Hillary + feminism, + how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans: a roundup of posts
A roundup of 5 articles, the associated tweets are below.
Why R feminists spending more time cheerleading for HRC than pushing for policies that advance all women? My latest: https://t.co/umo3KR5Mes
- Kathleen Geier (@Kathy__Gee) October 18, 2016
"Facts haven’t stopped pundits from pushing stories about the white working class’s embrace of a demagogue" https://t.co/XzEoKriY3K
- Connor Kilpatrick (@ckilpatrick) October 17, 2016
Last week, Obama did what Hillary Clinton hasn’t for months: argue that Trump is a product of Republican actions https://t.co/EelWZ3Qqkm
- BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) October 18, 2016
DNC Lawyers Argue No Liability: Neutrality Is Merely a ‘Promise’ https://t.co/YzB81n49N5
- OBSERVER (@observer) October 17, 2016
Our Coven penetrates Very Serious Media: https://t.co/XinKBTxvON
- Liza Featherstone (@lfeatherz) October 17, 2016
Why Feminists Shouldn’t Trust Hillary Clinton
Pro-Hillary cheerleading will not advance social justice for women. But keeping the pressure on might do the trick.
BY KATHLEEN GEIER
If you searched for a single headline that distilled what has been so depressing about feminist commentary on the 2016 election, you could do worse than pick this one, from The Guardian’s Lindy West, a writer I usually admire: “Hating Trump isn’t enough-we need to talk about why Clinton rules.” On the one hand, there’s the fixation on Trump’s awfulness, which is hardly a secret. On the other, there is the relentless cheerleading for Clinton, which sounds suspiciously like the desperate overselling of an underwhelming product. The piece accompanying the headline shares the defects common to the feminist pro-Clinton op-ed genre. In one short article, there are two long paragraphs about the sexism Clinton has suffered, but no attempt to probe into the policies she is proposing, or to grapple honestly with her actual feminist record.
Of course, most feminists-albeit with some notable exceptions-support Clinton in the presidential race. But though you’d never guess it from West’s piece and others like it, there’s a viable alternative both to outright opposition to Hillary and the happy talk of her feminist fans-one that is at once more intellectually honest and more politically constructive. Political theorist Nancy Fraser has dubbed it “critical support”: a vote for Clinton, combined with “vociferous criticism of her policies and explicit campaigning for Sanders-type alternatives.” Critical support, says Fraser, is “a strategy that looks beyond November to the ongoing struggle to build a new American left.”
But that, alas, has been the road not taken. While Clinton’s candidacy could have been an occasion for feminists to shine a spotlight on the broader, more structural forces that perpetuate women’s inequality, few Clinton supporters have chosen to do so-some because they worried that criticizing her would somehow boost Trump’s prospects. But now, as the campaign dwindles down to its final days, it is long past time for feminists to start thinking not only about the election, but also about what should happen afterward. If Hillary triumphs in November, how can feminists realize the potential of an historic opportunity to achieve social justice for women? More specifically, how can we pressure Clinton to make good on her feminist campaign promises, while at the same time fight for a bolder, more expansive vision for American feminism?
Let’s be clear about what is at stake. In the last century, major progressive change at the federal level-most notably the New Deal of the 1930s and the civil rights and Great Society legislation of the 1960s-has occurred only in narrow windows, when the Democratic Party controlled the presidency and at least one house of Congress. This year, not only are the Democrats strong favorites to win the White House, they are also favored to regain control of the Senate, and they even have an outside shot of taking back the House. Democratic victory in November, combined with a GOP in delightful post-Trump meltdown mode, would create the most auspicious political climate in decades for advancing women’s rights. Feminists would be granted the chance of a lifetime to bring U.S. work, family, and reproductive rights policies into the twenty-first century.
But absent organized pressure, Hillary Clinton is unlikely to avail herself of this opportunity. Aside from its anti-Trumpism, Clinton’s general-election campaign lacked a strong theme, which will make it difficult for her to claim a mandate for any particular set of policies or political vision. As New Republic columnist David Dayen has noted, “Democrats are at their most inspiring when they run on actual policies.” You’ve probably heard the (perhaps apocryphal) story about FDR, who, when asked by activists to support one of their causes, allegedly told them, “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”
Elected officials, even the most progressive ones, are unlikely to take bold action unless they are pushed. That lesson goes double for Hillary Clinton. She is a deeply cautious politician whose record is marred by some ugly anti-feminist blots. Among them: her endorsement of one of the most anti-woman policies in recent American history, welfare “reform” (even as a senator, she was calling for more punitive welfare policies than her Democratic colleagues); her tendency to use stigmatizing language when discussing abortion rights; her failure, while serving on the board of Walmart, to speak out on behalf of the women who launched a sex discrimination lawsuit against the retail giant; and her approval of foreign policies like the Iraq War and the coup in Honduras, which left women in those countries far worse off. (There’s a strong feminist tradition that opposes those kinds of imperialist adventures.)
On the other hand, throughout her 2016 campaign, Hillary has stressed surprisingly strong feminist themes. Her reproductive rights proposals include the abolition of the Hyde and Helms amendments (which, respectively, ban federal funding for abortion and prohibit foreign aid from being used for abortion “as a method of family planning”). Prodded by Bernie Sanders and his supporters, Clinton has also called for feminist economic policies that include paid family leave, a major boost in the minimum wage (women are nearly two-thirds of minimum wage earners), and significantly expanded child care.
But though Clinton is running on the most ambitious feminist platform of any major-party presidential nominee in history, it’s unclear how meaningful that will turn out to be. Visit Clinton’s web page and you will find a dizzying laundry list of 38 policy proposals, of which the feminist ones are a relatively small part. She has given little indication as to where feminist concerns stand in relation to the rest of her political priorities. If she’s elected president, which Hillary we will see: the corporate-friendly centrist of the 1980s through the 2000s, or the born-again feminist of the 2016 presidential campaign?
That remains an open question, and Clinton’s first major act as her party’s presidential candidate was hardly reassuring. For her running mate, she chose Senator Tim Kaine, a man who not only is not very progressive, but also has one of the worst records on reproductive rights of any major figure in the Democratic Party. As governor of Virginia, he advocated parental notification and other abortion restrictions and enacted a law that allowed funds to go to bogus “crisis pregnancy” centers-anti-choice propaganda outfits which bombard vulnerable women with guilt trips and dangerous misinformation. Some Kaine backers argue that his abortion views have “evolved;” nevertheless, he continues to support the Hyde amendment.
Yet bizarrely, the heads of NOW, Planned Parenthood, EMILY’s List, and other major women’s organizations greeted the Kaine pick with encomiums, praising him as an “ally” and “an excellent choice.” When they touted his “100 percent” rating from the likes of NARAL and Planned Parenthood, you could practically smell the bad faith. What kind of rating system would leave out such a pro-choice issue as vital as the Hyde amendment? (Candidate scorecards from NARAL and Planned Parenthood omit Hyde and other key reproductive rights issues).
To their credit, feminist Clinton supporters like Nation columnist Katha Pollitt expressed dismay at the Kaine selection. But at the same time, Pollitt argued Hillary will likely steer the right course on choice issues, because Clinton “is too closely embedded with Planned Parenthood, and with the larger pro-choice community” to do otherwise.
There’s a large grain of truth to this view, which is the predominant one among Clinton’s feminist supporters. But can we really trust Hillary to do the right thing? Granted, we should hardly expect Hillary to morph into an ardent fetus-fancier; she has zero political incentive to do so. But the bigger question is where reproductive rights, not to mention feminist issues generally, stand in terms of Clinton’s political priorities, and how much political capital she’s willing to spend to protect and enhance them. After all, the last two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, pledged strong support for abortion rights yet presided over the erosion of women’s right to choose. Neither of them lifted a finger to abolish the Hyde or Helms amendments (though a simple executive order would greatly restrict the scope of the latter). And Obama supported the Stupak amendment (what is it with these awful men and their terrible amendments?), a provision that allows states to weasel out of health care coverage for abortion, which has led to more women paying out of pocket for abortion. With her selection of Kaine, it certainly looked as though Clinton made the calculation that she, like her Democratic predecessors, can take pro-choice voters for granted.
Unfortunately, many of Clinton’s feminist supporters have made it easy for Democrats to take them for granted. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminist activists and intellectuals maintained a critical distance from the Democratic Party; they supported many Democratic candidates but remained focused on independent activism. This, arguably, gave the feminist movement a more sweeping, visionary approach that was focused on the structural, economically rooted barriers to women’s equality. Even mainstream feminist groups poured resources into campaigns for universal child care, welfare rights, and aggressive pay equity proposals such as comparable worth.
But in recent decades, the distance between mainstream feminism and the Democratic Party has almost totally evaporated. We saw the culmination of this process in the 2016 primaries, when every major women’s group and practically every mainstream feminist pundit supported Clinton over Bernie Sanders, many of them sounding more like campaign surrogates than independent journalists and activists. Feminist pundits have argued that Clinton, by virtue of her power as a positive role model, will uplift all women. But this trickle-down feminist perspective confuses the narrow personal interests of Hillary Clinton with the broader interests of women as a class. The result is that feminists have spent far more energy celebrating Clinton’s shattering of the “ultimate glass ceiling” and shielding her from criticisms (including fair ones, like those about her ties to Wall Street) than to sweating the details on her record and policies.
Take, for instance, Clinton’s child-care plan. Clinton supporters frequently characterize the program as “universal.” Rebecca Traister of New York magazine stopped short of making that claim, but she did say that Clinton’s proposals “would have been understood not long ago as something out of a ’70s feminist fever dream.” Well, if that’s true, the folks characterizing it that way would have had a poor grasp of policy-and of history. The signature child-care initiative of second-wave feminists was the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971, a bill that would have established a national network of federally funded child care centers. (Nixon, to his eternal discredit, vetoed it.) Now that would have been the start of a truly universal system.
It’s not that Hillary’s child-care proposals aren’t a step in the right direction. Her plans-which include moving toward universal pre-K, increasing funding for Head Start, and limiting child care costs to 10 percent of family income-would be a major improvement over the status quo. But here’s what her proposal does not do: Unlike the 1971 child-care bill, it would not actually provide child care. Yet the underprovision of child care, and the the shortage of licensed, quality care in particular, is one of the key failings of the American child care system. The increased spending that Clinton calls for is laudable, but it still would not bring us anywhere near the goal of accessible, affordable, high-quality care for all.
This points to a larger problem: Women will never achieve equality in our society absent major economic redistribution. The main force keeping women down is our society’s dependence on women’s unpaid caring labor, which profoundly disadvantages women in the labor force and within the family. Feminist progress requires an advanced welfare system that transfers wealth and resources to women and families. Universal child care would be a central component of such a structural transformation, but it would be only the beginning. Clinton, however, has pledged not to raise taxes on the middle class, which effectively rules out any major expansion of the welfare state. Unfortunately, her skittishness about raising taxes is echoed by many other leading Democrats (and their Wall Street backers), and it has dramatically narrowed feminism’s horizons. For women to advance, feminists need to fight Clinton-style, austerity-lite, anti-tax politics, a moldy artifact from a far more conservative era.
In addition to pushing Hillary toward more redistributionist labor and social welfare policies, feminists need to keep the pressure on in other ways. First and foremost, we need to support feminist organizing-by door-to-door canvassing, lobbying elected officials, participating in rallies and mass protests, and more. Let’s not forget that, more than any other single force, it’s the state and local campaigns across America for paid family and sick leave, domestic workers’ rights, and the $15 minimum wage which have created the political space for Clinton’s feminist policy initiatives. The success of the recent national strike of Polish women to protest a restrictive new abortion law is an inspiring example of just how potent feminist mass action can be.
Feminists should also keep close tabs on Clinton’s presidential transition process, which is already well underway; since personnel is policy, we should demand that key appointments be filled with the most progressive, most pro-feminist candidates available. In addition, since we know that Republican members of Congress will do their utmost to thwart progressive legislative initiatives, it’s important to figure out which feminist policies could be implemented by executive order instead-and hold Hillary’s feet to the fire until she signs off on them. Promising candidates for executive action include measures to strengthen pay transparency and weaken the Hyde amendment, but that is only the beginning. An especially urgent feminist project is to identify and advocate for policies that currently are not on the political map, but desperately need to become political priorities. First up should be rehauling our broken welfare system, but there are plenty more items to be added to the list.
And what if Clinton still shows signs of returning to her old neoliberal self? Feminists and other progressives would need to start planning for a serious 2020 primary challenge. As the Sanders example showed, primary challenges are one of the most powerful tools activists have to shape the direction of the party-and, potentially, a presidency.
Feminists can’t afford to be complacent, because there’s one thing we know for sure about Hillary Clinton: In the face of political failure, her deepest instincts are to move to the right. Hillary biographers such as Carl Bernstein report that after Bill Clinton’s failure to be re-elected governor in 1980 and the GOP takeover of the House in the 1994 midterms, she was a major advocate of politics of retreat and triangulation. And today, her triangulating tendencies are alive and kicking. Clinton has actively courted the endorsements of prominent Republicans who have made it clear that they expect to get something in return for their support. The recently leaked Wall Street speeches, which show Clinton praising the Social Security-cutting Bowles Simpson plan and openly admitting that elected officials “need both a public and a private [political] position,” raise serious questions about the depth of Clinton’s commitment to her progressive campaign promises.
We know from history that opportunities to make lasting change at the national level are rare and fleeting. When these moments come, activists must be poised to make the most of them. We can’t afford to forget that, as Frederick Douglass famously argued, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Feminists, let’s make Hillary do it.
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Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans
Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict - and native Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong.
Not so poor: Trump voters are middle class
Hard numbers complicate, if not roundly dismiss, the oft-regurgitated theory that income or education levels predict Trump support, or that working-class whites support him disproportionately. Last month, results of 87,000 interviews conducted by Gallup showed that those who liked Trump were under no more economic distress or immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.
According to the study, his supporters didn’t have lower incomes or higher unemployment levels than other Americans. Income data misses a lot; those with healthy earnings might also have negative wealth or downward mobility. But respondents overall weren’t clinging to jobs perceived to be endangered. “Surprisingly”, a Gallup researcher wrote, “there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign.”
Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000 - higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. In January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism - not income, education, gender, age or race -predicted Trump support.
These facts haven’t stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working class’s giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue.
In seeking to explain Trump’s appeal, proportionate media coverage would require more stories about the racism and misogyny among white Trump supporters in tony suburbs. Or, if we’re examining economically driven bitterness among the working class, stories about the Democratic lawmakers who in recent decades ended welfare as we knew it, hopped in the sack with Wall Street and forgot American labor in their global trade agreements.
But, for national media outlets comprised largely of middle- and upper-class liberals, that would mean looking their own class in the face.
Poor whiteness and poor character
The two-fold myth about the white working class - that they are to blame for Trump’s rise, and that those among them who support him for the worst reasons exemplify the rest - takes flight on the wings of moral superiority affluent Americans often pin upon themselves.
I have never seen them flap so insistently as in today’s election commentary, where notions of poor whiteness and poor character are routinely conflated.
In an election piece last March in the National Review, writer Kevin Williamson’s assessment of poor white voters - among whom mortality rates have sharply risen in recent decades - expressed what many conservatives and liberals alike may well believe when he observed that communities ravaged by oxycodone use “deserve to die”.
I’m hard-pressed to think of a worse slight than the media figures who have disregarded the embattled white working class for decades now beseeching the country to have sympathy for them. We don’t need their analysis, and we sure don’t need their tears. What we need is to have our stories told, preferably by someone who can walk into a factory without his own guilt fogging his glasses.
One such journalist, Alexander Zaitchik, spent several months on the road in six states getting to know white working-class people who do support Trump. His goal for the resulting new book, The Gilded Rage, was to convey the human complexity that daily news misses. Zaitchik wrote that his mission arose from frustration with “‘hot takes’ written by people living several time zones and income brackets away from their subjects”.
Zaitchik wisely described those he met as a “blue-collar middle class”- mostly white people who have worked hard and lost a lot, whether in the market crash of 2008 or the manufacturing layoffs of recent decades. He found that their motivations overwhelmingly “started with economics and ended with economics”. The anger he observed was “pointed up, not down” at those who forgot them when global trade deals were negotiated, not at minority groups.
Meanwhile, the racism and nationalism that surely exist among them also exist among Democrats and higher socioeconomic strata. A poll conducted last spring by Reuters found that a third of questioned Democrats supported a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States. In another, by YouGov, 45% of polled Democrats reported holding an unfavorable view of Islam, with almost no fluctuation based on household income. Those who won’t vote for Trump are not necessarily paragons of virtue, while the rest are easily scapegoated as the country’s moral scourge.
When Hillary Clinton recently declared half of Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables”, Zaitchik told another reporter, the language “could be read as another way of saying ‘white-trash bin’.” Clinton quickly apologized for the comment, the context of which contained compassion for many Trump voters. But making such generalizations at a $6m fundraiser in downtown New York City, at which some attendees paid $50,000 for a seat, recalled for me scenes from the television political satire Veep in which powerful Washington figures discuss “normals” with distaste behind closed doors.
When we talked, Zaitchik mentioned HBO talk-show host Bill Maher, who he pointed out “basically makes eugenics-level arguments about anyone who votes for Donald Trump having congenital defects. You would never get away with talking that way about any other group of people and still have a TV show.”
Maher is, perhaps, the pinnacle of classist smugness. In the summer of 1998, when I was 17 and just out of high school, I worked at a grain elevator during the wheat harvest. An elevator 50 miles east in Haysville, Kansas, exploded (grain dust is highly combustible), killing seven workers. The accident rattled my community and reminded us about the physical dangers my family and I often faced as farmers.
I kept going to work like everyone else and, after a long day weighing wheat trucks and hauling heavy sacks of feed in and out of the mill, liked to watch Politically Incorrect, the ABC show Maher hosted then. With the search for one of the killed workers’ bodies still under way, Maher joked, as I recall, that the people should check their loaves of Wonder Bread.
That moment was perhaps my first reckoning with the hard truth that, throughout my life, I would politically identify with the same people who often insult the place I am from.
Such derision is so pervasive that it’s often imperceptible to the economically privileged. Those who write, discuss, and publish newspapers, books, and magazines with best intentions sometimes offend with obliviousness.
Entertain a parallel broad statement about any other disenfranchised group, and you might begin to see how rudimentary class discussion is for this relatively young country that long believed itself to be free of castes. Isenberg has sniffed out the hypocrisy in play, though.
“The other problem is when people want to blame poor whites for being the only racist in the room,” she told Gladstone. “… as if they’re more racist than everyone else.”
That problem is rooted in the notion that higher class means higher integrity. As journalist Lorraine Berry wrote last month, “The story remains that only the ignorant would be racist. Racism disappears with education we’re told.” As the first from my family to hold degrees, I assure you that none of us had to go to college to learn basic human decency.
Berry points out that Ivy-League-minted Republicans shepherded the rise of the alt-right. Indeed, it was not poor whites - not even white Republicans - who passed legislation bent on preserving segregation, or who watched the Confederate flag raised outside state capitols for decades to come.
It wasn’t poor whites who criminalized blackness by way of marijuana laws and the “war on drugs”.
Nor was it poor whites who conjured the specter of the black “welfare queen”.
These points should not minimize the horrors of racism at the lowest economic rungs of society, but remind us that those horrors reside at the top in different forms and with more terrible power.
Among reporters and commentators this election cycle, then, a steady finger ought be pointed at whites with economic leverage: social conservatives who donate to Trump’s campaign while being too civilized to attend a political rally and yell what they really believe.
Mainstream media is set up to fail the ordinary American
Based on Trump’s campaign rhetoric and available data, it appears that most of his voters this November will be people who are getting by well enough but who think of themselves as victims.
One thing the media misses is that a great portion of the white working class would align with any sense before victimhood. Right now they are clocking in and out of work, sorting their grocery coupons, raising their children to respect others, and avoiding political news coverage.
Barack Obama, a black man formed by the black experience, often cites his maternal lineage in the white working class. “A lot of what’s shaped me came from my grandparents who grew up on the prairie in Kansas,” he wrote this month to mark a White House forum on rural issues.
Last year, talking with author Marilynne Robinson for the New York Review of Books, Obama lamented common misconceptions of small-town middle America, for which he has a sort of reverence. “There’s this huge gap between how folks go about their daily lives and how we talk about our common life and our political life,” he said, naming one cause as “the filters that stand between ordinary people” who are busy getting by and complicated policy debates.
“I’m very encouraged when I meet people in their environments,” Obama told Robinson. “Somehow it gets distilled at the national political level in ways that aren’t always as encouraging.”
Media fascination with the hateful white Trump voter fuels the theory, now in fashion, that bigotry is the only explanation for supporting him. Certainly, financial struggle does not predict a soft spot for Trump, as cash-strapped people of color - who face the threat of his racism and xenophobia, and who resoundingly reject him, by all available measures - can attest. However, one imagines that elite white liberals who maintain an air of ethical grandness this election season would have a harder time thinking globally about trade and immigration if it were their factory job that was lost and their community that was decimated.
Affluent analysts who oppose Trump, though, have a way of taking a systemic view when examining social woes but viewing their place on the political continuum as a triumph of individual character. Most of them presumably inherited their political bent, just like most of those in “red” America did. If you were handed liberalism, give yourself no pats on the back for your vote against Trump.
Spare, too, the condescending argument that disaffected Democrats who joined Republican ranks in recent decades are “voting against their own best interests,” undemocratic in its implication that a large swath of America isn’t mentally fit to cast a ballot.
Whoever remains on Trump’s side as stories concerning his treatment of women, racism and other dangers continue to unfurl gets no pass from me for any reason. They are capable of voting, and they own their decisions. Let’s be aware of our class biases, though, as we discern who “they” are.
Journalist? Then the chances are you’re not blue collar
The main reason that national media outlets have a blind spot in matters of class is the lack of socioeconomic diversity within their ranks. Few people born to deprivation end up working in newsrooms or publishing books. So few, in fact, that this former laborer has found cause to shift her entire writing career to talk specifically about class in a wealth-privileged industry, much as journalists of color find themselves talking about race in a whiteness-privileged one.
I know journalists to be hard-working people who want to get the story right, and I’m resistant to rote condemnations of “the media”. The classism of cable-news hosts merely reflects the classism of privileged America in general. It’s everywhere, from tweets describing Trump voters as inbred hillbillies to a Democratic campaign platform that didn’t bother with a specific anti-poverty platform until a month out from the general election.
The economic trench between reporter and reported on has never been more hazardous than at this moment of historic wealth disparity, though, when stories focus more often on the stock market than on people who own no stocks. American journalism has been willfully obtuse about the grievances on Main Streets for decades - surely a factor in digging the hole of resentment that Trump’s venom now fills. That the term “populism” has become a pejorative among prominent liberal commentators should give us great pause. A journalism that embodies the plutocracy it’s supposed to critique has failed its watchdog duty and lost the respect of people who call bullshit when they see it.
If you would stereotype a group of people by presuming to guess their politics or deeming them inferior to yourself - say, the ones who worked third shift on a Boeing floor while others flew to Mexico during spring break; the ones who mopped a McDonald’s bathroom while others argued about the minimum wage on Twitter; the ones who cleaned out their lockers at a defunct Pabst factory while others drank craft beer at trendy bars; the ones who came back from the Middle East in caskets while others wrote op-eds about foreign policy - then consider that you might have more in common with Trump than you would like to admit.
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Women Who Hate Trump, but Aren’t With Her
The misogyny of the 2016 campaign has stifled critiques of Clinton from progressive feminists and people of color, by Emma Green
Depending on your perspective, it’s either Hillary Clinton’s great misfortune or incredible luck to be matched with an opponent who believes men like him can simply grab women “by the pu**y,” who has been accused of making unwanted sexual advances against colleagues, and who made a sport of sizing up all the beauty queens in the pageant he owned. Because Donald Trump represents the worst version of how powerful men treat women, the symbolism of Clinton can seem uncomplicated: Her White House victory, if it comes, will be a win for women.
What that means, though, is that women have been twice silenced in this election: Once by Donald Trump and his allies, who have dismissed his demeaning behavior toward women as “locker-room talk,” and the other by Clinton and her supporters, who have pushed a narrative that she is both the symbol and champion of women’s progress. The second is subtler, and in no way equivalent to Donald Trump’s comments on women. But for some women who don’t feel represented by Clinton-specifically those on the left, along with women of color-this experience has been alienating. Just as it’s important for women and feminists to resist the downward suck of Trump’s vulgarity, so it’s important to entertain the limits of what Clinton’s presidency might mean for women’s advancement.
“If you criticize HRC, it looks like you’re endorsing fascism,” said Catherine Liu, a professor of film and media studies at University of California, Irvine.
And “the tone of some of this has been: If you are anti-Hillary, you are anti-woman,” said Naomi Christine Leapheart, a non-profit worker in Philadelphia who is seeking her ordination in the United Church of Christ. “I have, as they would say, receipts in that department.”
At the beginning of October, Clinton held a 20-percentage-point lead over her opponent among women surveyed in a Quinnipiac poll. But even women who intend to vote for Clinton don’t necessarily see themselves in her. Lots of women in the U.S., like Leapheart and others from around the country whom I spoke with in phone interviews, are not enthusiastic about Clinton, even if they’re horrified by the possibility of a President Trump. As the language used to refer to women has somehow become even more ugly and sexist during these final days of the election, a strong majority of women voters have signaled their intention to vote for Clinton. But the real divisions among them have largely been overlooked as a result.
Throughout the election, Clinton’s campaign has happily told the story that she is the woman’s candidate-during debates, on her merchandise, and especially upon becoming the Democratic nominee. “Thanks to you, we have reached a milestone: The first time in our nation’s history that a woman will be a major-party nominee for president,” she said during her June speech in Brooklyn, after winning enough delegates to secure the nomination. “It started right here in New York at a place called Seneca Falls, when a small but determined group of women and men came together with the idea that women deserved equal rights.” Later, she spoke about the day her mother was born: June 4, 1919, the day Congress gave women the right to vote.
The trouble with marking Seneca Falls and the 19th Amendment as straightforward landmarks in America’s march toward equality is that they only represent some women’s history. Black women did not take part in the convention where the Declaration of Sentiments was promulgated. African American advocates for women’s rights like Ida B. Wells occasionally clashed with white women in the movement, some of whom courted white Southerners in their quest for the vote. Many women of color did not benefit from suffrage until 1965, when the Voting Rights Act finally eliminated many of the racist barriers to their enfranchisement.
Even Clinton’s nomination isn’t a straightforward first: Shirley Chisholm, a black Congresswoman, ran against George McGovern in the 1972 Democratic presidential primary. As Charmaine Chua, a Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota who is skeptical of Clinton’s candidacy, put it, “The movement from Seneca Falls to the present covers a whole other set of steps in between that weren’t progressive at all.” If beating Trump is the apotheosis of feminism, then feminists haven’t achieved much at all. “I do not agree with the idea that we have to vote for Hillary and talk about her uncritically because of a fear of Donald Trump,” said Donna Murch, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “I think that is politically dangerous.”
Like this overly clean historical narrative, some of Clinton’s limitations are bound up in her identity. “I think Clinton comes from a background that is a bit disconnected from women of color,” said Farrah Khan, a Pakistani American candidate for city council in Irvine, California. “Our struggle is a bit different than hers might have been. When we’re running for office, when we’re moving ahead, we’re not only moving ahead as women-we’re moving ahead as minority women.”
While Clinton can’t help that she’s white, her whiteness at least partially determines who she can claim to speak for and represent. “She doesn’t seem to understand my everyday experience as a black woman,” said Leapheart.
Especially because Trump has so little support among black voters, it’s often assumed that Clinton has “black women in her pocket,” said Amaryah Armstrong, a theology Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Earlier this year, women on Twitter started the hashtag #GirlIGuessImWithHer, expressing reluctant support and feelings of distance from Clinton. “It’s everything from how much she spent on her suits and jackets-that’s so far from any reality that I have,” said Leapheart.
This is another factor that distinguishes Clinton from most American women: Like the vast majority of other national political figures, her household income puts her in the top 1 percent of earners in the U.S. Armstrong said this is the most alienating factor for her. “I don’t think it’s the fact that she’s a straight, white, cis woman,” she said. “Honestly, I think it’s the circles that she travels in-she’s a wealthy and elite white woman, and because of that, doesn’t have to deal with the kind of realities of living under the economic system that we live under.”
On a symbolic level, Clinton’s wealth matters-few women can identify with her life. “There’s a sense that for upper-middle-class women, or elite women, she represents this breaking-down of glass ceilings,” said Armstrong. “But when I think about poor women and working women, it’s hard for me to see her nomination as a victory in such a complete sense that she tries to portray it.”
From a political perspective, Clinton’s personal wealth highlights a divide within the Democratic Party, especially following a primary in which wealth and income inequality were central issues. “I think she’s courted the middle, and she’s made herself a very good Republican,” said Liu, the UC Irvine professor. For women looking for a radical vision of politics, including economic policies that would benefit poor women, Clinton’s platform may be unsatisfying.
“I don’t think there’s anything from her, tangibly, that’s different from a lot of other white, male candidates I’ve seen growing up my whole life,” said Junauda Petrus, a performance artist and activist in Minneapolis. “I wouldn’t sit down with these old-ass white people under any other circumstance to hear their opinions. But because they’re running for president, I’ve got to care.”
There are limits to how much Clinton can be criticized simply for who she is; no one can be a living symbol of every experience. But many women disagree with her policies as well. Charlene Carruthers, the national director of Black Youth Project 100, a grassroots organization in Chicago that trains young activists and organizes advocacy efforts, was particularly critical of Clinton’s role in ’90s-era welfare reform, which changed the structure of aid to poor mothers and children.
“I’ve voted in every election since I was 18,” Carruthers said. “I do not plan to cast a vote for Hillary Clinton in November. I cannot in good conscience, as the daughter of a black woman who has had to deal with the consequences of policies she has supported.”
Because she’s been in public office for so long, Clinton’s positions on different issues have changed over time. She didn’t start supporting same-sex marriage until 2013, for example, and specifically affirmed that marriage is between a man and a woman earlier in her political career. She has been embraced by LGBT organizations in Washington, including the Human Rights Campaign, but that doesn’t mean she’s won over all LGBT voters.
“It’s not enough to just be a woman who gets there-I want her to push for policies that actually help women and help genderqueer people and women of color,” said Jess Braverman, a lawyer who works in the public defender’s office in Minneapolis. “I want it to be more than just: She’s the first woman nominee for president.”
When it comes time to vote in November, women who don’t feel represented by Clinton have a few choices. “I’m voting for her, but I’m not, in general, in life, super excited,” said Braverman. Liu, who doesn’t live in a swing state, said she’d likely be sitting the presidential election out.
Petrus, in Minneapolis, told me over the phone that she was going to go for Jill Stein, but later followed up via email: “When reflecting more, I wanted to be thoughtful of the reality of the situation we find ourselves in, and in many ways it is avoiding disaster: the election of a reckless and hateful white supremacist who is accountable only to his own masturbatory narcissism,” she wrote. “At this point, electing Hillary is the only way to do that and I believe she is beyond capable of presidency.”
Some still haven’t decided. For people like Leapheart, who lives in the swing state of Pennsylvania, votes really do matter. She said she’s frustrated by the possibility of casting an anti-Trump vote. “I remain so disappointed. While we’re so busy arguing against what we don’t want, we’re not articulating a vision for what we can have, and what we do want,” she said. “As we get closer to November, I think I’ll have to decide I’m able to live with in terms of my own voting decision. But I don’t think I’ll be happy either way. Maybe I should just stop looking for that.”
Ultimately, that may be the lesson of Clinton’s feminist achievement: No one woman can truly represent 51 percent of the population. If anything, her candidacy, and potentially her presidency, will be a chance for those who care about women’s advancement to take stock of what’s next, now that it’s perfectly clear that even a woman running for president can’t stop misogyny. As many of the women I spoke with pointed out, presidents are only one kind of leader-as Petrus put it, “I see women who are presidents in the ghetto. You don’t have to hold the [White House] office to run things.”
But who knows? Just as some women have found their champion in Hillary Clinton, perhaps other feminists will get their hero one day-a woman who will undoubtedly be just as flawed, and raise just as many critiques, as Clinton.
“I’m sorry to be such a downer on this,” said Liu. “I want to be celebrating. I just can’t. Maybe there will be a second female president in my lifetime who I can be really happy about.”
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Hillary Clinton Holds Fire On GOP
Last week, as Democrats are eyeing bigger congressional gains, President Obama did what Hillary Clinton hasn’t for months: argue that Donald Trump is a product of Republican actions. Even as her own campaign signals tougher talk, Clinton hasn’t so far engaged. by Ruby Cramer
LAS VEGAS - On April 18, about two weeks before the end of the Republican primary, Hillary Clinton issued a grave warning to a small group of Democratic volunteers.
“It’s not just Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. What they are saying is what most of the Republican elected officials believe.”
The rebuke was one of the last that Clinton would aim at the GOP writ large. Later that spring, the Democratic nominee set out on a new and unprecedented effort to decouple Trump from the rest of his own party, casting the billionaire as “even more extreme than the rank-and-file Republican.” Clinton dedicated the summer and early fall to courting bipartisan support and building a case against Trump that had little to do with the GOP, its policies, rhetoric, or any of its candidates running in House and Senate races.
The campaign didn’t “want to link the House and Senate Republicans to Trump” or “connect Trump and the Republican Party,” according to hacked emails from May of this year between the Democratic National Committee and Clinton strategists.
Five months later, aides signaled, the message was about to change all over again.
This week, as Clinton traveled to rallies in Las Vegas and Pueblo, Colorado, her campaign strategists previewed a new push from the candidate on down-ballot Republicans. Amid an apparent breaking point within GOP - and a new opportunity for Democrats to gain seats - Clinton, aides said, would finally tie House and Senate candidates to their nominee.
The newly critical stance from Clinton’s senior officials? Republicans made their bed. Now they have to lie in it. “I would remind a lot of the people who are deserting him, they propped him up for a very long time,” campaign chairman John Podesta told reporters late Tuesday night aboard Clinton’s “Stronger Together” Boeing 737.
“They have to answer for that,” he said.
On Wednesday, on the plane ride to a rally in Las Vegas, campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri gave reporters a heads-up that Clinton would be using her speech to hit Rep. Joe Heck, the US Senate candidate in Nevada who revoked his support for Trump after the release of the 2005 video in which Trump talked about grabbing women “by the pussy” and forcibly kissing them.
But when she took the stage at Symphony Park in Las Vegas, Clinton didn’t mention Heck.
In recent days, the candidate and her aides have spoken more and more about down-ballot Democrats and the party’s chances of wresting back control of the Senate. But Clinton has yet to embrace a sharp message tying Trump to the party - one that some Democrats, including officials at the Democratic National Committee, hoped to hear from the start of the general.
The campaign’s attempt to “disaggregate” Trump from the GOP, they worried, might let the rest of Republicans on the ticket “off the hook” and undermine a message Democrats had already been trying to drive for years about an increasingly extreme Republican Party.
“I’ve heard a lot of bitching from Democratic officials and candidates in key states that the Clinton campaign’s strategy to triage the GOP establishment from Trump has been downright unhelpful,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic operative who helped lead Martin O’Malley’s presidential campaign last year.
Pollsters and strategists said Clinton’s message throughout the general election might have even helped create a consequence-free environment for Republicans. In battleground states, voters see establishment candidates like Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania as a “different kind of Republican” than Trump, according to a series of YouGov-CBS News polls. And a recent survey by USA Today and Suffolk University found that 52% of people who’ve chosen to back Clinton are “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to split the ticket when they vote next month.
One challenge with tying Trump to down-ballot Republicans: Voters don’t see candidates such as Ayotte, a well-liked and somewhat moderate lawmaker in New Hampshire, saying or doing anything in the mold of Trump, said Jennifer Duffy, a senior editor for the Cook Political Report, where she tracks Senate races. “These Senate candidates and Trump are not alike,” she said. “One Republican campaign manager told me that they did a focus group and they put up a picture of their candidate and Trump, and people laughed.”
Inside the party, President Obama has been the one to make the most forceful case against Trump as a symptom of the modern GOP, arguing that Republicans may not look or sound like their party’s standard bearer, but they enabled his rise.
“The problem is not that all Republicans think the way this guy does,” he said while campaigning for Clinton in Ohio this week. “The problem is, is that they’ve been riding this tiger for a long time. They’ve been feeding their base all kinds of crazy for years, primarily for political expedience.”
“They stood by while this happened,” Obama said. “And Donald Trump, as he’s prone to do, he didn’t build the building himself, but he just slapped his name on it and took credit for it.”
As Clinton aides forecast a possible return to rhetoric like Obama’s, they risk muddling the message the candidate has been driving since spring. “This is the exact opposite of what they’ve been doing,” said Colin Reed, head of the anti-Clinton research effort, America Rising, who noticed the shift after campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri first told reporters on Monday that candidates like Ayotte helped “legitimize” Trump.
“You can’t just change a message on a dime four weeks out,” Reed said.
Asked how the campaign would be able to balance a more condemnatory message with its ongoing efforts to woo Republicans and Independents turned off by Trump, including with their branded “Together for America” initiative, Palmieri simply said Clinton was “grateful” for bipartisan support but that it wouldn’t stop her from pressing the GOP in service of Democrats up and down the ballot.
During the primary, Clinton often spoke in passionate terms about helping build a “deep bench” of Democrats across the states, admitting that the party has a problem when it comes to midterm elections in particular. Bringing “as many Democrats with me to Washington as I possibly can,” she promised last year, would be central to the legacy of her presidential bid.
Clinton does campaign with down-ballot Democrats and almost always makes a point of mentioning key races in the states she visits. But for some in the party, her efforts have been lacking when it comes to hammering the other side.
Democrats have yet to see Clinton “make sure that vulnerable Republicans cannot distance themselves from the Trump trainwreck,” said Smith, the former O’Malley strategist.
One Democratic member of Congress agreed. “You gotta take what the defense gives you,” the lawmaker said, when asked if Clinton could be doing more. “If they set you up for an easy lay-up, take it.”
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DNC Lawyers Argue No Liability: Neutrality Is Merely a ‘Political Promise’
Apparently voters were supposed to assume the DNC was biased in favor of Clinton before the primaries even started
By Michael Sainato
Democratic National Committee (DNC) lawyers responded on October 14 in support of their motion to dismiss the class action lawsuit against the DNC and former chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, maintaining that a fair and balanced Democratic primary is just a “political promise.”
“Courts have uniformly rejected attempts to litigate on the basis of purported political promises, including ‘statements of principle and intent in the political realm’” wrote the DNC lawyers. “These decisions have not always been explicit in their reasoning, but they reflect the long-standing judicial understanding that, because they inherently raise serious questions of justiciability and threaten core First Amendment rights of political speech and association, “[p]olitical squabbles are not as easily resolved in federal courts as are some other disputes.” Wymbs v. Republican State Exec. Comm. of Fla., 719 F.2d 1072, 1077 (11th Cir. 1983) (citing Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 281-85 (1962)); see also Berg, 574 F. Supp. 2d at 529 (“[V]oters are free to vote out of office those politicians seen to have breached campaign promises,” but “[f]ederal courts … are not and cannot be in the business of enforcing political rhetoric”); Dornan v. U.S. Sec’y of Def., 676 F. Supp. 6, 7 (D.D.C. 1987) (holding action based in part on political promise nonjusticiable); see also O’Brien v. Brown, 409 U.S. 1, 4-5 (1972); Irish v. Democratic Farmer-Labor Party of Minn., 399 F.2d 119, 120-21 (8th Cir. 1968)”
The DNC lawyers’ argument here is that the charter’s demand that the chair and DNC staff remain neutral throughout the Democratic primary is a political promise, similar to policy proposals made in campaign platforms that aren’t fulfilled when in office. The lawyers cite an argument made in another court case stating that voters are free to vote out politicians. In their initial motion to dismiss the lawsuit, DNC lawyers argued Bernie Sanders supporters were aware the DNC and Wasserman Schultz were biased against their candidate. Now their argument is a neutral DNC and DNC chair are just political promises, leaving voters susceptible to the deception that the DNC would treat Clinton and Sanders equally. The lawyers argue liability only applies to consumer-merchant relationships
“The DNC may, within its First Amendment rights, chose to amend its rules to eliminate the provision upon which Plaintiffs’ theory relies,” added the DNC lawyers, arguing that because the DNC can amend its rules so its chair and staff don’t have to remain neutral or impartial in the Democratic presidential primaries, the court cannot render a ruling on the rule.
These DNC lawyers are the same counsel Hillary Clinton used throughout her presidential campaign. In a WikiLeaks release from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, attorney Marc Elias provides the Clinton campaign with an outline on how to legally coordinate with Super PACs.
The arguments made by the DNC’s lawyers were proven invalid after the WikiLeaks dump of emails resulted in the resignation of Wasserman Schultz and three other top staff members, who were exposed to be working against the Sanders campaign in favor of Clinton. Despite Wasserman Schultz’s disgrace, Clinton immediately hired her and establishment Democrats supported her reelection bid to Congress.
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Why Feminists Shouldn’t Trust Hillary Clinton, BY KATHLEEN GEIER | How the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans, by Sarah Smarsh | Women Who Hate Trump, but Aren’t With Her, by Emma Green | Hillary Clinton Holds Fire On GOP, by Ruby Cramer | DNC Lawyers Argue No Liability: Neutrality Is Merely a ‘Political Promise’, by Michael Sainato
Why R feminists spending more time cheerleading for HRC than pushing for policies that advance all women? My latest: https://t.co/umo3KR5Mes
- Kathleen Geier (@Kathy__Gee) October 18, 2016
"Facts haven’t stopped pundits from pushing stories about the white working class’s embrace of a demagogue" https://t.co/XzEoKriY3K
- Connor Kilpatrick (@ckilpatrick) October 17, 2016
Last week, Obama did what Hillary Clinton hasn’t for months: argue that Trump is a product of Republican actions https://t.co/EelWZ3Qqkm
- BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) October 18, 2016
DNC Lawyers Argue No Liability: Neutrality Is Merely a ‘Promise’ https://t.co/YzB81n49N5
- OBSERVER (@observer) October 17, 2016
Our Coven penetrates Very Serious Media: https://t.co/XinKBTxvON
- Liza Featherstone (@lfeatherz) October 17, 2016
Why Feminists Shouldn’t Trust Hillary Clinton
Pro-Hillary cheerleading will not advance social justice for women. But keeping the pressure on might do the trick.
BY KATHLEEN GEIER
If you searched for a single headline that distilled what has been so depressing about feminist commentary on the 2016 election, you could do worse than pick this one, from The Guardian’s Lindy West, a writer I usually admire: “Hating Trump isn’t enough-we need to talk about why Clinton rules.” On the one hand, there’s the fixation on Trump’s awfulness, which is hardly a secret. On the other, there is the relentless cheerleading for Clinton, which sounds suspiciously like the desperate overselling of an underwhelming product. The piece accompanying the headline shares the defects common to the feminist pro-Clinton op-ed genre. In one short article, there are two long paragraphs about the sexism Clinton has suffered, but no attempt to probe into the policies she is proposing, or to grapple honestly with her actual feminist record.
Of course, most feminists-albeit with some notable exceptions-support Clinton in the presidential race. But though you’d never guess it from West’s piece and others like it, there’s a viable alternative both to outright opposition to Hillary and the happy talk of her feminist fans-one that is at once more intellectually honest and more politically constructive. Political theorist Nancy Fraser has dubbed it “critical support”: a vote for Clinton, combined with “vociferous criticism of her policies and explicit campaigning for Sanders-type alternatives.” Critical support, says Fraser, is “a strategy that looks beyond November to the ongoing struggle to build a new American left.”
But that, alas, has been the road not taken. While Clinton’s candidacy could have been an occasion for feminists to shine a spotlight on the broader, more structural forces that perpetuate women’s inequality, few Clinton supporters have chosen to do so-some because they worried that criticizing her would somehow boost Trump’s prospects. But now, as the campaign dwindles down to its final days, it is long past time for feminists to start thinking not only about the election, but also about what should happen afterward. If Hillary triumphs in November, how can feminists realize the potential of an historic opportunity to achieve social justice for women? More specifically, how can we pressure Clinton to make good on her feminist campaign promises, while at the same time fight for a bolder, more expansive vision for American feminism?
Let’s be clear about what is at stake. In the last century, major progressive change at the federal level-most notably the New Deal of the 1930s and the civil rights and Great Society legislation of the 1960s-has occurred only in narrow windows, when the Democratic Party controlled the presidency and at least one house of Congress. This year, not only are the Democrats strong favorites to win the White House, they are also favored to regain control of the Senate, and they even have an outside shot of taking back the House. Democratic victory in November, combined with a GOP in delightful post-Trump meltdown mode, would create the most auspicious political climate in decades for advancing women’s rights. Feminists would be granted the chance of a lifetime to bring U.S. work, family, and reproductive rights policies into the twenty-first century.
But absent organized pressure, Hillary Clinton is unlikely to avail herself of this opportunity. Aside from its anti-Trumpism, Clinton’s general-election campaign lacked a strong theme, which will make it difficult for her to claim a mandate for any particular set of policies or political vision. As New Republic columnist David Dayen has noted, “Democrats are at their most inspiring when they run on actual policies.” You’ve probably heard the (perhaps apocryphal) story about FDR, who, when asked by activists to support one of their causes, allegedly told them, “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”
Elected officials, even the most progressive ones, are unlikely to take bold action unless they are pushed. That lesson goes double for Hillary Clinton. She is a deeply cautious politician whose record is marred by some ugly anti-feminist blots. Among them: her endorsement of one of the most anti-woman policies in recent American history, welfare “reform” (even as a senator, she was calling for more punitive welfare policies than her Democratic colleagues); her tendency to use stigmatizing language when discussing abortion rights; her failure, while serving on the board of Walmart, to speak out on behalf of the women who launched a sex discrimination lawsuit against the retail giant; and her approval of foreign policies like the Iraq War and the coup in Honduras, which left women in those countries far worse off. (There’s a strong feminist tradition that opposes those kinds of imperialist adventures.)
On the other hand, throughout her 2016 campaign, Hillary has stressed surprisingly strong feminist themes. Her reproductive rights proposals include the abolition of the Hyde and Helms amendments (which, respectively, ban federal funding for abortion and prohibit foreign aid from being used for abortion “as a method of family planning”). Prodded by Bernie Sanders and his supporters, Clinton has also called for feminist economic policies that include paid family leave, a major boost in the minimum wage (women are nearly two-thirds of minimum wage earners), and significantly expanded child care.
But though Clinton is running on the most ambitious feminist platform of any major-party presidential nominee in history, it’s unclear how meaningful that will turn out to be. Visit Clinton’s web page and you will find a dizzying laundry list of 38 policy proposals, of which the feminist ones are a relatively small part. She has given little indication as to where feminist concerns stand in relation to the rest of her political priorities. If she’s elected president, which Hillary we will see: the corporate-friendly centrist of the 1980s through the 2000s, or the born-again feminist of the 2016 presidential campaign?
That remains an open question, and Clinton’s first major act as her party’s presidential candidate was hardly reassuring. For her running mate, she chose Senator Tim Kaine, a man who not only is not very progressive, but also has one of the worst records on reproductive rights of any major figure in the Democratic Party. As governor of Virginia, he advocated parental notification and other abortion restrictions and enacted a law that allowed funds to go to bogus “crisis pregnancy” centers-anti-choice propaganda outfits which bombard vulnerable women with guilt trips and dangerous misinformation. Some Kaine backers argue that his abortion views have “evolved;” nevertheless, he continues to support the Hyde amendment.
Yet bizarrely, the heads of NOW, Planned Parenthood, EMILY’s List, and other major women’s organizations greeted the Kaine pick with encomiums, praising him as an “ally” and “an excellent choice.” When they touted his “100 percent” rating from the likes of NARAL and Planned Parenthood, you could practically smell the bad faith. What kind of rating system would leave out such a pro-choice issue as vital as the Hyde amendment? (Candidate scorecards from NARAL and Planned Parenthood omit Hyde and other key reproductive rights issues).
To their credit, feminist Clinton supporters like Nation columnist Katha Pollitt expressed dismay at the Kaine selection. But at the same time, Pollitt argued Hillary will likely steer the right course on choice issues, because Clinton “is too closely embedded with Planned Parenthood, and with the larger pro-choice community” to do otherwise.
There’s a large grain of truth to this view, which is the predominant one among Clinton’s feminist supporters. But can we really trust Hillary to do the right thing? Granted, we should hardly expect Hillary to morph into an ardent fetus-fancier; she has zero political incentive to do so. But the bigger question is where reproductive rights, not to mention feminist issues generally, stand in terms of Clinton’s political priorities, and how much political capital she’s willing to spend to protect and enhance them. After all, the last two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, pledged strong support for abortion rights yet presided over the erosion of women’s right to choose. Neither of them lifted a finger to abolish the Hyde or Helms amendments (though a simple executive order would greatly restrict the scope of the latter). And Obama supported the Stupak amendment (what is it with these awful men and their terrible amendments?), a provision that allows states to weasel out of health care coverage for abortion, which has led to more women paying out of pocket for abortion. With her selection of Kaine, it certainly looked as though Clinton made the calculation that she, like her Democratic predecessors, can take pro-choice voters for granted.
Unfortunately, many of Clinton’s feminist supporters have made it easy for Democrats to take them for granted. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminist activists and intellectuals maintained a critical distance from the Democratic Party; they supported many Democratic candidates but remained focused on independent activism. This, arguably, gave the feminist movement a more sweeping, visionary approach that was focused on the structural, economically rooted barriers to women’s equality. Even mainstream feminist groups poured resources into campaigns for universal child care, welfare rights, and aggressive pay equity proposals such as comparable worth.
But in recent decades, the distance between mainstream feminism and the Democratic Party has almost totally evaporated. We saw the culmination of this process in the 2016 primaries, when every major women’s group and practically every mainstream feminist pundit supported Clinton over Bernie Sanders, many of them sounding more like campaign surrogates than independent journalists and activists. Feminist pundits have argued that Clinton, by virtue of her power as a positive role model, will uplift all women. But this trickle-down feminist perspective confuses the narrow personal interests of Hillary Clinton with the broader interests of women as a class. The result is that feminists have spent far more energy celebrating Clinton’s shattering of the “ultimate glass ceiling” and shielding her from criticisms (including fair ones, like those about her ties to Wall Street) than to sweating the details on her record and policies.
Take, for instance, Clinton’s child-care plan. Clinton supporters frequently characterize the program as “universal.” Rebecca Traister of New York magazine stopped short of making that claim, but she did say that Clinton’s proposals “would have been understood not long ago as something out of a ’70s feminist fever dream.” Well, if that’s true, the folks characterizing it that way would have had a poor grasp of policy-and of history. The signature child-care initiative of second-wave feminists was the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971, a bill that would have established a national network of federally funded child care centers. (Nixon, to his eternal discredit, vetoed it.) Now that would have been the start of a truly universal system.
It’s not that Hillary’s child-care proposals aren’t a step in the right direction. Her plans-which include moving toward universal pre-K, increasing funding for Head Start, and limiting child care costs to 10 percent of family income-would be a major improvement over the status quo. But here’s what her proposal does not do: Unlike the 1971 child-care bill, it would not actually provide child care. Yet the underprovision of child care, and the the shortage of licensed, quality care in particular, is one of the key failings of the American child care system. The increased spending that Clinton calls for is laudable, but it still would not bring us anywhere near the goal of accessible, affordable, high-quality care for all.
This points to a larger problem: Women will never achieve equality in our society absent major economic redistribution. The main force keeping women down is our society’s dependence on women’s unpaid caring labor, which profoundly disadvantages women in the labor force and within the family. Feminist progress requires an advanced welfare system that transfers wealth and resources to women and families. Universal child care would be a central component of such a structural transformation, but it would be only the beginning. Clinton, however, has pledged not to raise taxes on the middle class, which effectively rules out any major expansion of the welfare state. Unfortunately, her skittishness about raising taxes is echoed by many other leading Democrats (and their Wall Street backers), and it has dramatically narrowed feminism’s horizons. For women to advance, feminists need to fight Clinton-style, austerity-lite, anti-tax politics, a moldy artifact from a far more conservative era.
In addition to pushing Hillary toward more redistributionist labor and social welfare policies, feminists need to keep the pressure on in other ways. First and foremost, we need to support feminist organizing-by door-to-door canvassing, lobbying elected officials, participating in rallies and mass protests, and more. Let’s not forget that, more than any other single force, it’s the state and local campaigns across America for paid family and sick leave, domestic workers’ rights, and the $15 minimum wage which have created the political space for Clinton’s feminist policy initiatives. The success of the recent national strike of Polish women to protest a restrictive new abortion law is an inspiring example of just how potent feminist mass action can be.
Feminists should also keep close tabs on Clinton’s presidential transition process, which is already well underway; since personnel is policy, we should demand that key appointments be filled with the most progressive, most pro-feminist candidates available. In addition, since we know that Republican members of Congress will do their utmost to thwart progressive legislative initiatives, it’s important to figure out which feminist policies could be implemented by executive order instead-and hold Hillary’s feet to the fire until she signs off on them. Promising candidates for executive action include measures to strengthen pay transparency and weaken the Hyde amendment, but that is only the beginning. An especially urgent feminist project is to identify and advocate for policies that currently are not on the political map, but desperately need to become political priorities. First up should be rehauling our broken welfare system, but there are plenty more items to be added to the list.
And what if Clinton still shows signs of returning to her old neoliberal self? Feminists and other progressives would need to start planning for a serious 2020 primary challenge. As the Sanders example showed, primary challenges are one of the most powerful tools activists have to shape the direction of the party-and, potentially, a presidency.
Feminists can’t afford to be complacent, because there’s one thing we know for sure about Hillary Clinton: In the face of political failure, her deepest instincts are to move to the right. Hillary biographers such as Carl Bernstein report that after Bill Clinton’s failure to be re-elected governor in 1980 and the GOP takeover of the House in the 1994 midterms, she was a major advocate of politics of retreat and triangulation. And today, her triangulating tendencies are alive and kicking. Clinton has actively courted the endorsements of prominent Republicans who have made it clear that they expect to get something in return for their support. The recently leaked Wall Street speeches, which show Clinton praising the Social Security-cutting Bowles Simpson plan and openly admitting that elected officials “need both a public and a private [political] position,” raise serious questions about the depth of Clinton’s commitment to her progressive campaign promises.
We know from history that opportunities to make lasting change at the national level are rare and fleeting. When these moments come, activists must be poised to make the most of them. We can’t afford to forget that, as Frederick Douglass famously argued, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Feminists, let’s make Hillary do it.
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Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans
Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict - and native Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong.
Not so poor: Trump voters are middle class
Hard numbers complicate, if not roundly dismiss, the oft-regurgitated theory that income or education levels predict Trump support, or that working-class whites support him disproportionately. Last month, results of 87,000 interviews conducted by Gallup showed that those who liked Trump were under no more economic distress or immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.
According to the study, his supporters didn’t have lower incomes or higher unemployment levels than other Americans. Income data misses a lot; those with healthy earnings might also have negative wealth or downward mobility. But respondents overall weren’t clinging to jobs perceived to be endangered. “Surprisingly”, a Gallup researcher wrote, “there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign.”
Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000 - higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. In January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism - not income, education, gender, age or race -predicted Trump support.
These facts haven’t stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working class’s giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue.
In seeking to explain Trump’s appeal, proportionate media coverage would require more stories about the racism and misogyny among white Trump supporters in tony suburbs. Or, if we’re examining economically driven bitterness among the working class, stories about the Democratic lawmakers who in recent decades ended welfare as we knew it, hopped in the sack with Wall Street and forgot American labor in their global trade agreements.
But, for national media outlets comprised largely of middle- and upper-class liberals, that would mean looking their own class in the face.
Poor whiteness and poor character
The two-fold myth about the white working class - that they are to blame for Trump’s rise, and that those among them who support him for the worst reasons exemplify the rest - takes flight on the wings of moral superiority affluent Americans often pin upon themselves.
I have never seen them flap so insistently as in today’s election commentary, where notions of poor whiteness and poor character are routinely conflated.
In an election piece last March in the National Review, writer Kevin Williamson’s assessment of poor white voters - among whom mortality rates have sharply risen in recent decades - expressed what many conservatives and liberals alike may well believe when he observed that communities ravaged by oxycodone use “deserve to die”.
I’m hard-pressed to think of a worse slight than the media figures who have disregarded the embattled white working class for decades now beseeching the country to have sympathy for them. We don’t need their analysis, and we sure don’t need their tears. What we need is to have our stories told, preferably by someone who can walk into a factory without his own guilt fogging his glasses.
One such journalist, Alexander Zaitchik, spent several months on the road in six states getting to know white working-class people who do support Trump. His goal for the resulting new book, The Gilded Rage, was to convey the human complexity that daily news misses. Zaitchik wrote that his mission arose from frustration with “‘hot takes’ written by people living several time zones and income brackets away from their subjects”.
Zaitchik wisely described those he met as a “blue-collar middle class”- mostly white people who have worked hard and lost a lot, whether in the market crash of 2008 or the manufacturing layoffs of recent decades. He found that their motivations overwhelmingly “started with economics and ended with economics”. The anger he observed was “pointed up, not down” at those who forgot them when global trade deals were negotiated, not at minority groups.
Meanwhile, the racism and nationalism that surely exist among them also exist among Democrats and higher socioeconomic strata. A poll conducted last spring by Reuters found that a third of questioned Democrats supported a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States. In another, by YouGov, 45% of polled Democrats reported holding an unfavorable view of Islam, with almost no fluctuation based on household income. Those who won’t vote for Trump are not necessarily paragons of virtue, while the rest are easily scapegoated as the country’s moral scourge.
When Hillary Clinton recently declared half of Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables”, Zaitchik told another reporter, the language “could be read as another way of saying ‘white-trash bin’.” Clinton quickly apologized for the comment, the context of which contained compassion for many Trump voters. But making such generalizations at a $6m fundraiser in downtown New York City, at which some attendees paid $50,000 for a seat, recalled for me scenes from the television political satire Veep in which powerful Washington figures discuss “normals” with distaste behind closed doors.
When we talked, Zaitchik mentioned HBO talk-show host Bill Maher, who he pointed out “basically makes eugenics-level arguments about anyone who votes for Donald Trump having congenital defects. You would never get away with talking that way about any other group of people and still have a TV show.”
Maher is, perhaps, the pinnacle of classist smugness. In the summer of 1998, when I was 17 and just out of high school, I worked at a grain elevator during the wheat harvest. An elevator 50 miles east in Haysville, Kansas, exploded (grain dust is highly combustible), killing seven workers. The accident rattled my community and reminded us about the physical dangers my family and I often faced as farmers.
I kept going to work like everyone else and, after a long day weighing wheat trucks and hauling heavy sacks of feed in and out of the mill, liked to watch Politically Incorrect, the ABC show Maher hosted then. With the search for one of the killed workers’ bodies still under way, Maher joked, as I recall, that the people should check their loaves of Wonder Bread.
That moment was perhaps my first reckoning with the hard truth that, throughout my life, I would politically identify with the same people who often insult the place I am from.
Such derision is so pervasive that it’s often imperceptible to the economically privileged. Those who write, discuss, and publish newspapers, books, and magazines with best intentions sometimes offend with obliviousness.
Entertain a parallel broad statement about any other disenfranchised group, and you might begin to see how rudimentary class discussion is for this relatively young country that long believed itself to be free of castes. Isenberg has sniffed out the hypocrisy in play, though.
“The other problem is when people want to blame poor whites for being the only racist in the room,” she told Gladstone. “… as if they’re more racist than everyone else.”
That problem is rooted in the notion that higher class means higher integrity. As journalist Lorraine Berry wrote last month, “The story remains that only the ignorant would be racist. Racism disappears with education we’re told.” As the first from my family to hold degrees, I assure you that none of us had to go to college to learn basic human decency.
Berry points out that Ivy-League-minted Republicans shepherded the rise of the alt-right. Indeed, it was not poor whites - not even white Republicans - who passed legislation bent on preserving segregation, or who watched the Confederate flag raised outside state capitols for decades to come.
It wasn’t poor whites who criminalized blackness by way of marijuana laws and the “war on drugs”.
Nor was it poor whites who conjured the specter of the black “welfare queen”.
These points should not minimize the horrors of racism at the lowest economic rungs of society, but remind us that those horrors reside at the top in different forms and with more terrible power.
Among reporters and commentators this election cycle, then, a steady finger ought be pointed at whites with economic leverage: social conservatives who donate to Trump’s campaign while being too civilized to attend a political rally and yell what they really believe.
Mainstream media is set up to fail the ordinary American
Based on Trump’s campaign rhetoric and available data, it appears that most of his voters this November will be people who are getting by well enough but who think of themselves as victims.
One thing the media misses is that a great portion of the white working class would align with any sense before victimhood. Right now they are clocking in and out of work, sorting their grocery coupons, raising their children to respect others, and avoiding political news coverage.
Barack Obama, a black man formed by the black experience, often cites his maternal lineage in the white working class. “A lot of what’s shaped me came from my grandparents who grew up on the prairie in Kansas,” he wrote this month to mark a White House forum on rural issues.
Last year, talking with author Marilynne Robinson for the New York Review of Books, Obama lamented common misconceptions of small-town middle America, for which he has a sort of reverence. “There’s this huge gap between how folks go about their daily lives and how we talk about our common life and our political life,” he said, naming one cause as “the filters that stand between ordinary people” who are busy getting by and complicated policy debates.
“I’m very encouraged when I meet people in their environments,” Obama told Robinson. “Somehow it gets distilled at the national political level in ways that aren’t always as encouraging.”
Media fascination with the hateful white Trump voter fuels the theory, now in fashion, that bigotry is the only explanation for supporting him. Certainly, financial struggle does not predict a soft spot for Trump, as cash-strapped people of color - who face the threat of his racism and xenophobia, and who resoundingly reject him, by all available measures - can attest. However, one imagines that elite white liberals who maintain an air of ethical grandness this election season would have a harder time thinking globally about trade and immigration if it were their factory job that was lost and their community that was decimated.
Affluent analysts who oppose Trump, though, have a way of taking a systemic view when examining social woes but viewing their place on the political continuum as a triumph of individual character. Most of them presumably inherited their political bent, just like most of those in “red” America did. If you were handed liberalism, give yourself no pats on the back for your vote against Trump.
Spare, too, the condescending argument that disaffected Democrats who joined Republican ranks in recent decades are “voting against their own best interests,” undemocratic in its implication that a large swath of America isn’t mentally fit to cast a ballot.
Whoever remains on Trump’s side as stories concerning his treatment of women, racism and other dangers continue to unfurl gets no pass from me for any reason. They are capable of voting, and they own their decisions. Let’s be aware of our class biases, though, as we discern who “they” are.
Journalist? Then the chances are you’re not blue collar
The main reason that national media outlets have a blind spot in matters of class is the lack of socioeconomic diversity within their ranks. Few people born to deprivation end up working in newsrooms or publishing books. So few, in fact, that this former laborer has found cause to shift her entire writing career to talk specifically about class in a wealth-privileged industry, much as journalists of color find themselves talking about race in a whiteness-privileged one.
I know journalists to be hard-working people who want to get the story right, and I’m resistant to rote condemnations of “the media”. The classism of cable-news hosts merely reflects the classism of privileged America in general. It’s everywhere, from tweets describing Trump voters as inbred hillbillies to a Democratic campaign platform that didn’t bother with a specific anti-poverty platform until a month out from the general election.
The economic trench between reporter and reported on has never been more hazardous than at this moment of historic wealth disparity, though, when stories focus more often on the stock market than on people who own no stocks. American journalism has been willfully obtuse about the grievances on Main Streets for decades - surely a factor in digging the hole of resentment that Trump’s venom now fills. That the term “populism” has become a pejorative among prominent liberal commentators should give us great pause. A journalism that embodies the plutocracy it’s supposed to critique has failed its watchdog duty and lost the respect of people who call bullshit when they see it.
If you would stereotype a group of people by presuming to guess their politics or deeming them inferior to yourself - say, the ones who worked third shift on a Boeing floor while others flew to Mexico during spring break; the ones who mopped a McDonald’s bathroom while others argued about the minimum wage on Twitter; the ones who cleaned out their lockers at a defunct Pabst factory while others drank craft beer at trendy bars; the ones who came back from the Middle East in caskets while others wrote op-eds about foreign policy - then consider that you might have more in common with Trump than you would like to admit.
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Women Who Hate Trump, but Aren’t With Her
The misogyny of the 2016 campaign has stifled critiques of Clinton from progressive feminists and people of color, by Emma Green
Depending on your perspective, it’s either Hillary Clinton’s great misfortune or incredible luck to be matched with an opponent who believes men like him can simply grab women “by the pu**y,” who has been accused of making unwanted sexual advances against colleagues, and who made a sport of sizing up all the beauty queens in the pageant he owned. Because Donald Trump represents the worst version of how powerful men treat women, the symbolism of Clinton can seem uncomplicated: Her White House victory, if it comes, will be a win for women.
What that means, though, is that women have been twice silenced in this election: Once by Donald Trump and his allies, who have dismissed his demeaning behavior toward women as “locker-room talk,” and the other by Clinton and her supporters, who have pushed a narrative that she is both the symbol and champion of women’s progress. The second is subtler, and in no way equivalent to Donald Trump’s comments on women. But for some women who don’t feel represented by Clinton-specifically those on the left, along with women of color-this experience has been alienating. Just as it’s important for women and feminists to resist the downward suck of Trump’s vulgarity, so it’s important to entertain the limits of what Clinton’s presidency might mean for women’s advancement.
“If you criticize HRC, it looks like you’re endorsing fascism,” said Catherine Liu, a professor of film and media studies at University of California, Irvine.
And “the tone of some of this has been: If you are anti-Hillary, you are anti-woman,” said Naomi Christine Leapheart, a non-profit worker in Philadelphia who is seeking her ordination in the United Church of Christ. “I have, as they would say, receipts in that department.”
At the beginning of October, Clinton held a 20-percentage-point lead over her opponent among women surveyed in a Quinnipiac poll. But even women who intend to vote for Clinton don’t necessarily see themselves in her. Lots of women in the U.S., like Leapheart and others from around the country whom I spoke with in phone interviews, are not enthusiastic about Clinton, even if they’re horrified by the possibility of a President Trump. As the language used to refer to women has somehow become even more ugly and sexist during these final days of the election, a strong majority of women voters have signaled their intention to vote for Clinton. But the real divisions among them have largely been overlooked as a result.
Throughout the election, Clinton’s campaign has happily told the story that she is the woman’s candidate-during debates, on her merchandise, and especially upon becoming the Democratic nominee. “Thanks to you, we have reached a milestone: The first time in our nation’s history that a woman will be a major-party nominee for president,” she said during her June speech in Brooklyn, after winning enough delegates to secure the nomination. “It started right here in New York at a place called Seneca Falls, when a small but determined group of women and men came together with the idea that women deserved equal rights.” Later, she spoke about the day her mother was born: June 4, 1919, the day Congress gave women the right to vote.
The trouble with marking Seneca Falls and the 19th Amendment as straightforward landmarks in America’s march toward equality is that they only represent some women’s history. Black women did not take part in the convention where the Declaration of Sentiments was promulgated. African American advocates for women’s rights like Ida B. Wells occasionally clashed with white women in the movement, some of whom courted white Southerners in their quest for the vote. Many women of color did not benefit from suffrage until 1965, when the Voting Rights Act finally eliminated many of the racist barriers to their enfranchisement.
Even Clinton’s nomination isn’t a straightforward first: Shirley Chisholm, a black Congresswoman, ran against George McGovern in the 1972 Democratic presidential primary. As Charmaine Chua, a Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota who is skeptical of Clinton’s candidacy, put it, “The movement from Seneca Falls to the present covers a whole other set of steps in between that weren’t progressive at all.” If beating Trump is the apotheosis of feminism, then feminists haven’t achieved much at all. “I do not agree with the idea that we have to vote for Hillary and talk about her uncritically because of a fear of Donald Trump,” said Donna Murch, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “I think that is politically dangerous.”
Like this overly clean historical narrative, some of Clinton’s limitations are bound up in her identity. “I think Clinton comes from a background that is a bit disconnected from women of color,” said Farrah Khan, a Pakistani American candidate for city council in Irvine, California. “Our struggle is a bit different than hers might have been. When we’re running for office, when we’re moving ahead, we’re not only moving ahead as women-we’re moving ahead as minority women.”
While Clinton can’t help that she’s white, her whiteness at least partially determines who she can claim to speak for and represent. “She doesn’t seem to understand my everyday experience as a black woman,” said Leapheart.
Especially because Trump has so little support among black voters, it’s often assumed that Clinton has “black women in her pocket,” said Amaryah Armstrong, a theology Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Earlier this year, women on Twitter started the hashtag #GirlIGuessImWithHer, expressing reluctant support and feelings of distance from Clinton. “It’s everything from how much she spent on her suits and jackets-that’s so far from any reality that I have,” said Leapheart.
This is another factor that distinguishes Clinton from most American women: Like the vast majority of other national political figures, her household income puts her in the top 1 percent of earners in the U.S. Armstrong said this is the most alienating factor for her. “I don’t think it’s the fact that she’s a straight, white, cis woman,” she said. “Honestly, I think it’s the circles that she travels in-she’s a wealthy and elite white woman, and because of that, doesn’t have to deal with the kind of realities of living under the economic system that we live under.”
On a symbolic level, Clinton’s wealth matters-few women can identify with her life. “There’s a sense that for upper-middle-class women, or elite women, she represents this breaking-down of glass ceilings,” said Armstrong. “But when I think about poor women and working women, it’s hard for me to see her nomination as a victory in such a complete sense that she tries to portray it.”
From a political perspective, Clinton’s personal wealth highlights a divide within the Democratic Party, especially following a primary in which wealth and income inequality were central issues. “I think she’s courted the middle, and she’s made herself a very good Republican,” said Liu, the UC Irvine professor. For women looking for a radical vision of politics, including economic policies that would benefit poor women, Clinton’s platform may be unsatisfying.
“I don’t think there’s anything from her, tangibly, that’s different from a lot of other white, male candidates I’ve seen growing up my whole life,” said Junauda Petrus, a performance artist and activist in Minneapolis. “I wouldn’t sit down with these old-ass white people under any other circumstance to hear their opinions. But because they’re running for president, I’ve got to care.”
There are limits to how much Clinton can be criticized simply for who she is; no one can be a living symbol of every experience. But many women disagree with her policies as well. Charlene Carruthers, the national director of Black Youth Project 100, a grassroots organization in Chicago that trains young activists and organizes advocacy efforts, was particularly critical of Clinton’s role in ’90s-era welfare reform, which changed the structure of aid to poor mothers and children.
“I’ve voted in every election since I was 18,” Carruthers said. “I do not plan to cast a vote for Hillary Clinton in November. I cannot in good conscience, as the daughter of a black woman who has had to deal with the consequences of policies she has supported.”
Because she’s been in public office for so long, Clinton’s positions on different issues have changed over time. She didn’t start supporting same-sex marriage until 2013, for example, and specifically affirmed that marriage is between a man and a woman earlier in her political career. She has been embraced by LGBT organizations in Washington, including the Human Rights Campaign, but that doesn’t mean she’s won over all LGBT voters.
“It’s not enough to just be a woman who gets there-I want her to push for policies that actually help women and help genderqueer people and women of color,” said Jess Braverman, a lawyer who works in the public defender’s office in Minneapolis. “I want it to be more than just: She’s the first woman nominee for president.”
When it comes time to vote in November, women who don’t feel represented by Clinton have a few choices. “I’m voting for her, but I’m not, in general, in life, super excited,” said Braverman. Liu, who doesn’t live in a swing state, said she’d likely be sitting the presidential election out.
Petrus, in Minneapolis, told me over the phone that she was going to go for Jill Stein, but later followed up via email: “When reflecting more, I wanted to be thoughtful of the reality of the situation we find ourselves in, and in many ways it is avoiding disaster: the election of a reckless and hateful white supremacist who is accountable only to his own masturbatory narcissism,” she wrote. “At this point, electing Hillary is the only way to do that and I believe she is beyond capable of presidency.”
Some still haven’t decided. For people like Leapheart, who lives in the swing state of Pennsylvania, votes really do matter. She said she’s frustrated by the possibility of casting an anti-Trump vote. “I remain so disappointed. While we’re so busy arguing against what we don’t want, we’re not articulating a vision for what we can have, and what we do want,” she said. “As we get closer to November, I think I’ll have to decide I’m able to live with in terms of my own voting decision. But I don’t think I’ll be happy either way. Maybe I should just stop looking for that.”
Ultimately, that may be the lesson of Clinton’s feminist achievement: No one woman can truly represent 51 percent of the population. If anything, her candidacy, and potentially her presidency, will be a chance for those who care about women’s advancement to take stock of what’s next, now that it’s perfectly clear that even a woman running for president can’t stop misogyny. As many of the women I spoke with pointed out, presidents are only one kind of leader-as Petrus put it, “I see women who are presidents in the ghetto. You don’t have to hold the [White House] office to run things.”
But who knows? Just as some women have found their champion in Hillary Clinton, perhaps other feminists will get their hero one day-a woman who will undoubtedly be just as flawed, and raise just as many critiques, as Clinton.
“I’m sorry to be such a downer on this,” said Liu. “I want to be celebrating. I just can’t. Maybe there will be a second female president in my lifetime who I can be really happy about.”
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Hillary Clinton Holds Fire On GOP
Last week, as Democrats are eyeing bigger congressional gains, President Obama did what Hillary Clinton hasn’t for months: argue that Donald Trump is a product of Republican actions. Even as her own campaign signals tougher talk, Clinton hasn’t so far engaged. by Ruby Cramer
LAS VEGAS - On April 18, about two weeks before the end of the Republican primary, Hillary Clinton issued a grave warning to a small group of Democratic volunteers.
“It’s not just Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. What they are saying is what most of the Republican elected officials believe.”
The rebuke was one of the last that Clinton would aim at the GOP writ large. Later that spring, the Democratic nominee set out on a new and unprecedented effort to decouple Trump from the rest of his own party, casting the billionaire as “even more extreme than the rank-and-file Republican.” Clinton dedicated the summer and early fall to courting bipartisan support and building a case against Trump that had little to do with the GOP, its policies, rhetoric, or any of its candidates running in House and Senate races.
The campaign didn’t “want to link the House and Senate Republicans to Trump” or “connect Trump and the Republican Party,” according to hacked emails from May of this year between the Democratic National Committee and Clinton strategists.
Five months later, aides signaled, the message was about to change all over again.
This week, as Clinton traveled to rallies in Las Vegas and Pueblo, Colorado, her campaign strategists previewed a new push from the candidate on down-ballot Republicans. Amid an apparent breaking point within GOP - and a new opportunity for Democrats to gain seats - Clinton, aides said, would finally tie House and Senate candidates to their nominee.
The newly critical stance from Clinton’s senior officials? Republicans made their bed. Now they have to lie in it. “I would remind a lot of the people who are deserting him, they propped him up for a very long time,” campaign chairman John Podesta told reporters late Tuesday night aboard Clinton’s “Stronger Together” Boeing 737.
“They have to answer for that,” he said.
On Wednesday, on the plane ride to a rally in Las Vegas, campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri gave reporters a heads-up that Clinton would be using her speech to hit Rep. Joe Heck, the US Senate candidate in Nevada who revoked his support for Trump after the release of the 2005 video in which Trump talked about grabbing women “by the pussy” and forcibly kissing them.
But when she took the stage at Symphony Park in Las Vegas, Clinton didn’t mention Heck.
In recent days, the candidate and her aides have spoken more and more about down-ballot Democrats and the party’s chances of wresting back control of the Senate. But Clinton has yet to embrace a sharp message tying Trump to the party - one that some Democrats, including officials at the Democratic National Committee, hoped to hear from the start of the general.
The campaign’s attempt to “disaggregate” Trump from the GOP, they worried, might let the rest of Republicans on the ticket “off the hook” and undermine a message Democrats had already been trying to drive for years about an increasingly extreme Republican Party.
“I’ve heard a lot of bitching from Democratic officials and candidates in key states that the Clinton campaign’s strategy to triage the GOP establishment from Trump has been downright unhelpful,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic operative who helped lead Martin O’Malley’s presidential campaign last year.
Pollsters and strategists said Clinton’s message throughout the general election might have even helped create a consequence-free environment for Republicans. In battleground states, voters see establishment candidates like Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania as a “different kind of Republican” than Trump, according to a series of YouGov-CBS News polls. And a recent survey by USA Today and Suffolk University found that 52% of people who’ve chosen to back Clinton are “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to split the ticket when they vote next month.
One challenge with tying Trump to down-ballot Republicans: Voters don’t see candidates such as Ayotte, a well-liked and somewhat moderate lawmaker in New Hampshire, saying or doing anything in the mold of Trump, said Jennifer Duffy, a senior editor for the Cook Political Report, where she tracks Senate races. “These Senate candidates and Trump are not alike,” she said. “One Republican campaign manager told me that they did a focus group and they put up a picture of their candidate and Trump, and people laughed.”
Inside the party, President Obama has been the one to make the most forceful case against Trump as a symptom of the modern GOP, arguing that Republicans may not look or sound like their party’s standard bearer, but they enabled his rise.
“The problem is not that all Republicans think the way this guy does,” he said while campaigning for Clinton in Ohio this week. “The problem is, is that they’ve been riding this tiger for a long time. They’ve been feeding their base all kinds of crazy for years, primarily for political expedience.”
“They stood by while this happened,” Obama said. “And Donald Trump, as he’s prone to do, he didn’t build the building himself, but he just slapped his name on it and took credit for it.”
As Clinton aides forecast a possible return to rhetoric like Obama’s, they risk muddling the message the candidate has been driving since spring. “This is the exact opposite of what they’ve been doing,” said Colin Reed, head of the anti-Clinton research effort, America Rising, who noticed the shift after campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri first told reporters on Monday that candidates like Ayotte helped “legitimize” Trump.
“You can’t just change a message on a dime four weeks out,” Reed said.
Asked how the campaign would be able to balance a more condemnatory message with its ongoing efforts to woo Republicans and Independents turned off by Trump, including with their branded “Together for America” initiative, Palmieri simply said Clinton was “grateful” for bipartisan support but that it wouldn’t stop her from pressing the GOP in service of Democrats up and down the ballot.
During the primary, Clinton often spoke in passionate terms about helping build a “deep bench” of Democrats across the states, admitting that the party has a problem when it comes to midterm elections in particular. Bringing “as many Democrats with me to Washington as I possibly can,” she promised last year, would be central to the legacy of her presidential bid.
Clinton does campaign with down-ballot Democrats and almost always makes a point of mentioning key races in the states she visits. But for some in the party, her efforts have been lacking when it comes to hammering the other side.
Democrats have yet to see Clinton “make sure that vulnerable Republicans cannot distance themselves from the Trump trainwreck,” said Smith, the former O’Malley strategist.
One Democratic member of Congress agreed. “You gotta take what the defense gives you,” the lawmaker said, when asked if Clinton could be doing more. “If they set you up for an easy lay-up, take it.”
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DNC Lawyers Argue No Liability: Neutrality Is Merely a ‘Political Promise’
Apparently voters were supposed to assume the DNC was biased in favor of Clinton before the primaries even started
By Michael Sainato
Democratic National Committee (DNC) lawyers responded on October 14 in support of their motion to dismiss the class action lawsuit against the DNC and former chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, maintaining that a fair and balanced Democratic primary is just a “political promise.”
“Courts have uniformly rejected attempts to litigate on the basis of purported political promises, including ‘statements of principle and intent in the political realm’” wrote the DNC lawyers. “These decisions have not always been explicit in their reasoning, but they reflect the long-standing judicial understanding that, because they inherently raise serious questions of justiciability and threaten core First Amendment rights of political speech and association, “[p]olitical squabbles are not as easily resolved in federal courts as are some other disputes.” Wymbs v. Republican State Exec. Comm. of Fla., 719 F.2d 1072, 1077 (11th Cir. 1983) (citing Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 281-85 (1962)); see also Berg, 574 F. Supp. 2d at 529 (“[V]oters are free to vote out of office those politicians seen to have breached campaign promises,” but “[f]ederal courts … are not and cannot be in the business of enforcing political rhetoric”); Dornan v. U.S. Sec’y of Def., 676 F. Supp. 6, 7 (D.D.C. 1987) (holding action based in part on political promise nonjusticiable); see also O’Brien v. Brown, 409 U.S. 1, 4-5 (1972); Irish v. Democratic Farmer-Labor Party of Minn., 399 F.2d 119, 120-21 (8th Cir. 1968)”
The DNC lawyers’ argument here is that the charter’s demand that the chair and DNC staff remain neutral throughout the Democratic primary is a political promise, similar to policy proposals made in campaign platforms that aren’t fulfilled when in office. The lawyers cite an argument made in another court case stating that voters are free to vote out politicians. In their initial motion to dismiss the lawsuit, DNC lawyers argued Bernie Sanders supporters were aware the DNC and Wasserman Schultz were biased against their candidate. Now their argument is a neutral DNC and DNC chair are just political promises, leaving voters susceptible to the deception that the DNC would treat Clinton and Sanders equally. The lawyers argue liability only applies to consumer-merchant relationships
“The DNC may, within its First Amendment rights, chose to amend its rules to eliminate the provision upon which Plaintiffs’ theory relies,” added the DNC lawyers, arguing that because the DNC can amend its rules so its chair and staff don’t have to remain neutral or impartial in the Democratic presidential primaries, the court cannot render a ruling on the rule.
These DNC lawyers are the same counsel Hillary Clinton used throughout her presidential campaign. In a WikiLeaks release from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, attorney Marc Elias provides the Clinton campaign with an outline on how to legally coordinate with Super PACs.
The arguments made by the DNC’s lawyers were proven invalid after the WikiLeaks dump of emails resulted in the resignation of Wasserman Schultz and three other top staff members, who were exposed to be working against the Sanders campaign in favor of Clinton. Despite Wasserman Schultz’s disgrace, Clinton immediately hired her and establishment Democrats supported her reelection bid to Congress.
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Why Feminists Shouldn’t Trust Hillary Clinton, BY KATHLEEN GEIER | How the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans, by Sarah Smarsh | Women Who Hate Trump, but Aren’t With Her, by Emma Green | Hillary Clinton Holds Fire On GOP, by Ruby Cramer | DNC Lawyers Argue No Liability: Neutrality Is Merely a ‘Political Promise’, by Michael Sainato