As late as the beginning of this year, Hillary Clinton was presumed to be the Democratic nominee for president; assumed by most Democrats, assumed even by the media that have treated her so shabbily. Now it seems clear that the nomination will instead go to the upstart Senator from Illinois.

So what went wrong? Is it, as many feminists are saying, because she's a woman?

It's no secret that I don't share the focus on the minutiae of language that many feminists do. My view is that for three generations now, while women have been parsing the meaning of words and looking only at the corporate glass ceiling, the Democrats have been rubber-stamping Supreme Court nominees like John Roberts and Samuel Alito, more women than ever are working without benefits and without job security, women are still trapped in abusive relationships from which they have difficulty escaping because they have no skills, or being raped on the street and by their dates, or sexually harassed by their bosses. And it's not because Barack Obama called a reporter "sweetie." While you can make the argument that comments deemed dismissive of women are part of the same continuum that leads to rape and discrimination, they aren't the same, and to equate them is to make the mistake that Andrea Dworkin made when she opined that penetrative sex is, by definition, violent. It's hyperbole in the service of a cause that negates the worthiness of that cause.

It's the politics of victimization that have been the most troubling part of this election campaign, a contest of Who's Suffered More that does little to advance the cause of any aggrieved group making claims of comparative suffering, and a great deal to make very real issues seem trivial. You can't be empowered if you frame yourself solely in the context of being a rape survivor. You can't be empowered if you take to your fainting couch every time a man says something you think is dismissive or cruel.

I tend to suffer from a great deal of free-floating anxiety, and I also tend to be hypersensitive to people's moods. If someone had a bad day, it's my fault. If someone is curt because she didn't get enough sleep last night, it must be something I did. For decades I framed myself solely in terms of what people thought and what they said. And believe me, there is nothing LESS empowering than giving other people this kind of power over you. If I learned nothing else from the excellent-but-tough therapists I've had in my life, it's that you cannot control what other people do, you can only control what you do. And to put your life, your definition of yourself in the hands of those who because of their own psychological baggage, hate women, can't accept women in a powerful role, have issues with their mothers, whatever -- you perpetuate the idea that women just can't handle the stresses of life, that we really ARE fragile creatures who can't play on the same field.

This isn't to say that we shouldn't point out when Chris Matthews opines on national television that the only reason Hillary Clinton is a Senator is because her husband cheated on her. It doesn't mean we shouldn't point out what Hillary nutcrackers really mean, or the comparisons to the Alex Forrest character in Fatal Attraction. But I think there's a way to do this, and it isn't to have the vapors every time a man on television says something mind-bogglingly stupid, but to amass a group of them into a pattern, and THEN say, "See? THIS is what I'm talking about." You must amass evidence if you want to make a case.

I'll give Hillary Clinton credit for this: For the most part, it hasn't been Clinton herself who's played the poor-me-victim-of-sexism card. She isn't entirely blameless, but it's largely been grievance feminists who have chosen to blame the failure of Clinton's campaign solely at the feet of sexist males and hapless dupes like me who've managed to be able to earn a living, yes, even once being fired from a retail job after rebuffing my supervisor in the stockroom, who don't see male oppression around every corner and haven't let sexism define me or my life.

If there's a message that we HAVEN'T heard from the polls during this primary race, it hasn't been a great deal of concern about having a woman president. There's been concern about dynasty, and there's been a fair amount of lynching metaphor used from people who have said they just couldn't vote for a black man, but I haven't heard concern that Hillary isn't "tough enough to be a wartime president." For one thing, it's hard to make that argument when you're talking about a woman who refuses to say that her Iraq war vote was wrong, who voted for Kyl-Lieberman, and who has blithely talked about her intention to obliterate Iran during her presidency. So those who want to chalk up Hillary Clinton's apparent (at this point) failure to win the nomination to sexism don't want to look at:

1) Her crappy campaign organization and refusal to realize that the nature of campaigning has changed. Howard Dean may not have succeeded with a 50-state strategy in his own run, and the DLC of which Hillary is a member has fought it tooth and nail, preferring the old model of pouring money into "sure-win" races. But if the Obama campaign is anything, it's a triumph of the 50-state, campaign-by-the-people strategy. Hillary Clinton put together a conventional top-down, big-donor, big-state apparatus, led by Mark Penn -- a man of dubious connections who didn't even know how Democratic delegates were apportioned. Her campaign burned through money early, assuming inevitability and a bottomless pit of big-money donors. Her campaign focused on traditional Democratic constituencies, which have been insufficient to create a victory for anyone but her husband, who was a far more talented pure politician than she is. Meanwhile, the Obama camp went after expanding the pool of voters and reaching out to the $25 donor, realizing that if you can tap a million donors for ten $25 donations spread out over time, you have a more consistent cash flow and you have more people with actual skin in the game.

2) She ran up against a more charismatic candidate. If we should have learned anything from the Democratic races in the last 28 years, it's that television image matters. Charisma matters. In 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, and 2004, the Democratic Party nominated intelligent, capable, competent men -- men whose campaigns made them as dull as dishwater. These men were also highly conventional candidates who underestimated the power of the televised image and the impact of media narrative, hence Jimmy Carter's sweater, Walter Mondale pledging to raise taxes, Michael Dukakis in the tank, Al Gore's sighs, and John Kerry's windsurfing. That all of these men would have been better national stewards than the men who occupied the White House instead is immaterial. The media are going to Go For the Story. And if the candidate can't create his or her own story or narrative, the media will create one. Perhaps if this primary race had been Hillary against a bunch of white men, the fact that she was the first viable woman candidate would have been a bigger story. Perhaps if she had not been the wife of a former president, her presence would have been more compelling. But frankly, she never had a chance against a rock star like Obama, who also happened to have a more compelling backstory and represent even MORE of a harbinger of change.

3) She wasn't prepared for a long campaign, and it showed. The worst thing that could have happened to Hillary Clinton's campaign was a long hard slog. In 2000, there were voters who voted for George W. Bush either because they were confused and thought they were voting for his father, or who assumed that the old man would be the one actually running things so it wouldn't be so bad. Hillary Clinton ran on "It'll be Bill all over again." And at one time, that idea didn't seem like a bad one, until things started to go wrong and the Clinton campaign sent Bill out on the campaign trail, hoping to remind voters of that old Clinton magic. Instead, his presence reminded us less of the Clinton magic than the Clinton narcissism. And that made many of us question what it was we ever saw in him in the first place. Once that particular door opened, it was an easy step to "Now I understand why they hated him." And if you weren't inclined to vote for Hillary on gender grounds, and you were no longer looking at a return to the peace and prosperity of the 1990s, but instead, a return to the Clinton drama and uproar of the 1990's, the case for Hillary became far less compelling.

4) The shifting message. Last year at Yearly Kos, Hillary Clinton stood up in front of around 2500 assembled people in response to John Edwards' challenge of a pledge to kick out the lobbyists, and made an impassioned statement that lobbyists are Americans too. The rest of America may not carry the loathing of K Street the way the netroots does, but they have a sense that their government no longer belongs to them, that it belongs to the money interests. I don't think Clinton realized back then, and I don't think she realized until it was too late, that there is a real hunger in this country for Something Different; that the change for which Democrats thirsted wasn't a restoration, but a leap into something unknown. Because when the last seven years had been spent being led by fear and corruption and incompetence, a leap into the unknown seemed somehow better than anything that smacks of more of the same -- no matter what that "same" might be. And so we started to see Populist Hillary, Good Old Boy Hillary, drop-yer-g's Hillary. And as soon as she became Leonard Zelig, the strong lioness, stalwart in the face of adversity, began to seem panicky and desperate -- and inauthentic.

Of course it's still possible, though increasingly unlikely every day, that something may yet happen to hand Hillary Clinton the nomination. But if it doesn't, and Barack Obama ends up giving the acceptance speech in Denver this summer, it won't be because a sexist society conspired against her. It will be because she and her campaign misread the mood of the nation, and that this party realized that change doesn't mean going back in time.

Labels: feminism, Hillary Clinton