New Hampshire Voters: From the Inside Out
posted January 9th, 2008 at 11:56 am by Betty
New Hampshire voters transcended the polls and said what they wanted to say, not what they were told to say. What a model for the American people!
The New Hampshire way was a looking within, an earnest reflecting within one’s self. And it seems there was both an examination of the difficult issues that confront us, from the economy to the war and immigration, as well as a following of the heart. Hurrah for a people that can make a decision about what is best for our country from the inside out!
I just love America when it acts in this way: “Don’t tell me what to do; I can decide for myself. This is my opportunity to participate in the democratic process, and I want my vote to count.” Hurrah for all those who came out for the first time and knew instinctively the importance of their vote!
The New Hampshire voters were fighting their way through the media extremes: both the rave reviews and the bashing. It is the latter that I want to talk about this morning.
In this election process, I have found the mocking and the brutality to be simply out of sight, particularly with regard to Hillary Clinton. Perhaps it is because I am a woman and I can identify, but I would like to think it is because I am concerned about the way we treat and so often harm one another. From my perspective, Hillary has been mocked, derided, and sold away a thousand times by the news media. She has been called everything in the book: I have never seen anything quite like this.
Where is this brutality and harm coming from? We need to think about this. No matter how you come down in your decision, I think you will agree that much more discourse is needed about the embedded and often hidden violence that faces an “unusual sort” — a woman, an African American, a Hispanic — if they dare to run for president.
I don’t hear many people talking about this. But just take this last week. When it looked like Hillary’s ship was sunk, the expressions of relief and glee simply couldn’t be missed among the media. When her ship recovered, praising her accomplishment seemed more like cutting teeth. What’s going on here? Why do so many people have such a visceral reaction to Hillary? We as a nation, both men and women, need to look at this.
It seems to me that her news coverage is not the same as it is for the men candidates. Take her remarks last night after winning in New Hampshire. I tuned in a little late so I didn’t catch the first part of her speech. Because I missed the first portion and had found her particularly effective, I decided to surf the channels to catch her speech later. None of the channels I checked ever replayed even portions of the speech. It was easy to catch portions of McCain’s speech being replayed, his exact words, but not those of Hillary: the only thing I could catch was her coming out and shaking hands with the crowd after her victory. None of her words! From what I could tell, listening to just a portion of her speech, she was extremely effective! Could that be why it didn’t get covered?
How difficult it is for a woman to run for President. No woman has ever run for President. There are no guidelines available as to how a woman might succeed, no precedents from the past. And the precedents of the past for successful candidates, apparently, don’t work for women. She has to be steely while the men can emote, she has to be ladylike and yet show strength. She really is dammed if she does, and dammed if she doesn’t.
Jodi Kantor hints at some of these problems in this morning’s New York Times: “The Show of Emotion Heard ‘Round the Presidential Campaign World.” Kantor says that Hillary cannot show her emotions while the men are applauded for being emotionally accessible to the public. Edwards and Obama are free to talk about their emotional struggles while Hillary has to mete “out her inner life one teaspoon at a time, a suggestive line in an interview here, and intriguing hearty laugh there.”
So Monday, she had an emotional moment in a coffee shop when a woman photographer asked her “How do you do it? just as she asked, “Who does your hair?” One moment of self-revelation on Hillary’s part, and Rush Limbaugh is on the point, not to mention, it seemed, everyone else in the world. My goodness, my goodness, what a difference it makes to be a woman running for President! And the part about the hair, that’s too close to home for me to even discuss. Asking a woman about her hair — rather than her vision and her point of view - well, I leave that one up to my readers.
All of us are working though tremendous issues that have held us back in the past - prejudices that we can no long afford to accept. I think Hillary is correct when she says that the entire election process will be transformative for not only for the American people but also for the candidates themselves. I think that’s a good thing. But please, let’s stop the unconscionable brutality and inequality.
http://www.technorati.com/search/hillary?language=en&authority=a4
