It's Still History

Everyone has been talking about this Democratic nominating contest as historic and unprecedented - to the point where us hapless TV viewers/newspaper readers don't even know what that really means anymore.

A Boston Herald columnist, Margery Eagan, helps crystallize that in her sum-up of Gloria Steinem's maybe-surprising switch in support to Barack Obama. Apparently lots of uber-Hillaryites were expecting the loyal Clinton supporter to be defiant during an appearance in Boston yesterday. (Sidenote: The degree of obstinance in some of the Hillary supporters has been kind of dumbfounding!)

Eagan says:

Yet lost in all this acrimony is that Hillary Clinton, as Obama himself said Tuesday, “has done what no woman has done before” ever, in our history. She won presidential primaries from coast to coast. She nearly won the nomination. She has answered the tough-enough question (yes, she is) for the next woman who may be today, this instant, what Obama was just a few years ago, an obscure but extremely gifted politician with a vision that resonates - because she is the right woman at the right time.

Clinton herself spoke Tuesday about “millions of Americans registering to vote for the first time, raising money for the first time, (about) mothers and fathers lifting their little girls and their little boys on to their shoulders and whispering, ‘See, you can be anything you want to be.’ ”

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have made that more true today in America than ever before. We shouldn’t lose sight of that happy fact, either.

Yes. She may have played dirty, and she may have been treated badly by Hillary Haters. But her candidacy, and Obama's, are more than just symbolic breakthroughs.

Second Billing

More funny stuff on the Clinton campaign, in the NYT.

Hillary's team is struggling with, among other things, getting just the right dosage of Bill, and in the right places.

“We don’t want to make the Al Gore mistake — trying to separate Hillary from the president, or not sending the president out because you think he’s not well liked or because he might be a better speaker than Hillary,” one senior campaign adviser said, who spoke about internal campaign strategy on the condition of anonymity. “Voters would think we were acting phony.”

Well thank goodness. Now that voters know Team Hillary's trying to appear like they're not trying to appear a certain way, they can all rest easy.

This was also really funny. The thought of an over-eager Bill being scolded and told to leave the room makes me chuckle:

When need be, she also knows how to cut him off. In preparation for a Senate debate, she more or less ordered him out of the room when he began coaching too much, Democrats close to the Clintons say. During a policy discussion awhile back about New York issues, when Mr. Clinton began to pontificate, she told him that he did not exactly know what he was talking about and to hush up.

Working Moms

Women are making some news this year.

Nancy Pelosi became the first woman Speaker of the House ("Madam Speaker") and is third in line to the presidency.

Hillary Clinton is (duh) running for president and has the best chance to win that any woman has ever had.

Drew Gilpin Faust was named the president of Harvard, and will be the first woman to hold the position when she takes over in July.

Katie Couric became the first woman to solo-anchor an evening news broadcast, in September.

Ségolène Royal is the Socialist party's nominee for France's 2007 presidential election, this spring. She would be the country's first woman president.

Anyone else?

Oh yeah, right: Ann Coulter becomes the first woman ever* to refer to a presidential candidate as a faggot on national TV, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in early March.

*speculation

graphic from Queen's University Dept. of Women's Studies

One-Name Wonder

A fun little piece in yesterday's Times Op-Ed section noted that Hillary Rodham Clinton is taking the celebrity route and running her campaign for the U.S. presidency solely with her first name.

Someone has apparently decided that Mrs. Clinton will be the first major single-name candidate since 1952, when Ike’s P.R. gurus realized that “Eisenhower” was tough to fit on a bumper sticker.

Mrs. Clinton announced her intentions via the Internet on a Web site called “Hillary for President.” Incredibly, on the day of her announcement, the name “Clinton” did not appear anywhere in the long text on the site’s home page — except when linking to articles from The Associated Press and The Washington Post, and at the very bottom in the obligatory fine print: “Paid for by Hillary Clinton for President Exploratory Committee.”

...

... she knows that she’s the only candidate whose name lends itself to Oprah-ization.

Organizers for John Edwards and John McCain presumably considered, and rejected, naming their sites “John for President.” And it’s hard to imagine that President Bush would have gotten much traction from a site titled “George for President.”

I love it. She's famous enough and her name unique enough that she may be elected leader of the free world -- and need only her given name to do it. Maybe she'll make like Ichiro and make a request: Beltway reporters will refer to her as "President Hillary."

Bill Outshines the Rising Star

Bill Clinton swooped in on Hillary's behalf to win the endorsement of a prominent African-American South Carolina state senator, Robert Ford, who endorsed North Carolina's John Edwards in 2004 and whom Barack Obama was pursuing for the 2008 primaries. (Ford must have some street cred: Not only was he arrested 73 times during the Civil Rights movement, but it's a featured credential on his CV!)

It's simply an early demonstration of the huge presence everyone is saying Clinton will have in this race.

Maybe Clinton's "blacker" than Obama. It's been a topic of intense discussion recently, and I think that to assert that he's "not black enough" -- that is to say, he is not descended of African slaves of white Americans, was not raised in the face of racism and oppression, or otherwise hasn't had an authentic black American experience -- is antithetical to the notion of inclusiveness that black leaders have long petitioned for. In his TIME piece, sociology professor Orlando Patterson says that historically as an American, even a single drop of African blood would make you an African-American. He goes on to say:

Black identity was historically progressive in another important respect: from very early in the 19th century through the civil rights movement, it was strikingly cosmopolitan. Black leaders took a deep interest in oppressed peoples throughout the world. The Pan-African movement and early black nationalism were part of emerging notions of black solidarity. Blacks took deep pride in the Haitian revolution, and black American missionaries played an important role in the Christianization of Jamaican and other West Indian blacks. Black Americans were also open to the inspiration of black immigrants: W.E.B. DuBois's father was Haitian; James Weldon Johnson's mother, Bahamian. One of the first mass movements of African Americans was led by a Jamaican, Marcus Garvey, in the '20s. An impressive number of black leaders and civil rights icons--Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, Shirley Chisholm, Louis Farrakhan, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, to list a few--were all first- or second-generation immigrants.

For some, "blackness" no longer connotes an inclusive family of the disenfranchised, but an exclusive club.