Since I'm a woman on the downhill side of 45 and I even have this blonde hairdo that looks pretty much like hers, I was supposed to have voted for Hillary.
But she just didn't connect with me.
I feel sad for her. I remember watching
Bill speak at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 and feeling so nostalgic. Oh, Bill! I missed you and I missed the '90s and I thought how nice it would be to turn back the clock to happier times.
He talked about how we're all in the same boat, about what unites us rather than divides us. He talked about forming a more perfect union.
But then Bill resigned his job as ex-President and turned into this peevish, perturbed and abrasive dude. Bill Clinton, Mr. Charming, abrasive!
Then I remembered that for most of those so-called happier times in the '90s, I was personally pretty miserable and mostly chemically impaired. So, was I really feeling nostalgic, or was my memory just too foggy to be trusted?
And besides, he wasn't running for President, she was. And she reminded me of Laura Johnson, the valedictorian of the high school class two years ahead of mine. Older than me. Smarter. Well, sure she was smarter. And she knew it and we all knew it. We figured she'd be successful in her life, but we didn't like her. We didn't want to hang out with her.
Do you vote for someone for President because they're someone you'd want to hang out with? People generally say this is where we went wrong with Dubya, but I disagree. People voted for Dubya because Karl Rove saw how well it worked for Nixon to get people motivated by greed and fear, not because Bush was such a swell guy. Although I think I'd rather hang out with Obama than Hillary, that's not why I voted for him.
Obama appealed to our better natures. He had uplift.
Hillary, frankly, was a drag. She appealed to the bitter, resentful, fearful parts of people. Not too different from the Republicans, who score big with resentful, fearful rich people. Hillary's voters are similarly grumpy, but they don't belong to country clubs.
Understandably so. If you're a 55 year old woman who's watched dumber, less qualified men rise in the corporation while you plodded along earning 75 cents to their dollar, you're pissed off. And, if you lose your health insurance at the same time that you are undergoing chemo, then you're either terrified or going ballistic.
But it's hard to argue that you're any more entitled to your resentments than, oh, I don't know, a black man whose dad absented himself from his two-year-old's life and left him to grow up with his white hippie mom and lepers for neighbors in Indonesia. I mean, if anybody has a right to be bitter...but I don't get that from Barack.
Slate ran
an interesting piece that argued Hillary failed because she wasn't
enough of a feminist. She fell into the trap of trying too hard to be "one of the boys," slamming back whiskey shots, talking in that deep chest voice that ultimately grates on your nerves, never for one minute backing off of her vote to send boys my son's age to die in Iraq. Blaming her failures not on herself but on our gender bias, she didn't embrace a more relevant feminism that affirms the value of being female. It is not advancing the cause if you advocate that women aspire to be men or even mannish in the worst aspects: hawkish, arrogant, combative, patronizing.
Yes, it was doubly sad the day Obama clinched the nomination and Hillary finally read the delegate count on the wall, also was the anniversary of the 19th Amendment's ratification. Who scripted this? The first serious woman contender for President sees her hopes dashed with finality on the anniversary of women getting the vote.
And yet, there's a lesson in history, too. The women's suffrage movement was inspired by the Abolitionists who succeeded in overturning slavery. So, it stands to reason that a black man would have a real chance of becoming president long before a woman in this country.
And here's another lesson if we're willing to learn from someone outside our borders. Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland.
Former United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights. Current member of
The Elders. What a cool, strong, powerful, extraordinarily talented and intelligent woman leader. When she speaks about human rights, international law and the right of every person to be treated with dignity, she shows the creativity and imagination that a woman could bring to the highest office in a nation and the global community.
I don't think women have to vote for a woman if she's the wrong person for the job. If Mary Robinson was running, I'd vote for her. Obama is the next-best thing, though.
