It's interesting to watch the US media's coverage of the campaign by Hillary-there's never-been-a-war-I-didn't-like-Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination. While her ambition and steadfast course towards DP endorsement and the presidency is old news and while it would be remarkable if either Clinton or Obama were to become US president, it's worth reflecting on how extraordinary and at the same time dismal is the fact of Clinton's candidature.
In the facile world of MSM electoral reportage, factors such as the age, relative physical attractiveness or personal charm of candidates inevitably become the most prominent and discussed aspects of political campaigns — even on purportedly serious blogs!
Indeed, sometimes you need to remind yourself that these contests are political campaigns, not celebrity popularity contests or gladiatorial love- or hate-fests, or opportunities for public humiliation of the great and powerful, staged for the entertainment of a distracted and otherwise uninterested populace. But when the political information available to the citizenry is dominated by 15-second soundbites on television news, the alleged relative charmlessness and "aggression" of the seasoned and well-within-the-range-of- political-normalcy ruthless Clinton is a sadly predictable feature of media coverage of this possible first-ever female candidate for the US Presidency.
You'd have to say both the media's role in showcasing electoral contests in the way they do, particularly in the US, and the electorate's willing suspension of disbelief when confronted with politicians' manufactured, insincere, smarmy, glib one-liners and policy vagueness, says a lot about the health of the entire body politic. The question always needs asking: why does anyone take politicians' pretence at face value and tolerate their evasions in the way so many obviously do? And why do people put up with the media's facile spin, including in the case of Clinton, its misogyny couched in terms of her lack of desirable femininity?
Despite its self-image (or that of its government and ruling class) as the world's foremost liberal democracy, the participation of US women in formal politics is abysmal. The growth of female membership of the US Congress has been excruciatingly slow since the explicit, active opposition of both the major political parties to women candidates halted in the 1970s, largely as a result of second-wave feminism.
Even so, until the 1990s, parties in the US made only desultory efforts to recruit female candidates and are still relatively unsuccessful in doing so at all levels of government. In 2008, women hold only 16.1 per cent of the 535 seats in the US Congress. This percentage has grown by only six per cent since 1992. At that rate it will be at least a century before Congress is composed equally of women and men.
When Geraldine Ferraro ran as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate with Walter Mondale in his 1984 bid for the presidency, groups such as the National Organisation for Women thought the Democrats could capitalise on the attachment of women and feminists to the party. But the incumbent Republican President Reagan won with 59 per cent of the popular vote including that of the majority of women.
Since the decline of the mass, politically independent, grassroots US women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s, it would appear there has been a corresponding and related decline in effective civic and political engagement by feminists and their supporters. The ability of a candidate such as Clinton to wage a campaign that seems to make little reference to the needs of women for full equality and how that might be achieved is certainly symptomatic.
This is even more so the case when state support for US women in the form of secure access to abortion and reproductive healthcare, childcare, equal educational opportunity, wage and job equality and other economic rights, remains limited, even stagnant. The decline of the old mass-based traditional organisations of the working class, especially the trade unions, and of women's organisations, removed crucial organisational venues for the discussion of feminist issues, the development of policies and campaigns and the formation of strategic alliances.
It is in this context that Hillary Clinton's campaign takes place. It's hard to see how anyone can take seriously the claims of her supporters that success for her will be in any way whatsoever a victory or advance for women.
What is feminist about her campaign? What policy differences does she have from Obama that would encourage women, especially feminists, to vote for her over him? Exactly how would a Clinton Democratic presidency improve the material conditions and lives of US women?
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3 comments:
There has been, of course, lots of low-level office sexism in media coverage of Clinton, and the usual demented screams from Maureen Dowd and the gang at the NYT about her marriage and her political past, but little comment about that fact that this would be our first woman presidential candidate and our first woman president.
As you said, not since Walter Mondale included Geraldine Ferraro as his vice-presidential candidate has a woman had a place in American presidential politics.
My personal bias is that this country would benefit enormously if a woman were president, among many other reasons due to the sex-based differences in solving social problems and the encouragement and recruitment into politics of other women.
And, as it happens, Clinton is an exceptionally bright and politically well-educated person. Although, as the g.w. bush candidacy of 2000 taught us, this is not a matter of great interest to the media.
For the record my demographics are: American, white, male, 60+, middle-class, college educated, married, southern.
This country needs a change alright, many changes in fact, in the way it conducts it public business. A great start on making these change would be a more balanced representation of the sexes in our political problem-solving.
There are many examples of women in politics that're encouraging. But at the level of national president or prime minister, let's face it, any expectation these politicians will challenge the patriarchy is crazy.
Hillary Clinton would have some women in Australia rooting for her because they met her when she was her and she milked the feminist cow very well.
Telling isn't it, though, how she hasn't explicitly used the gender card much in this campaign, presumably because it wouldn't be a goer.
The US elections are a feeble, depressing joke.
Now Edwards has dropped out (oh the irony) the contest will get dirtier.
I don't think it'll matter in the least if the DP or the GOP wins the next election.
And that's ghastly.
Let's not over-analyze why people "hate Hillary". Don't try to make flimsy connections with anti-feminisim, misogyny, blah blah.
The simple truth is that most people who are opposed to her--on the progressive side of the fence--know that she is a corporate shill, a "Republicrat": in cahoots with Walmart, a booster for the Iraq war, a "compassionate conservative". She is a proponent of the brutal free trade and ruthless globalisation endorsed and supported by her hubby when he was pres. She is nothing but Reagan with ovaries.
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