No Country for Bold Women

(Photo Credit: Doug Mills, New York Times; Senator Hillary Clinton concedes defeat in Iowa Democratic caucuses, 1/3/08)

The morning after Iowa, Moose sits in the red chair, reading the papers, fielding phone calls, loathing NBC’s chief bloviator, Chris Matthews, to whom she unwisely subjected herself for far too many hours last night. Matthews was so over-the-top in his gleeful anticipatory dancing upon the grave of the Clinton campaign that Moose entertained unkind visions of Anton Chigurh, the sociopathic killing machine who marches through the austere landscape of No Country for Old Men, taking aim at Matthews’s fat head with that strange cattle gun that is his weapon of choice. Forgive Moose her uncharacteristically mean thoughts, but even Keith Olbermann seemed horrified by his colleague’s emphatic pronouncements of doom for Clinton. (Other viewers shared Moose's disgust, by the way.) Had it not been for butch goddess Rachel Maddow, who was also on MSNBC and sanely pointed out that 2/3s of Democratic voters rejected each of the party’s front runners in Iowa, Moose would have turned off the TV and gone to bed by 9:30, but she cannot walk away from Rachel Maddow.

June Star calls in from New Jersey to declare, not gloatingly but matter of factly, that Barack Obama’s stunning victory signals the start of a juggernaut that cannot be stopped. Moose demurs from that assessment, though she admits to being impressed by the size of the victory and by Obama’s success with young and independent voters. (Details here.) Moose acknowledges Obama gave a stirring victory speech, a soaring bit of oratory that quickened her pulse and made her palms a little sweaty. (See Obama's speech here.) But, she says to June Star, has anyone noticed that the politics and the policies don’t match the rhetoric, that even if he’s talking like RFK and MLK his proposals are warmed-over versions of stuff out of the Democratic Losership Council? No, June Star replies. Nobody is noticing because nobody cares right now. Voters are hungry for change, and they want to be inspired. I know, Moose says. Me, too, but surely the substance matters, and aren’t you furious with the press’s knee-jerk hatred of Clinton and their eagerness to declare her campaign DOA? Of course, June Star says, but, oh, shoot, I’ve reached my destination. I’ll call you back later.

(NB: Roxie’s World does not condone the use of cell phones while driving. Let the record show that June Star uses a perfectly legal hands-free device for chatting while negotiating the highways of the Garden State, and Moose always urges her to pay proper attention to traffic as they minutely dissect the latest developments in politics and pop culture.)

Moose hangs up the phone. She puts down the papers and stares out the back window, thinking, for some strange reason, of the late 1860s. Moose, as I have told you before, is weird and given at times to pondering history’s maddening tendency to repeat itself. She is musing upon that nasty period in the history of American civil rights when the coalition between abolitionists and women’s rights advocates that worked so effectively to bring about the end of slavery fell apart when abolitionists agreed to separate the causes of black and women’s suffrage and support the 14th and 15th Amendments, which secured voting rights for black men and introduced the distinction of gender into the Constitution for the first time. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and others in the women’s suffrage movement felt betrayed and abandoned by their old allies, including William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, and relations between the advocates of women’s equality and racial equality were severely strained. In the end, American women would wait another fifty years to gain universal suffrage with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. That painful bit of history is a powerful example of what happens when race and sex are pitted against each other, which happens all too often in American politics and in the crude framings of events (as allegories, melodramas, endless repetitions of a reductive Showdown at Race/Gender Gap) in the American media. Moose sees that happening everywhere in the coverage of Clinton v. Obama, and it drives her crazy.

And yet: Moose is thinking about all the talk she’s heard about America not being “ready” for a black president. She never bought that, but now she’s wondering if it isn’t possible that the country isn’t ready for a woman president. Could it be that misogyny is a more potent force in the electorate than racism is, or is that the wrong question, a question that shows Moose herself is caught up in the trap of pitting race against gender? Is it simply that the magnetic Obama is a better candidate than the overly cautious Clinton? Or that the Clinton campaign, in thrall to pollster Mark Penn, misread voters’ moods and placed too much emphasis on the candidate’s experience rather than on the exciting prospect of putting a woman in the White House (as president) for the first time? (That point is made deep into this Wa Po analysis of what happened to Clinton in Iowa.) (Just to prove that these are not [all] rhetorical questions, we’ll offer an emphatic YES on that last one and urge Clinton to un-burden herself of the over-rated Penn as quickly as possible. Fire him, Hillary, and throw a little bit of your caution to the wind. Let voters see that you want this thing, and they’ll start wanting it for you. Talk to your husband about the advantages of running as the underdog.)

It’s entirely possible that all of this gnashing of teeth and talk of changing courses is premature. The bigger story out of Iowa in the opinion of the political division here at Roxie’s World is the triumph of the terrifying yet affable Mike Huckabee in the Republican straw poll, a result that throws the race on that side into true chaos. If Clinton comes back in five days and wins New Hampshire, Matthews and the other vampire slayers will have to admit that not much has changed and the old girl isn’t dead yet. The candidate herself was preternaturally calm last night in the face of defeat. She, too, gave a wonderful speech. (See it here.) She was gracious to Obama and the rest of the Democratic field and appropriately exultant on the size of the turnout for Democrats. She also seemed quietly yet fiercely determined to carry on the fight for the nomination. She has the resources and the organization to do so, so perhaps the prognosticators should hold their tongues and wait and see what happens when the race moves into bigger states. She’s got work to do, but there’s no reason to think she can’t do it.

In the meantime, we’ve taken steps here in Roxie’s World to assure that Moose’s mood stabilizes as the race unfolds. She’s been forbidden to watch any show that has Chris Matthews on it, and we’re not letting her get anywhere near livestock equipment stores. Sweeney Todd is next on the list of films she and Goose are supposed to see, so we may need to limit her access to barbershops as well, but fear not, readers. The old dog is on a short leash for the duration, and she’ll stand by Hillary, as she did by Bill, until the last dog dies.