Commentary

The Importance of Being Hillary
By Gloria Feldt

The crowd was buzzing outside New York's Beacon Theater October 25, 2007. People speed dialed their cell phones to share the excitement: "I'm here for Hillary's 60th birthday. The cops are everywhere. People are lined up like crazy. "

If the phrase "You're a rock star" denotes the highest order of celebrity, no question the appellation fit Hillary Clinton, who will go down in history as the first truly viable woman U.S. presidential candidate. The elegant Upper West Side Beacon was the perfect birthday bash venue for Clinton--for whom real rock stars like Elvis Costello wanted to perform. The celebratory ambiance felt accessible to anyone, though the attendees-many of them aging rockers like their honoree-- had paid up to $2300 to attend and cheer the woman who at that brief shining moment was the most-likely-to-succeed candidate for the Democratic party's nomination. As one newspaper report of the birthday concert put it: "Even though she's older now than her main Democratic rivals Barack Obama, 46, John Edwards, 54, and Bill Richardson, 59, none of them have yet to find a way to derail her seemingly inevitable march towards the nomination."

But derail her Obama did, and therein lies a complicated tale of the importance of being Hillary, what she accomplished by her candidacy, and why, as she said in her concession speech eight months later, "we didn't break the highest and hardest glass ceiling, but there are 18 million cracks in it."

Eighteen million votes is the most garnered by any presidential primary candidate in history. Still it wasn't enough to stop Obama's insurgency, his stunning victories in Iowa and other caucus states, and his appeal as the "new new thing" to freshly energized young voters and superdelegates apparently done with "the Clintons" (as reporters were fond of referring to Hillary, implying that like many women in past eras, she didn't earn her own way into political leadership) and more enthralled by Obama's ethereal promise of "change we can believe in" than Clinton's precisely documented position statements.

One thing about politics is the playing field changes just when you think you have it figured out. Nothing is "inevitable". With this caveat, in this historic election year, it is irresistible to try to assess the impact of Clinton's candidacy on women's future political aspirations and actions. What about Clinton's experience mitigates against women running for office? What might motivate more women to enter the fray?

Starting Where We Are

A former mentor used to tell me this about teaching: "You have to start where they are, not where you wish they were." She was speaking of students of course, but the principle applies to politics too. Here's the dime version of women's political history in U.S. politics. Reminding ourselves of this long, still under construction, road to gender parity is essential to understanding the boulders of fundamental social change Hillary Clinton had to push uphill in her quest for the presidency.

Ninety-two years after Jeanette Rankin of Montana became the first woman elected to Congress (four years before American women won the Constitutional right to vote in 1920 after a seven-decade fight), America ranks an embarrassing 84th among nations in the proportion of women holding national legislative office-far behind Rwanda, Austria, and Cuba. Men run City Hall in 90 of 100 largest cities; women make up just 18% of state governors, and less than a quarter of state legislators. Despite Clinton's groundbreaking run, Nancy Pelosi's preeminence as the first woman Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and women like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice holding top administrative positions, the dial for women in political leadership has moved excruciatingly slowly, from 3% of Congress in 1979 to 16% in 2008. Though women comprise the majority of voters, men, by and large, still decide the laws that govern every aspect of our lives, from war and peace to equal pay policies to reproductive freedom.

Efforts to rectify this imbalance date back to Abigail Adams, who beseeched her husband, John, to "Remember the ladies," as the Continental Congress moved toward declaring independence . He didn't. Once women gained voting power, it took generations before they began to share governing power. The first tiny wave of women in public office were like Maine Republican Margaret Chase Smith, initially elected to Congress in 1940 to serve out her late husband's term. The second wave were like Pelosi; they bided their time, often as envelope-stuffing volunteers in men's campaigns, until their children were grown before running for office themselves. Only recently have younger women started to run from their own early-life desire for political office.

Feminist initiatives in the consciousness-raising 1960's and '70s included creating the nonpartisan National Women's Political Caucus in 1971 to "increase the number of women in all aspects of political life-as elected and appointed officials, as judges in state and federal courts, and as delegates to national conventions." The Women's Campaign Fund, now known as the Women's Campaign Forum, started in 1974 in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v Wade decision that legalized abortion, with the mission of electing pro-choice women of either party. Though both organizations have political action committees that raise money for their endorsed candidates, neither has ever had even a fraction of the fundraising heft of male-dominated corporate special interest PACs.

These first efforts assumed, naively, that if they simply trained women in the basics of the political structure, the mechanics of campaign organization, fundraising, and media skills, women would naturally take their places in the panoply of political offices and political leadership at all levels of government. But the culture hadn't been prepared for women to hold political power. Nor were women prepared for the shock of navigating an entrenched power grid in a political system almost devoid of female role models or women with Rolodexes to equal men's fundraising ability and self-interested networks of colleagues with social, economic, or political power. Before there could be a significant leap in the numbers of women running and winning, women had to first get to the point where they could and would open their purses to fund political candidacies.

Enter organizations like Emily's list (Early Money Is Like Yeast), founded by Ellen Malcolm in 1985 to support pro-choice Democratic women candidates. It's now the nation's largest political action committee. On the Republican side, the Richard G. Lugar Excellence in Public Service Series has trained over 1500 women to assume political leadership positions both electoral and administrative, and the WISH List supports the election of pro-choice Republican women.

The nonpartisan White House Project, founded in 1998 by Marie Wilson to advance women's leadership, began by launching a campaign asking the public to identify women qualified to become president. The list drew snickers that some nominees were lightweights, including former Illinois Senator Carol Moseley Braun, whose 2004 run for president was quickly smacked down. Deborah Carstens, a Washington D.C. based businesswoman active in efforts to elect pro-choice Republican women and former WHP board member, recalls such bruisings when she says, "The path to change is onerous."

Sprinting to Where We Want to Be

On that path to change, Hillary Clinton has shown that women beyond any doubt can be tough enough, smart enough, persistent enough, ambitious enough, courageous enough, and can raise enough money to compete in the biggest political arena. What does this mean for the future of women in politics? What will be the lasting effects of Hillary Clinton's run for the highest elective office in America? First, the bad news:

1. Structural barriers remain to women seeking elective office. Aside from financial power disparities-women still earn 3/4 of men's pay, make up only 15% of corporate board positions, and remain primary caregivers most of the time for children and the elderly. These responsibilities are more likely to deter women from starting their political careers early enough to move up through the pipeline as men are inclined to do. This keeps them from gaining the seniority like, say, a Ted Kennedy or John McCain, that enables them to garner powerful agenda-setting roles like committee chairmanships.

2. Many women, especially younger ones, say they are very put off by the media sexism Clinton endured during her campaign. From attention given to her physical attributes to damned if she did and damned if she didn't comments on her confidence level, the assaults were relentless. They called her laugh a "cackle", a designation usually reserved for witches who are of course always women. Never mind that both John McCain and Rudy Giuliani have odd laughs that present at inappropriate moments-those were never mentioned. They criticized her thick ankles, her moment of cleavage, her pantsuits, her pink jacket. Rush Limbaugh told us the nation didn't want to watch a woman age. When Hillary told Katie Couric she felt confident in her ability to win the race, Chris Matthews absolutely lambasted her "arrogance"; yet when male candidates expressed similar confidence, they were never challenged, but rather admired.

3. Cultural sexism remains pervasive. Hillary's candidacy has shown that women who threaten the gender power balance will be subjected to vicious attacks, not just from political opponents and pundits, but also from yahoos who don't have a clue-like the creator of the Hillary Nutcracker whose splayed metal "thighs" have lugs that can crush-nuts. This man actually e-mailed me to assure me the product was not sexist. His proof? He'd heard they were turning up on the desks of Clinton campaign staffers. He couldn't understand my retort that the only defense a woman has against such irrational misogyny is to turn it into a joke. Obama made the race speech; Clinton would have shown herself to be more of a leader had she made a sexism speech, because goodness knows there was and is plenty to talk about. But why didn't Obama speak out to protest the sexism too? Because sexism is either not noticed or not viewed as important as racism.

Despite these downsides, there are even more reasons to be optimistic that Hillary Clinton's presidential run will be a net plus in motivating women to enter politics. I predict a sea change in women's participation in politics up and down the ticket and in non-elective political roles as well, for these reasons:

1. Seeing gives the potential for being. The message chanted at Clinton's rallies: "Yes she can!" has clearly been delivered to younger generations. All young girls hereafter will grow up knowing it is possible for a woman to be president. And Clinton's willingness to stay in the race despite all the challenges, despite constant calls for her to bow out, despite what must have been intense exhaustion and disappointment, is exactly what women of all ages with political aspirations need to see. In her speeches, she often mentioned "two groups who move me: women in their 80's and 90's who come out in walkers and wheelchairs and say they just want to live long enough to see a woman elected president, and families who bring their children and lean over and whisper in their daughter's ear, 'Honey you can be anything you want to be.'" Now they know they can.

2. Women were energized as never before. Rep. Carolyn Maloney said at a recent event sponsored by Lifetime Television, which along with three major women's magazines has spearheaded a massive multimedia campaign called "Every Woman Counts", that even though Clinton lost the primary campaign to Obama, "I think she lifted up the self esteem of women across the country, across the world." Observing that Clinton raised $190 million in the primary race, Maloney said. "I think she helped all of us." One measure of how much she has helped women become more engaged in politics is that in past races, women's financial contributions amounted to less than 30% of the total. For the first time, fueled by excitement over Clinton's candidacy, half of the contributions to a presidential candidate came from women. And, in fact, over 40% of Obama's contributions came from women as well, demonstrating women's importance to the Democratic party and women's understanding about the strategic importance of giving their fair share of the proverbial mother's milk of politics in order to get their fair share of influence on the public policies they want. As North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Bev Perdue pointed out, "Everybody is involved in politics whether they realize it or not." Since men have little motivation to change the power structure, women have little choice but to become the change we want to see. Clinton's willingness to put herself out there will motivate more of us to try.

3. Media sexism has been called out, and that roots it out. Rep. Maloney went on to say at the Lifetime event that there was "a big undercurrent of sexism, misogyny and stereotyping" against Hillary Clinton during her campaign for president. But the point here is Maloney made her claims at a public, mainstream media-sponsored event. That would not have happened in the past. The nonprofit Women's Media Center mounted a campaign called "Sexism Sells, but We're not Buying It" in collaboration with several media justice organizations They got the attention and the responses of major media executives and producers, as well as on-air apologies from Chris Matthews, David Schuster, and others. Even Katie Couric-too late, sadly, to make a difference in this year's primary reporting but with luck influential enough to change the way women candidates are treated in the future-finally had enough and spoke out publicly on the subject. Change will be slow and imperfect, but it will happen.

4. Hillary's post-primary awakening led her to embrace her leadership role as a woman and on behalf of other women. Throughout the campaign, she downplayed the importance of her gender, saying as she did at the Beacon Theater, "For me it is a great honor and humbling experience to be the first woman president. But I'm not running because I am a woman but because I am the most qualified. " Since the campaign, she has been much quicker to champion women's rights. For example, she led the charge to challenge the Bush administration's proposed new regulations that would redefine many birth control methods as abortion and allow medical providers to refuse to provide them. She seems to have learned a lesson about being her true self; other women will take courage from that.

Elvis Costello got a standing ovation at Hillary's birthday event after he declared, "Questioning authority is the act of a patriot". The Wallflowers joined Elvis onstage; the decibel level elevated ten-fold, whipping this audience of unlikely rockers into frothy enthusiasm. Then comedian Billy Crystal came up to close the evening.

Little did Crystal know just how prescient he was when he said, ""Hillary is making this campaign not so much for the old rockers but for the new ones."

© by Gloria Feldt, 2008 gloria@gloriafeldt.com www.GloriaFeldt.com www.GloriaFeldt.com/heartfeldt-politics-blog