Too Weak or Too Conniving, Take Your Pick…

I heard about the story as it broke. I was driving to work and Ed Shultz was canoodling with Joe Scarborough and some other right wing Fox douche (another reason why he’s not one of my favorites). They cut into their inane banter with gravity suggestive of real news, “I’m being informed … that Hillary Clinton started crying at a town hall event …”  Oh god, I thought, they’re going to latch onto that. Their tongues were audibly tsking as they contemplated this development, or perhaps that was the media machine kicking into gear.

It was very predictable in a way. All the pundits were talking about Clinton’s third-place finish in Iowa as a rejection by the voters, so what’s more natural than for a rejected woman to cry about it? And that was the story they told. From the New York Times:

Her eyes visibly wet, in perhaps the most public display of emotion of her year-old campaign… Mrs. Clinton did not cry, but her quavering voice and the flash of feeling underscored the pressure, fatigue, anger and disappointment… Mrs. Clinton has felt frustrated and at times rejected…

Did she? Let’s roll the tape, shall we, and see what made her voice slightly husky with emotion. The question was indeed about how she deals with the rigors of campaigning. Did her answer reflect fatigue, anger or disappointment?

I have so many opportunities from this country. I just don’t want to see us fall backwards. … This is very personal for me. It’s not just political; it’s not just public. I see what’s happening, and we have to reverse it. … Some people think elections are a game [but] it’s about our country; it’s about our kid’s futures…

It sounds a lot less like personal frustration or rejection to me than it does like passion, concern for the future, and commitment to make a difference. And crying it was not. I know from crying; I blubber at the heartfelt moments in kid’s cartoons. Mitt Romney was a lot more choked up on Meet the Press than Clinton was here. When Rachel Maddow (why oh why can’t Rachel be on instead of Ed?) called Pat Buchanan on this double-standard, he kept insisting on saying that Hillary “broke up” about potentially losing while Mitt merely “got emotional” at a “powerful moment.” Double-standard? Game and set to Rachel.

Despite being contrary to the actual facts, I’m afraid the meme has already taken on a life of its own. Even people indifferent to Clinton will joke about her melting down because she wasn’t getting her way. It could be the jape for Clinton what the lie about inventing the Internet was for Al Gore. The sexist dilemma for all women in positions of power is that if they are strong-willed they are considered too unemotional, while if they show emotion they are considered too weak-willed. We see that for Clinton, as for so many women, there is no Goldilocks zone. For the media she can be too hard or too soft, but she can never be just right.

I heard the most bizarre version of the Catch-22 yesterday morning listening to a few minutes of the (sigh) Big Ed show. A caller started out by raving about how our leaders shouldn’t cry in front of the terrorists. This is a clue that you’re dealing with a hard-core authoritarian who buys into the absurd right-wing theory that foreign policy is a battle of wills, like some kind of international staring contest where the first to blink loses. He then also went on to pronounce that Clinton’s tears had been false, calculated to win sympathy votes. But wait – if she’s calculating enough to win hearts and minds in the battle of wills that is a national election, surely that’s the kind of person you want dealing with terrorists, isn’t it? Apparently not, if it’s a woman.

If Clinton ends up with the nomination we can expect to be awash in misogynistic slurs as the GOP tries to diminish her relative to her inevitably male opponent, and the media will gleefully pile on. The clarifying factor is that no matter what you may think of her or her policies, she is clearly qualified, both in experience and in temperament, to be president. Keep that in mind as otherwise reasonable people tell you that somehow, in an oblique manner related to her sex organs, she’s not.

- jack*

Comments

[Zenji]

firedog lake had a post up about all the times republican men have cried in public. It's insanely hypocritical and decidedly sexist to be making a big deal out of Hillary having gotten choked up. People get choked up all the time about things that matter to them, and i'm glad they do. It definitely made Hillary more sympathetic to me when i heard the tape, too, it was a very human moment.

[01d55]

"The clarifying factor is that no matter what you may think of her or her policies, she is clearly qualified, both in experience and in temperament, to be president."

I disagree, for the reasons Bob Harris explains here:
http://www.bobharris.com/content/view/1268/1/