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Tag: women in politics
Hillary To Donald: Game On!

Hillary To Donald: Game On!

Hillary Clinton strode on stage in Philadelphia Thursday night and showed herself ready to win the presidency.

In her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, she presented herself less in her historic role as the first woman presidential candidate of a major party and more on her merits as the best candidate for the job. She was positive, extolling the greatest ideals of the nation and making a persuasive case that all Americans will benefit from bolstering our democratic principles.

Yet she also drew judicious attention to the evident flaws of her opponent, Donald Trump. In doing so, her message was clear: Game on!

It was exactly the message she needed to deliver to a skeptical electorate.

Indeed, speakers throughout the Democratic convention made a point of contrasting Clinton’s experience and gravitas to Trump’s lack of character, seriousness and scruple. These critiques were all the more effective because they avoided the vituperation and bombast that Trump prefers in his attacks.

By the convention’s last day, Trump had become so miffed by the criticism directed his way that he let his violent, menacing character show through. In a press conference he said he wanted “hit” some of the speakers “so hard that their heads would spin and they would never recover.”

Thanks, Donald, for reminding us who the adult is in this race.

What will stick with many voters is the candidate Clinton showed herself to be—steeled and calm—the attributes that will make our country prevail against its many challenges.

Indeed, Trump’s antics make the reasons to shun Clinton appear petty.

It may be true that voters want new blood, not another family returning to the White House as if a dynasty. And, yes, Clinton’s judgment was terrible in creating a separate email server at the State Department. Yes, she has not held regular press conferences as she should. She is not smooth before the cameras. Her past pecuniary relationships with Wall Street raise questions about her political affinities. Her vote for the Iraq invasion was simply wrong.

But all these objections recede in the face of Trump. He is a candidate so unworthy of the powers of the presidency it is stunning. A candidate for president simply can’t shoot off his mouth about foreign policy, as Trump has done. He has threatened to extort our NATO allies. He has invited the Russian government to commit cybercrimes against the United States government. He has alienated Mexico, a neighbor and major trading partner. His rhetoric about Muslims is a gift to terrorists.

Contrast that to Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. She was integral to the decision to kill Osama bin Laden and the negotiation of the treaty that got Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program, among other achievements.

America has a simple choice. It is between one who is reliable and intelligent and experienced enough for the responsibilities of the presidency and one who is not.

It also happens to be a historic moment for women. For too long in politics, female candidates have been subject to unfair standards of scrutiny, including the superficial sorts of judgment we associate with middle school.

Clinton’s certainly seen her fair share. Why are her pantsuits even a topic of commentary? How many times do we have to hear male pundits complain about her “lecturing” tone? Her voice is like that of many women. It can take on a different range, a higher one, when she changes her tone either for emphasis or when riled. That’s mechanics, people. It’s about her vocal cords, and it’s not a reason to determine a person unfit for political office.

Hillary Clinton was always enough. She didn’t need an association by marriage to Bill to rise to professional heights. Born as she was nearly 70 years ago, not to wealth or privilege, maybe she didn’t even realize this early on. But history will probably judge that it was Bill who got to the White House with the help of his wife, not the other way around.

Clinton’s been on a path to the White House her whole life, and not just to be a first lady. She’s been gaining the types of experiences that would ready any person—male or female—to fulfill the job of president. It’s just taken the nation until 2016 for other factors to align in a woman’s favor. Now it’s time to elect her.

Mary Sanchez is an opinion-page columnist for The Kansas City Star. Readers may write to her at: Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or via e-mail at msanchez@kcstar.com.

 

Photo: Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Hillary Clinton pust her hand on her heart as she delivers her nomination acceptance speech on the fourth and final night at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. July 28, 2016.  REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Hatred Toward Hillary May Be Fueled By Sexism

Hatred Toward Hillary May Be Fueled By Sexism

Once upon a time, Hillary Rodham Clinton was a left-wing ideologue. Or so her conservative critics argued. After all, as a young woman, she had worked in the presidential campaigns of progressive icons Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. After law school, she had taken a job with a suspiciously left-leaning charity, the Children’s Defense Fund.

And her liberal enthusiasms didn’t stop there. As Bill Clinton’s first lady, she was an unapologetic feminist, lending her intellectual firepower to his administration, leading the charge to enact universal health care. She was branded a fire-breathing populist, a near-socialist bent on destroying a productive sector of the American economy.

She was vilified by congressional Republicans, right-wing radio pit bulls and health industry executives. Her health care proposal went down in flames.

Fast forward a few decades, and you’ll find that she is now a corporate sellout. Or so her liberal critics argue. She is a soulless centrist who lacks a guiding ideology. She is a warmonger, an untrustworthy political hack.

The only thing that hasn’t changed in the several decades of her public life is this: Hatred of her remains white-hot, unhinged, irrational. As Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates observed in a widely quoted New Yorker profile written in 1996: “Like horse-racing, Hillary-hating has become one of those national pastimes which unite the elite and the lumpen.”

What’s up with that? Why has Clinton inspired such rage, such resentment—fueled by very different sentiments and assessments—over the years? What has she done to earn so much antipathy?

Hillary-hate is a strange brew, a toxic mixture of ultra-conservative rage, populist suspicion and progressive resentment over her lack of ideological purity. It is stirred together with heaping doses of the candidate’s own anti-charisma, her calculating poses, her inability to give a simple answer to a simple question. But the ingredient that has fed the mix and fueled its growth is sexism, the lingering animus toward a woman’s leadership that still festers underneath our patina of equality for all. Without the yeast of sexism, it is impossible to imagine that Clinton would be deemed nearly as untrustworthy as the lying and fraudulent Donald Trump.

As her fight for universal health care underscores, the conservative assault on Hillary Clinton began during her husband’s presidency. It was aided, immeasurably, by the rise of a harsh, unrelenting hyper-partisanship championed by the inimitable Newt Gingrich and echoed through a growing right-wing media network. So it was that the president and his wife were accused of drug dealing and murder.

As special counsel Kenneth Star continued his torturous investigation of the Clintons, a besieged Hillary Clinton complained of a “vast, right-wing conspiracy” — a remark the Washington media establishment greeted as the ranting of a woman who could find no rational explanation for the political troubles of the Clinton White House. There’s no doubt the sex scandal was a problem of the president’s own making, but it’s also true that a vast right-wing conspiracy — funded by ultra-conservative 1-percenters such as Charles and David Koch and Richard Mellon Scaife — was out to smear the Clintons and ruin his presidency.

But as her husband contributed to his enemies’ campaign against him, Hillary Clinton has also made mistakes that arm her rivals. Her decision to use a private email server as secretary of state was a case of superbly bad judgment; her failure to acknowledge that early in her presidential campaign is simply inexplicable. She has also disappointed liberals with her hawkishness, including her support for the worst U.S. foreign policy blunder of the last 50 years, the invasion of Iraq. That vote alone may have cost her the presidential nomination in 2008.

She suffers further because she is simply not a skillful politician. She’s as smart as they come, and she has a formidable work ethic. She’s a policy wonk. But she lacks the ability to project warmth and empathy and camaraderie on the campaign trail, through no fault of her own.

Still, her lack of charisma doesn’t explain everything. Bernie Sanders, who yelled and gestured wildly from every podium he occupied, doesn’t exactly exude charisma. And the beloved Joe Biden, who was greeted rapturously when he took the convention stage, has been known to calculate his moves and to cater to big-money interests. So, ask yourself this: What’s different about her?

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

 

Photo: Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton pauses as she speaks at a campaign rally in Cleveland, Ohio June 13, 2016.   REUTERS/Aaron Josefczyk

That Hillary

That Hillary

Six times now, I’ve revised the beginning of this column to avoid starting with the word “I,” my mother’s long-ago voice ringing in my ear.

Not talking about oneself is a cornerstone of my upbringing. This is not uncommon for women of my generation. We came of age in the 1970s, at the height of the feminist movement. Many mothers like mine worried we might be getting a little full of ourselves as we mapped out our big new lives.

“All this ‘I, I, I,'” my mother said one afternoon, her final nerve frayed with all my talk about what I wanted to do — who I wanted to be — in the weeks before I left for college. “Nobody likes a girl who talks about herself,” my mother warned.

When she chastised me for dreaming out loud, I heard the voice of a mother who couldn’t understand what it was like to be me. Too many years later, I heard what she was really saying: “What about me?”

Kent State University was as foreign to my mother as every country she had never visited — which was every one but Canada. She was a nurse’s aide who would spend all of her years in the same small county in which she was born. Like so many mothers before her, she wanted more for her daughter than a life that nobody would notice. She also felt guilt about how much she wished she could come along.

Three days before she died, at age 62, my mother motioned for me to lean in close and whispered through her oxygen mask. “Get all of my journals out of the house,” she said. “I want you to have them.”

“Where are they?” I asked.

“Everywhere.”

I found them tucked in drawers and in the back of closets. Two were hidden behind cookbooks in a kitchen cabinet. One was in a chest of drawers in my old bedroom.

I found nearly two dozen in all, each one filled cover to cover with my mother’s loopy handwriting. When she asked me to gather them up, I thought she wanted to protect my father’s feelings from her occasional venting. But once I began reading them, I realized my mother wanted at least one person to know the story of her life.

My mother was no different from so many women you think you know just because they’re a part of your life. They’re full of dreams and other secrets they keep to themselves out of modesty and a certainty that no one would care anyway.

But this week, their stories are seeping out. For that, we can thank Hillary Clinton.

On Tuesday night, I stood on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia and watched the roll call before Bernie Sanders stepped up to the microphone surrounded by fellow Vermonters and made the call for party unity.

“I move that Hillary Clinton be selected as the nominee of the Democratic Party for president of the United States,” he said.

The arena erupted. Overcome with emotion, I squeezed my husband’s arm and said, “I have lived to see the day.”

In the hours since, I have heard and read on social media so many stories from women who feel the need to share a little about themselves. They are doing this almost as a public service, as if to help others explain why Clinton’s nomination matters to them.

Facebook threads, in particular, read like entries from personal journals, as rich and varied as the women who are writing them. To my delight, they are using the word “I.”

“When I was 12, my grandmother told me…”

“All of my life, I wanted to be…”

“I worked for that company for 24 years, but they…”

Many of us yearn to share this moment with women long gone. “My mother … my grandmother … my sister … my friend…”

One of my friends texted me: “I swear I felt her tap on my shoulder,” she wrote. “My mother, she knows.”

My first attempt at this column began, “I wish my mother were alive to see this.” She loved first lady Hillary Clinton, who — like every strong, opinionated woman she ever saw on TV — reminded her of me. “That Hillary,” she called her, always with a smile. “She’s got bigger plans.”

I am waiting for that tap on my shoulder. At the very least, I sure hope she knows.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. She is the author of two books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. Her email is con.schultz@yahoo.com.

 

Photo: Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton points at President Barack Obama as she arrives onstage at the end of his speech on the third night of the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania U.S., July 27, 2016.  REUTERS/Jim Young

Hillary Thanks Our Foremothers

Hillary Thanks Our Foremothers

Hallelujah, we lived to see the day — as Hillary Clinton spoke with grace to claim her place in American history. Nothing’s over yet, but as the Democratic Party standard-bearer, Clinton is riding high. And she worked for it.

Waking from the long gone, Quaker abolitionist firebrand Lucretia Mott reached for her favorite volume, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” a passionate polemic by Mary Wollstonecraft, written as she witnessed the French Revolution.

“Thank thee, Mary,” she said quaintly in the Quaker way. “The journey to Philadelphia in July is almost done.” Mott founded the women’s equal rights cause in antebellum America. Clinton spoke of that convention’s declaration like a secular prayer. Mott, famed for a revolutionary voice and vision, was the star at Seneca Falls.

Say the names: Mary, Lucretia, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan, B. Anthony, Alice Paul — all gave us suffrage, sisterhood and a legacy named Hillary, whom they have watched for years. There’s no greater testament to how past is prologue. You’ll be seeing their faces on the money — the new $10. The Treasury turns out to have nimble timing, what is the world coming to — and “Hamilton” on Broadway, too? Suddenly, history is cool.

To meet our foremothers in the right light, note they are among things they never told you in history class — likely, not even the teacher knew.

Clinton confidently hit the right notes, a promising omen for the general election. She was gracious to her opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders, who, with his campaign staff, resembled a sulky child.

Moving on lightly, she said how hard it is to lose a campaign when you’ve poured your heart into it: “I know that feeling well,” she added, in rare public self-deprecation, a crowd-pleaser. She let her own walls down, in sync with her artful passage about bridges being better than walls, an arrow at Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.

Vindication is so sweet, readers, we must do this more often. The modern women’s movement, such as it is, has been drowsy or dormant in the last decade or two. President Bill Clinton (Hillary’s husband!) signed major legislation to allow parents (read, women) to take leave from work for family and medical leave — unpaid. That was almost 25 years ago.

From the onset, when a cheery Clinton went to Iowa for the summer political rituals for the state Caucuses, I asked my pundit friends if she couldn’t skip the snowy state that dealt her a blow eight years ago. In my mind, she had every right to do cross Iowa off her map. No, she has to go to Iowa, a seasoned columnist told me. So she did. And so she won, barely. That showed character, to cross over to the fray.

A few points struck me as changed about Clinton’s victory speech. Compared to her wrenching loss to Senator Barack Obama in 2008, she came across as softer round the edges, with subtle touches on her hair and dress. (Yes, that matters.) Pleasing to the ear, her voice was pitched lower. Her gratitude for great good fortune seemed genuine, which she shared with “all of you.”

It was the best night for American womanhood since Alice Paul wrested the Votes for Women mass movement over the finish line in 1920. Despite Woodrow Wilson, no friend to woman suffrage, in the White House.

Clinton covered that nicely, noting her mother was born in 1919, with Congress on the cusp of passing the suffrage amendment.

As outsiders to American democracy, women could only count on themselves — there were few men in the suffrage movement. Many, like Paul, were part of the first wave of college graduates — Paul was in the Swarthmore class of 1905. They expected more from the turn of the 20th century.

Mott, a Quaker pacifist, has one reservation about Clinton: her support for the Iraq War authorization. Yet Clinton sent a message that she learns from her mistakes, and second, that she has done well along the way.

Revolutions happen on their own time, and it sure as heck feels like one is on the horizon. I might add Mott’s parting promise about the Democratic convention: “It’s 2016, not 1776. This July in Philadelphia, it will be ladies first.”

Photo: Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during her California primary night rally held in the Brooklyn borough of New York, U.S., June 7, 2016.  REUTERS/Lucas Jackson