GENDER MATTERS

The following article appeared in last Sunday's New York Times.

August 31, 2008
Unity Deferred
Can You Cross Out ‘Hillary’ and Write ‘Sarah’?

By KATE ZERNIKE

It was an awfully complicated week to be a Hillary supporter.
Her voters headed into the Democratic National Convention in Denver with anger, with threats to reprise 1968. Then came the swelling of pride, as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton gave what many considered the speech of her life. But, oh, the regret: if only she had campaigned with that kind of oratory!
By the time Mrs. Clinton graciously called for the convention to nominate Senator Barack Obama by acclamation, some of her supporters were working their way toward acceptance, wiping tears but nodding as she declared that the party had to unite behind him. Yet how could they not feel at least envy, watching the Obamas and the Bidens stroll out in triumph, and thinking that their candidate could have been in either role, at the top or bottom of that ticket. Not even vetted for V.P.!!
Then, of course, came Friday: “It turns out the women of America aren’t finished yet!” That was Sarah Palin, the Republican governor of Alaska, as Senator John McCain introduced her to the country as his vice-presidential nominee. “We can shatter that glass ceiling!” she proclaimed.
What’s a woman to do? Or at least, the woman who so badly wanted to see a woman in the White House?
Democrats, who make up the party that has long claimed the bigger pool of up-and-coming women, were quick to dismiss Ms. Palin as not experienced enough to be a heartbeat from the presidency. Mrs. Clinton’s supporters will never back her, they insisted, because she is against abortion rights.
Not. So. Fast.
That underestimated, or at least underappreciated, the raw feelings of many Clinton supporters, and particularly the women among them, despite the almost flawless display of harmony in Denver.
At the very least, Ms. Palin’s selection unleashes gender as a live issue again, just when Democrats thought they had it under control. (This might not be a bad time for Mr. Obama to reconsider that question of retiring Mrs. Clinton’s campaign debt.)
“This puts the issue back on center stage,” said Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “There are going to be some really fascinating conversations that are going to come up around gender, in some ways that nobody expected.”
Lynn Hackney and Kim Hoover might perfectly illustrate the emotions of those whom Ms. Palin counts as “not finished yet.” They had gathered 20 equally passionate Hillary supporters at their home in Washington on Tuesday to watch Mrs. Clinton’s speech. “The Kleenex was flowing,” said Ms. Hackney, who declared the speech “brilliant.”
Thursday, when 38 million Americans watched Mr. Obama’s speech, they watched a movie, “The Squid and the Whale.”
No matter what Mrs. Clinton urged, they cannot support Mr. Obama.
“To go against Hillary is not easy for us,” Ms. Hackney said. “We don’t take that lightly. We just don’t think he has a message. We don’t think he’s good for women.”
“It’s not about being bitter for Hillary,” she said. Still, “I think the Democratic Party took women for granted in the primary, they didn’t step on sexism when they should have, and I can’t support them.”
Her phone, she said, began “burning up” when Mr. McCain announced Ms. Palin as his choice. “The fact that he went out on a limb to pick a woman, I’m very impressed by that.” She says she is not sure she can vote for a Republican, and will most likely stick to her plan to write in Mrs. Clinton. But, she said, “It’s opened my eyes to at least pay attention.”
Yes, they said, they were troubled by Ms. Palin’s opposition to abortion rights. But Ms. Hoover said she felt betrayed by pro-choice groups, and in particular politicians like Senators Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who were helped into office by pro-choice groups like Emily’s List but came out early to support Mr. Obama over Mrs. Clinton, despite her being the first viable pro-choice woman to run for president.
Ms. Hoover has stopped giving to Emily’s List as a result. “It doesn’t make sense to me that, frankly, Emily’s List didn’t hold them accountable for having been elected on that platform but then not supporting that platform,” she said. “The setback for the pro-choice movement is almost deserved.”
Karen O’Connor, the director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University, said the convention’s constant repetition about the “18 million cracks in the glass ceiling” had left many people depressed. “If 18 million votes is not enough, what does it take in the Democratic Party to get a woman on the ticket?”
Healing may have come easier to those Clinton supporters who went to the convention, with all its women’s caucus meetings, the Emily’s List luncheon, and Mrs. Clinton’s meeting with her delegates, where she released them to vote as they pleased. It was hard to stand in a stadium of 80,000 listening to Mr. Obama and not be moved.
Lanny Davis, who was special counsel to President Bill Clinton and who came to exemplify the die-hard Hillary Clinton supporter so much that he was barely speaking to a son who supports Mr. Obama, said he was riding such a roller coaster of emotion that he finally Googled Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief.
“Denial, yes,” he said. “Anger, definitely. Bargaining, well, O.K. And depression, that’s definitely what I was going through.” He struggled to get to five: acceptance. “Even after we had our little Kumbaya meeting with Senator Obama I wasn’t doing well,” he said. But after the speeches, and Mr. Obama’s graceful acknowledgment of Mrs. Clinton in his speech accepting the nomination on Thursday night, Mr. Davis said, “O.K., I’m there.”
For supporters who saw the speeches only from home, said Ms. Walsh, it may have been harder, particularly with Mrs. Clinton coming off so forcefully.
“I think that makes it doubly hard for some of these women, because she really did look presidential.”
Mr. McCain’s choice, she said, “is a move for the women who weren’t at the convention.”
And even there, some women were not appeased. Ms. Walsh sat two seats away from an African-American woman who was crying during Mrs. Clinton’s speech. When the convention staff handed out “Unity” placards, the woman refused it.
The Palin nomination complicates the gender question in many ways.
Susie Tompkins-Buell, the Democratic fundraiser who declared herself the “poster child” for the “Hillary holdouts,” announced on Thursday that after her convention conversion she would transform Women Count, the organization she founded to support Mrs. Clinton in the final days of the primaries, into an organization to help protect women like Michelle Obama against misogyny.
But what will happen if the misogyny extends to Ms. Palin? There were hints of that on Friday, with Web sites showing photographs of her bare-shouldered in the days when she was runner-up for Miss Alaska, or as one caption read, “showing off her legs.” “Sarah Palin — Alaska Gov., McCain’s V.P. Pick, Kind of a Babe,” read one Internet headline.
The nomination promises to test the argument made during the primary that it wasn’t about sexism, it was about Hillary.
And, as Ruth B. Mandel, one of the founders of the Rutgers center, said, “this raises the question of when, where and how often women vote out of anger because there’s sexism.”
Republicans were stoking the gender wars before the Palin announcement.
Alex Castellanos, a Republican media strategist, revived the “Fatal Attraction” analogy in a television discussion about whether Mrs. Clinton would be able to gracefully cede the convention to her former rival.
Mr. McCain’s campaign ran an ad called “Passed Over,” highlighting the fact that she had not been seriously examined for the vice-presidential slot.
At the same time, the move is such a bald bid for the women’s vote that it might backfire. It seems likely that most Clinton supporters backed their candidate for her experience, not her gender. They may resent being reduced to the sum of their hormones.
When a Republican woman has run in the past, Ms. Mandel said, “we did not see a big benefit for her from the gender gap.” And Geraldine Ferraro did not prevent a landslide for Ronald Reagan, when she was on the ticket with Walter Mondale in 1984. But, as Ms. Mandel said, “It’s a different moment.”
The general election comes off a primary season of division, if not anger. And the country has been closely split in the last several elections.
Few people claim to understand the dynamics of the Clinton vote. In the most recent New York Times/CBS News poll, conducted Aug. 15-20, 22 percent of voters who said they had voted for Mrs. Clinton in the primaries say they now support Mr. McCain, while 61 percent back Mr. Obama. Among the women who voted for Mrs. Clinton, 17 percent say they support Mr. McCain, and 63 percent Mr. Obama. (The rest were undecided.)
“This says again, you can’t take these women for granted,” Ms. Walsh said. “There’s going to be a need to really reach out to them, to highlight the difference between John McCain and Barack Obama on the issues women care about.”
For all the emotion of the week, she said, the lesson is clear: “We matter.”