has to. For the latest batches of would-be "career women," mainstream feminist politics sells a sugar daddy in another form.
As the National Review's Kate O'Beirne pointed out last week, Hillary's key constituency is single women, who make up about a quarter of the voting population. The good news for Hillary is that single women tend to care about her favorite issues: health care and entitlements. The bad news: they're not very likely to vote, with 40% staying home in 2004. To make matters worse, they're not the most informed bunch--a 2006 poll revealed that 70 percent of nonvoting single women found "politics and elections so complicated that it is hard to understand what is really going on." Hooray, feminism!
Hillary does, however, have something in common with the average female voter: their husbands tend to influence their political lives to a startling degree. In 2006, O'Beirne reports, the marriage gap--the margin between married voters and unmarried voters on particular issues or positions--was 36 points among voting women, dwarfing the 9 point gender gap. Married women, it turns out, are much more likely to vote Republican. There are multiple explanations for this, but most of them are enough to make any feminist squirm: concern about family values, decreased need for government entitlements, and, worst of all, the adoption of their husband's more conservative political views.
The fact that Hillary is seriously considered an icon for female empowerment is laughable at best. It's also a troubling tribute to the confused mess that mainstream feminism has become.
2008 is bound to be a lot of things, but it doesn't appear to be gearing up as the Year of the Woman. For one thing, government dependence fails miserably as a formula of female empowerment. More important, however, is the revealing nature of the Clinton campaign's recent slide into Obama-inspired desperation. The cracks in Hillary's veneer are obvious: lack of conviction, lack of principles, and a real lack of confidence. All of this is unsurprising coming from a woman who has fermented for years in a marriage of apparent political convenience. But it is surprising that people would see such a figure as a shoo-in for the presidency.
Someday, America will be ready for a woman president, but odds are it won't be Hillary. The true spirit of feminism, it could be argued, is being comfortable and confident in one's own skin. No need to cackle; no need to lash out; no need to try to be as funny as Bubba. The first female president will likely be someone who is quietly confident, principled on her own grounds, and willing to be a little politically incorrect now and then. She won't bend over backward to prove she's someone she isn't, and she won't sacrifice everything for power.
She'll be a real symbol of female empowerment. And she won't be there because of her husband. |
