My Life on the Road (20 page)

As the New York primary approached, I certainly wasn’t against either candidate, but I still had to decide who to vote for. So I sat down with a yellow pad and made a list of pros and cons for each. On the issues, there were differences of emphasis, but both wanted a country in which individual futures were not limited by sex or race, class or sexuality. Both advocated a foreign policy that was less about oil and support for dictators and more about support for democracies and the environment. Hillary had voted in the Senate for the first U.S. military action in Iraq—and some Obama supporters were making much of that—but Obama himself was honest enough to say that had he been in the Senate at that time and given the same false information about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction,” he didn’t know how he would have voted. The only obvious difference was experience. As a partner, Hillary Clinton had spent twelve years in state government, eight in the White House, plus eight more on her own in the U.S. Senate—all of them fighting the right-wing extremists who controlled what once was the Republican Party; the next president would face the same opposition. Obama had crucial multicultural experience growing up, time spent as an organizer in Chicago that meant a lot to me, seven years in a state legislature, three years in the U.S. Senate, but much less experience fighting and being attacked by the political ultra-right wing. Both the good and the bad news was that he was a peacemaker and skilled in the art of finding a middle path. This primary race was a rare case in which the female candidate was more experienced in big-time political conflict than the male candidate. She was more familiar with extremists for whom there was no middle ground.

I knew that outside the women’s movement, I would be better liked if I chose Obama. Women are always better liked if we sacrifice ourselves for something bigger—and
something bigger
always means including men, even though
something bigger
for men doesn’t usually mean including women. In choosing Hillary, I would be seen as selfish for supporting a woman “like” me. But that was a warning, too. Needing approval is a female cultural disease, and often a sign of doing the wrong thing.

There was one more note on my yellow pad. Because I still believed it was too soon for Hillary or any woman to be accepted as commander in chief, I wrote:
If I were Obama, I would not feel personally betrayed by lack of support from someone like me, a new ally. If I were Hillary Clinton, I might feel betrayed by a longtime supporter who left me for a new face.
In other words: Obama didn’t need me to win. Hillary Clinton might need me to lose.

O
NCE AGAIN THE ROAD
educated me—by showing me what voters were subjected to. I began to think that the wait for a female president might be even longer than I imagined. At airport gift shops, a nutcracker made to look like Hillary Clinton was sold as an election novelty. Her legs were handles, and her crotch was the place for cracking nuts. When I asked a sales clerk in the Washington, D.C., airport if there were complaints, she said yes, there had been a few, but it was selling well. When I asked her if there were similar nutcrackers of the male candidates, she said, “Certainly not!”

On campuses, I saw young men wearing T-shirts that said
TOO BAD O
.
J
.
DIDN’T MARRY HILLARY
. All the wearers I saw were white. When I asked students what they thought about this slogan, they agreed it was uncool. They assured me most guys just put on their T-shirts and Facebook pages
BROS BEFORE HOS
.

I watched as MSNBC political analyst Tucker Carlson said of Hillary Clinton, “I have often said when she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.” I thought:
No wonder that nutcracker is selling well.
Also on MSNBC, Chris Matthews announced, “Let’s not forget—and I’ll be brutal—the reason she’s a U.S. senator, the reason she’s a candidate for president, the reason she may be a frontrunner, is her husband messed around. That’s how she got to be senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn’t win there on her merit.”
9

A woman reporter for
The Washington Post
wrote about a Hillary suit jacket that disclosed a bit of cleavage and called it “a provocation.” No such charge had been leveled at male presidential candidates, from John F. Kennedy to Obama, when they were photographed on the beach in bathing suits. About Hillary, Rush Limbaugh asked: “Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older on a daily basis?” According to another Fox News analyst, “If that’s the face of experience, I think it’s going to scare away a lot of those independent voters.” At CNN, women correspondents told me they had been cautioned not to wear pantsuits on camera—they might look too much like Hillary.

All this reductionist commentary might have been fair game, had it been directed at all the primary candidates: say, Senator Joe Biden’s obvious hair transplants; or Senator John Edwards’s resemblance to a Ken doll; or Governor Mitt Romney’s capped teeth and dyed hair; or Senator John McCain’s special shoes to make him taller; or Governor Bill Richardson’s resemblance to an unmade bed; or Senator Obama’s ears, about which he himself made jokes. But it wasn’t.

No wonder such misogyny was almost never named by the media. It
was
the media.

In making my list about the pluses and minuses of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, I discovered I was angry. I was angry because it was okay for two generations of Bush sons to inherit power from a political patriarchy even if they spent no time in the White House, but not okay for one Clinton wife to claim experience and inherit power from a husband whose full political partner she had been for twenty years. I was angry because young men in politics were treated like rising stars, but young women were treated like—well, young women. I was angry about all the women candidates who put their political skills on hold to raise children—and all the male candidates who didn’t. I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one. And I was angry because the media took racism seriously—or pretended to—but with sexism, they rarely bothered even to pretend. Resentment of women still seemed safe, whether it took the form of demonizing black single mothers or making routine jokes about powerful women being ball-busters.

In other cases of unadmitted bias, I had used the time-honored movement tactic of reversing the race or sex or ethnicity or sexuality involved, then seeing if the response would be the same. Fueled by months of repressed anger, I asked:
What might have happened if even an empathetic man like Obama had been exactly the same person—but born female?

I called the result “A Short History of Change.”
The New York Times
op-ed page changed it to “Women Are Never Front-Runners.” Published on the morning of the New Hampshire primary, it asked why the sex barrier was not taken as seriously as the racial one.

The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.

I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together….

It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.

I added that I was supporting Hillary Clinton based only on her greater experience. About Obama, I wrote, “If he’s the nominee, I’ll volunteer….To clean up the mess left by President Bush, we may need two terms of President Clinton and two of President Obama.”

The first response was overwhelmingly positive. Because Hillary Clinton unexpectedly won that New Hampshire primary, my column was even given some of the credit.
The New York Times
published a letter from a voter there to that effect. It was as if I’d written what many people were thinking. Most just seemed glad that I’d spoken up about the humiliation of a good woman.

But then a few calls came in from interviewers assuming that by supporting Hillary I was ranking sex over race—despite my lifetime of arguing that sexism and racism were linked, not ranked, and despite writing in that same op-ed that the caste systems of sex and race could only be uprooted together, I was seen as asking people to take sexism more seriously than racism.

When I went on a television show, an Obama supporter, a black woman academic, accused me by saying that “white women have been complicit in the oppression of black men and black women.” She talked many times more than I did, mentioned lynching, and said, “To take this kind of position in
The New York Times
struck me as the very worst of what feminism can offer.” I was left saying things like “I refuse to be divided on this” and pointing out that whether Hillary or Obama won the primary, she and I would be united in the general election. Afterward I felt as if I had been hit by a Mack truck.

From then on, every morning brought new attacks. I came to dread the particular ring of my cell phone. Though I had been called many things, from a baby killer to a destroyer of the family, those had come from people with whom I really disagreed. These attacks came from people whose opinion I valued and who were accusing me of holding a position I didn’t hold.

Online, I discovered part of the reason. The
Times
had used an ambiguous pull-quote to characterize the whole op-ed: “Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House.” I meant that in terms of pervasiveness, kitchen to White House, not that it was more—or less—important. However, I realized with a sinking heart that I should have known, in this context, that
most
is a four-letter word. Only conflict is news, and in agreeing to edits on the phone I had failed to make every sentence bulletproof. Definitely my fault. That quote was going around the world on the Web, and was seen by many more people than read the op-ed. I withdrew the whole thing from syndication by
The New York Times,
but it didn’t matter. The attacks grew increasingly virulent.

A
NYBODY CAN BE WITH YOU
when you’re right, but only friends are with you when you mess up. Many called to comfort me. At least one prominent African American woman leader said she had been asked by the Obama campaign to launch a major attack against me, and had refused. She told them I had earned the right to say what I thought.

If hard things ultimately have a purpose, then they aren’t so hard anymore. Therefore, I listed what I had learned:

I also thought suddenly of the wisdom of my speaking partner, the late generous, outrageous, matchless Flo Kennedy. She found value in conflict, no matter what. “The purpose of ass-kicking is not that your ass gets kicked at the right time or for the right reason,” she often explained. “It’s to keep your ass
sensitive.
”

Remembering her words made me laugh out loud.

O
NCE
O
BAMA WON,
a few wise people in his and Hillary’s campaigns—who had been in touch all along—knew there had to be a healing.

With my friend and colleague Judy Gold, who was in charge of women’s issues for Obama’s campaign, I planned what we knew would be the first of many healing meetings. There were heartbroken older women who now knew they would never live to see a woman in the White House. There were younger ones who had grown up being told they could be anything, then been shocked by Hillary’s treatment and defeat. African American women and men who had supported Hillary also worried that some would punish them for working across racial lines. Oprah Winfrey and other women in public life who had supported Obama paid a price, too. Some criticized them for not supporting Hillary Clinton, since women were their main supporters and constituency. This was also true for Karen Mulhauser, a white woman and an important and longtime feminist leader, who supported Obama. I had written and spoken in support of their right to choose Obama, and now they, too, helped to heal the wounds of Hillary Clinton’s defeat.

As my last campaign effort, I made hundreds of buttons that said:

HILLARY SUPPORTS OBAMA

SO DO I

Then I got on the plane to Washington, went to join the crowd at her historic and generous concession speech—in which she pledged her wholehearted support to Obama—and distributed the buttons to the audience. They were in great demand.

All my years of campaigning have given me one clear message: Voting isn’t the most we can do, but it is the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one. Still, I realize this fully only by looking back.

At the beginning of the 1980s, I went to Missouri to campaign for Harriett Woods in her U.S. Senate race. She was a great candidate, and I empathized with the difficult time she’d had as a woman journalist. Her path into politics was so improbable that no one could have made it up. As a mother of two young children, she complained about a noisy manhole cover that awakened them every time a car rolled over it in her otherwise quiet street. When she got nowhere with the city council, she circulated a neighborhood petition to close the street to cars. It worked. This success led her to run for the city council. She won, served eight years, got appointed to the state highway commission, ran a successful race for the state legislature, and was reelected there, too. She also became the producer of a much-loved local television show. All this made her a viable statewide candidate.

Still, this was not enough for the state Democratic Party. When it came time to choose a primary candidate in a U.S. Senate race, it backed a well-to-do banker who had never run for anything, just written checks. To be fair, Woods might have seemed like a lost cause in Missouri, where no woman had ever won a statewide office. She also wasn’t rich like the banker. But she turned out to have something more important than her party’s blessing: community support and volunteers. She beat the rich guy two to one.

Suddenly, Harriett Woods was in a race with Republican Senator John Danforth. He was not only the incumbent but a former attorney general of Missouri, an ordained Episcopal priest, and the rich grandson of the founder of Ralston Purina. It was as if she were running against the entire patriarchy.

When I went to campaign for her, I could see that all the new feminist electoral groups were working their hearts out. So were the volunteers in her statewide network. Though Missouri was often counted as an antichoice state, Woods refused to budge from her support for reproductive freedom.

In the end, she won in rural Republican areas anyway, including one so conservative that it was known as Little Dixie. But in the final week, she had run out of money and couldn’t answer the last-minute storm of virulent attacks. She lost by less than 2 percent of the vote. This heartbreaking hairbreadth defeat drew special attention, as did the fact that she had been the only female U.S. Senate candidate in the whole country, from either party. It was so clear that she could have won with money to answer attacks that her race inspired the founding of EMILY’s List, a political action committee that supports pro-choice Democratic women candidates. As proof that even failure can be turned to good purpose, this PAC went on to attract three million members and become one of the biggest in the nation, as well as the single biggest resource for women in politics.

But Danforth did win. He took with him to Washington an African American lawyer named Clarence Thomas, who had been working for Monsanto, the agrochemical giant that gave us Agent Orange, genetically engineered seeds, and more. Indeed, Danforth got him that job, too. As Danforth explained, he was very attracted to Thomas, not only because he was a rare African American conservative, but also because he, too, had studied to be a priest—in his case, a Catholic priest.

All this happened decades ago. Woods died in 2007 from leukemia at the age of seventy-nine, yet the impact of her loss by a few hundred votes goes on.

If you don’t believe me, flash-forward to the morning after the 2000 Bush-versus-Gore presidential election, with national results hanging by the thread of a few thousand disputed votes in Florida.

I just happened to be speaking at Palm Beach County Community College that morning, a long-arranged event unrelated to any election, and its campus just happened to be in a poor area. I’d been asked to talk about social justice movements generally, but I could see that nobody wanted to talk about anything but the election cliffhanger that was upon us.

A young African American woman rose to say she’d registered to vote by phone, then been challenged at her polling place because “Caucasian” had been printed next to her name. She never did get to vote. An older African American man said he had been denied the right to vote because he was told he had a felony conviction, yet he’d never been accused of a crime, much less convicted of one. Someone shouted out, “Yes, you have—it’s called Voting While Black!” Amid the laughter, another man stood to explain that names of people with felonies had been merged with the voter rolls without checking whether more than one person shared the same name. Then an older white woman said the bus from her retirement home had been sent to the wrong polling place. Others testified that polling places were fewer and lines were longer in poor and more Democratic areas. People had given up because they were hourly workers who lost pay if they weren’t at their jobs. Then a white man of fifty or so said he’d seen the illustration of the ballot only on the way out—and realized he had accidentally voted for an extreme right-wing candidate when he thought he was voting for Al Gore. That caused a dozen more people to groan or shout out that this had also happened to them.

One by one, people in this random audience told their confusing and disenfranchising experiences. Out of the approximately seven hundred people in the auditorium, at least a hundred had been unable either to vote for their chosen candidate or to vote at all. I wondered:
If there are this many in one auditorium, how many in all of Palm Beach County? Or in the state?

Finally, a white man of thirty or so rose to face me. In the name of his military service to his country, he said, and also of his young daughter, whom he wanted to grow up in a democracy, he asked: “Will you stay and help us organize a protest tomorrow—and the next day and the next—whatever it takes?”

I could feel a deep pull to say yes. Yet I thought my presence might be used to call this a rebellion instigated by an outsider. Instead, I promised to take the name, address, and polling place of everyone who hadn’t been able to vote at all, or to vote for their chosen candidate, and give them to lawyers for Gore as well as nonpartisan watchdogs outside the state.

I went home, called election lawyers, and delivered the lists as promised. When Bush’s lead was down to a mere 537 votes out of about six million cast, the reexamination of ballots was stopped. Florida’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, also the co-chair of Bush’s Florida campaign, declared Bush the winner.

Calls for a recount were deafening, and supported by the Florida Supreme Court. However, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that there was no uniform recount standard to meet the equal protection clause, and no time to create one. Therefore, the recount was stopped. It was a decision that would be compared with
Dred Scott
—the nineteenth-century Supreme Court ruling that no black person, slave or free, could ever become a citizen of the United States—for its impact and clear bias.

Remember: “For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, for want of a horseshoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the battle was lost, for want of a battle, the war was lost.” This parable should be the mantra of everyone who thinks her or his vote doesn’t count.

Well, you get the idea.
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The list goes on.

We must not only vote but fight to vote. The voting booth really is the one place on earth where the least powerful equal the most powerful.

I still dream about that veteran and his daughter. I so wish I had said yes. I have no idea whether we in the room could have made a difference. In truth, we don’t know which of our acts in the present will shape the future. But we have to behave as if everything we do matters. Because it might.

As my mother would say, “Democracy is a seed that can only be planted where you are.”