My Life on the Road (19 page)

That was the beginning of campaigning from inside a movement rather than on a candidate’s turf. Up until then I had supported campaigns by writing about them or volunteering in them. Now I was learning that the best way to help was to strengthen the movements that embody principles, so those movements could themselves generate support for the candidates who voted for those principles. More than any volunteer or staff member inside a candidate’s race—or any journalist or activist making points from outside—a movement can pioneer new issues and motivate voters. As Bella always knew, you didn’t just ask for support, you created support—from what Bella named “the gender gap.” Women of all groups were measurably more likely than their male counterparts to vote for equality, health, and education, and against violence as a way of solving conflict. It wasn’t about biology, but experience.

I
N 1984
I
SAW WHAT
I wasn’t sure I ever would: a woman as the vice-presidential candidate on a major party ticket, not just a symbol but someone who had a chance of winning. Geraldine Ferraro was no older or more conflict-loving than I, yet she had survived political opposition and media attacks by campaigning from the bottom up. In fact, she would travel more miles around the country than her presidential running mate, Walter Mondale, and twice as many as their opponents, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, combined.

I noticed that she was supported by everyday citizens who gathered in halls large and small. Even at the Democratic Convention in San Francisco, she traded an elite, high-level reception for a populist event organized by the NWPC, and stood on a huge stage surrounded by women elected leaders—a category that couldn’t have filled a small room a few years before. Parents put their little girls on their shoulders to see the future, and more than a few women were in tears. They weren’t witnessing one woman’s win, but what they, too, could become.

And Ferraro would need their support. At every stop, Catholic officials condemned her for supporting family planning and legal abortion. I noticed they hadn’t attacked Senator Ted Kennedy, also a pro-choice Catholic, in the same way—as if tacitly admitting that it was strong, rebellious women who were the problem. Also reporters kept asking Ferraro if a woman could be “tough enough” to “push the button,” meaning declare a war, though they didn’t ask male candidates if they could be wise enough not to. Forests of newsprint were spent on her hair, though not on Reagan’s obviously dyed and sprayed pompadour. Barbara Bush told reporters that Ferraro was something that couldn’t be said on television but “rhymes with rich.” Most of all, Ferraro was accused of profiting from questionable real estate dealings by her husband, a charge that seemed partly attached to their Italian names. Such accusations subsided only after she spent hours answering questions until even reporters ran out of things to ask.

At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, I’d climbed onto a makeshift stage to stand at the side with other reporters, all of us awaiting Ferraro’s arrival. I was amazed to get cheers from this big and diverse audience. When Ferraro mounted the stage, she also got cheers—but fewer and not as loud. How could this be? She was making history, and I was not. I said so to an experienced reporter. He looked at me as if I’d said there was oxygen in the air. “Americans don’t like politicians much,” he explained patiently. “And if they do trust Ferraro, they credit the women’s movement—and you’re part of that.”

This really drove home for me that in the future, any of us who were recognizable as part of a social justice movement had to use ourselves to support the candidates we believed in. However controversial our movements might be, at least voters know that they stand for principles. Being backed by one was a signal that politicians are not all alike.

I
N THE BEGINNING
of my campaigning movement style, I thought,
It’s as if fate has sent me a good experience so I’ll keep showing up.
And there kept on being more and more terrific women to show up for in the years that followed. Indeed, 1992 came to be called the Year of the Woman, though as Senator Barbara Mikulski pointed out, “We’re not a fad, a fancy, or a year.” Later, she would prove her point by being elected five times and serving thirty years.

That quantum 1992 leap in the number of women in Congress was born out of the aftermath of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Watching the dignified Anita Hill face an all-white and all-male Senate Judiciary Committee—and then seeing Thomas confirmed for the Supreme Court—had inspired more women to be elected to Congress in that single year than had been elected in any previous decade—though they still made up only a little over 10 percent of a body that should have been more like 50/50. This record wouldn’t be surpassed until 2013, with 20 women in the Senate and 81 in the House.

But the most widespread and lasting impact of the Senate Judiciary hearings was not the Year of the Woman—and perhaps not even the ascension to the Supreme Court of a very right-wing and young Clarence Thomas, likely to be there for a long time; it was the new national understanding of sexualized intimidation as a means of keeping females in a subordinate place. The whole country learned that sexual harassment was illegal. Millions of women learned they were not alone in their experience of it. The use of sex to humiliate and dominate would never seem normal again.

As long as I’ve been campaigning, I’ve heard two questions: “When will we have a woman president?” and “When will we have a black president?”

Ironically, the 2008 primary campaign between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, which gave us the chance for both, was the best contest in terms of candidates and the worst in terms of conflict.

I knew Hillary Clinton mostly in the way we all do, as a public figure in good times and bad, one who became part of our lives and even our dreams. I once introduced her to a thousand women in a hotel ballroom at a breakfast in New York City. Standing behind her as she spoke, I could see the White House binder on the lectern with her speech carefully laid out—and also that she wasn’t reading from it. Instead, she was responding to people who had spoken before her, addressing activists and leaders she saw in the audience, and putting their work in a national and global context—all in such clear and graceful sentences that no one would have guessed she hadn’t written them in advance. It was an on-the-spot tour de force, perhaps the best I’ve ever heard.

But what clinched it for me was listening to her speak after a performance of Eve Ensler’s play
Necessary Targets,
based on interviews with women in one of the camps set up to treat women who had endured unspeakable suffering, humiliation, and torture in the ethnic wars within the former Yugoslavia. To speak to an audience that had just heard these heartbreaking horrors seemed impossible for anyone, and Hillary had the added burden of representing the Clinton administration, which had been criticized for slowness in stopping this genocide.

Nonetheless, she rose in the silence, with no possibility of preparing, and began to speak quietly—about suffering, about the importance of serving as witnesses to suffering. Most crucial of all, she admitted this country’s slowness in intervening. By the time she sat down, she had brought the audience together and given us all a shared meeting place: the simple truth.

So when she left the White House and decided to run for the U.S. Senate from her new home in New York State—something no First Lady, not even Eleanor Roosevelt, had dared to do—I was blindsided by the hostility toward her from some women. They called her cold, calculating, ambitious, and even “unfeminist” for using political experience gained as a wife. These were not the right-wing extremists who had accused the Clintons of everything from perpetrating real estate scams in Arkansas to murdering a White House aide with whom Hillary supposedly had an affair. On the contrary, they mostly agreed with her on the issues, yet some were so opposed to her that they came to be called Hillary Haters. It took me weeks of listening on the road to begin to understand why.

In living rooms from Dallas to Chicago, I noticed that the Hillary Haters often turned out to be the women most like her: white, well educated, and married to or linked with powerful men. They were by no means all such women, but their numbers were still surprising. Also they hadn’t objected to sons, brothers, and sons-in-law using family connections and political names to further careers—say, the Bushes or the Rockefellers or the Kennedys—yet they objected to Hillary doing the same. The more they talked, the more it was clear that their own husbands hadn’t shared power with them. If Hillary had a husband who regarded her as an equal—who had always said this country got “two presidents for the price of one”—it only dramatized their own lack of power and respect. After one long night and a lot of wine, one woman told me that Hillary’s marriage made her aware of just how unequal hers was.

In San Francisco and Seattle, I listened to self-identified Hillary Haters condemn her for staying with her husband, despite his well-publicized affairs. It turned out that many of them had suffered a faithless husband, too, but lacked the ability or the will to leave. They wanted Hillary to punish a powerful man in public on their behalf. I reminded them that presidents from Roosevelt to Kennedy had affairs, but the haters identified with those First Ladies and assumed they couldn’t leave. It was Hillary’s very strength and independence that made them blame her. When I tried describing the public condemnation Hillary would have suffered had she abandoned her duties in the White House for such a personal reason, this changed the minds of some—but not many.

Finally, I resorted to explaining my own reasons for thinking the Clintons just might be, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “the marriage of true minds.” I had seen them together for a long afternoon during a White House ceremony for recipients of the Medal of Freedom. One medalist was my friend Wilma Mankiller, chief of the Cherokee Nation. She and I were both struck by the obvious connection between the Clintons as they walked from one group of awardees and their families to the next, talking to guests and each other. In a roomful of interesting people, they seemed just as interested in listening and talking to each other. What they were sharing, I don’t know, but what was clear was their intimacy and pleasure in each other’s company. Of how many long-married couples could that be said?

Yet when I brought this up, some Hillary Haters became even angrier. Many were longtime wives and others were new wives replacing older ones, but the fact that Bill valued Hillary as an equal partner—and vice versa—seemed to make them more aware that their own marriages were different. It dawned on me that if a sexual connection is the only bond between a husband and wife, an affair can make her feel replaceable—and perhaps cause her to be replaced. This was not only emotionally painful but devastating when it also meant losing social identity and economic security as well. I began to understand that Hillary represented the very public, in-your-face opposite of the precarious and unequal lives that some women were living. In a classic sense, they were trying to kill the messenger.

Their projections made me realize that I was projecting, too. I couldn’t understand why Hillary wanted to go back to Washington, and so campaigned for the Senate in the first place. After eight years in the White House with political piranhas circling, and every move accompanied by hostile lawsuits and media attacks—from ultra-right-wing groups spending unlimited money on anti-Clinton conspiracy theories—why ask for six more years in the Senate with a target painted on her back? It seemed quixotic and self-punishing, especially now that she had such great alternatives as creating her own foundation, and supporting female empowerment globally.

Finally, I had to admit that the latter would have been my choice, not hers. If she was willing to face a degree of combat that I couldn’t even imagine, I should celebrate.

As my own part of her Senate campaign, I began to invite Hillary Haters to the living room events where Hillary herself was fund-raising. To my surprise, all but a few turned around once they had spent time in her presence. This woman they had imagined as smart, cold, and calculating turned out to be smart, warm, and responsive. Instead of someone who excused a husband’s behavior, she was potentially, as one said, “a great girlfriend” who had their backs.

They also saw her expertise. For instance, George Soros, the Hungarian-born financier and philanthropist, introduced her in his Manhattan living room by saying, “Hillary knows more about Eastern Europe than any other American.”

After she was elected to the U.S. Senate on her own merits, she worked constructively, even with old enemies there, and was solidly reelected to a second term. I began to hear the first serious talk of Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate. By the time the election of 2008 was in the wind, she had a higher popularity rating than any other potential candidate, Republican or Democrat.

Meanwhile, I knew from campaigning in Illinois with Voters for Choice that a young two-term state legislator named Barack Obama had helped defeat a bill designed to weaken
Roe v. Wade
there. But when I went to the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston, I was as surprised as the rest of the country to watch his inspirational blockbuster of a speech. His rise was much more like a movement event than politics as usual.

After his election to the U.S. Senate, Obama appeared at a living room fund-raiser in Manhattan to celebrate, and to help pay off his campaign debt. I watched as supporters urged him to disobey traditional rules for a freshman senator and refuse to follow the quiet example of the newly elected. He was reluctant, citing his need to learn and the power of the Bush presidency. I urged him, too. After all, everybody knew that George W. Bush would never have become president without his family, and everybody also knew that Obama had become senator against all odds.

By the following year, progressive forces looking for a new candidate—not just in the Senate but for the presidency—were approaching him with offers to, as Obama said, “drink the Kool-Aid.” Though he resisted at first, the draft effort gradually became a movement with a life of its own. Though such African American leaders as Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and Reverend Jesse Jackson had run, Obama became the first with a serious chance of being a major-party candidate. Together, he and Hillary could turn this election into the first in history with candidates who looked like the country. It wasn’t campaign season yet, but wherever I went, from campuses to living rooms, questions about the possibility of a new kind of president were being raised.

Though Obama was younger, with less national, international, and Senate experience than Hillary, I still thought it was too soon for the country to accept a woman commander in chief. Moreover, Obama’s Kennedyesque appeal created a rare and precious chance to break the racial barrier. But to me, their shared content was way more important than different forms. She was a civil rights advocate. He was a feminist. They were a modern-day echo of the abolitionist and suffragist era, when black men, black women, and white women—the groups white male supremacists had worked so hard and cruelly to keep apart—turned this country on its head by working together for universal adult suffrage.

Whenever I was on the road before the primaries, I saw a revival of this unconscious coalition in audiences that were interested in politics as never before. There was enthusiasm for these two new faces that stood for a shared worldview. In audiences from very blue states to very red ones, support was more like a Rorschach test than a division by race and sex. For instance, 94 percent of black Democrats had a favorable view of Hillary Clinton, compared to an 88 percent favorable view of Obama. After all, he was new on the national stage and the Clintons had earned a reputation for racial inclusiveness that caused African American novelist Toni Morrison to famously call Bill Clinton “the first black president.” Both white and black women were more likely than their male counterparts to support Hillary Clinton—and in my observation, also more likely to believe that she couldn’t win. Male and female black voters were more likely than white voters to support Obama and also to believe he couldn’t win. Each group was made pessimistic by the depth of the bias they had experienced.

Some mostly white audiences seemed to hope this country could expiate past sins by electing Obama. As one white music teacher rose in an audience to say, “Racism puts me in prison, too—a prison of guilt.” Many parents of little girls, black and white, were taking them to Clinton rallies so they would know that they, too, could be president. Older women especially saw Hillary Clinton as their last and best chance to see a woman in the White House. And not just any woman:
7
as one said, “This isn’t just about biology. We don’t want a Margaret Thatcher, who cut off milk for schoolchildren.” They wanted Hillary Clinton because she supported the majority interests of women. On the other hand, many young black single mothers said they supported Obama because their sons needed a positive black male role model. A divorced white father told me that Obama’s life story had inspired him to drive hundreds of miles to see his son every week. “I don’t want to be the father Obama almost never saw,” he explained. “I want to be the father he wished he had.” In Austin, Texas, an eighty-year-old black woman said she was supporting Hillary because “I’ve seen too many women who earned it, and too many young men who came along and took it.”

But the press, instead of reporting on these shared and often boundary-crossing views as an asset for the Democratic Party—after all, Democratic voters would have to unify around one of these candidates eventually—responded with disappointment and even condescension. They seemed to want newsworthy division. Soon frustrated reporters were creating conflict by turning any millimeter of difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama into a mile. Since there was almost none in content, they emphasized ones of form. Clinton was entirely summed up by sex, and Obama was entirely summed up by race. Journalists sounded like sports fans who arrived for a football game and were outraged to find all the players on the same team.

It dawned on me that in the abolitionist and suffragist past, a universal suffragist movement of black men and white and black women also had been consciously divided by giving the vote to black men only—and then limiting even that with violence, impossible literacy tests, and poll taxes. Now, this echo of divide-and-conquer in the past was polarizing the constituencies of two barrier-breaking “firsts,” never mind that the candidates were almost identical in content. As in history, a potentially powerful majority was being divided by an entrenched powerful few.

Maybe attributing a divide-and-conquer motive was unfair in a country that treats everything like a horse race, but there had to be some reason why the press did not consider what I witnessed on the road—delight in two “firsts” with similar purpose—worth reporting.

Soon, a person or a group’s choice of one candidate was assumed to be a condemnation of the other. I could feel fissures opening up between people who had been allies on issues for years. The long knives of reporters—plus a few shortsighted partisans in both campaigns—deepened those fissures until they bled.

To make a case for linking racism and sexism instead of ranking them—and for unifying around one of these two firsts in the national election—I wrote a
New York Times
op-ed titled “Coalition vs. Competition.”
8
I called either/or media questions “dumb and destructive,” since the two candidates were so much the same on issues. Also, it was way too soon to know who could survive the primaries, so I ended this way: “We could double our chances by working for one of these candidates, not against the other. For now, I’ve figured out how to answer reporters when they ask if I’m supporting Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. I just say yes.”