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Posted on 05/27/2002 9:06:45 PM PDT by doug from upland
(This is a long read with several links and references. This paragraph is quite far into the article).
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The investigation of Hillary begins with the questions about her image, character and behavior which puzzle us. We immediately recognize her energy, intelligence, organizational and leadership abilities, political and professional ambition, charisma, social and religious motivations and family commitment. This needs to be balanced with her chronic anger and impatience, temper outbursts, her anxiety as a "worrier," a victim of a philandering husband, her role the family breadwinner who cut some ethical corners and as the icy "Sister Frigidaire," a label from her high school newspaper. These are the complexities and polarities that we explore with Hillary's psychohistory.
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Hellery thinks she is punishing me this way...
Not anymore, Doug, Hillary had the editor whacked.
There's a .gif picture there as well. I did a "view source" and grabbed all the HTML code, but the .gif didn't show up here.From http://www.maine207south.k12.il.us/departments/235/rodham.gif:
ROFLMAO! Oh that is a perfect description. Hitlary does not look feminine. Barney Frank is better at being a girl than Hitlary!From http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,6000,349652,00.html:
It's a girl thing
If you designed a senate candidate on paper to appeal to the ambitious, powerful and driven women voters of New York, Hillary Clinton would be that person. So why is she so unpopular with her natural constituents, and why does she make their skin crawl? Katie Roiphe reports
Tuesday August 1, 2000
The Guardian
It is not surprising that rednecks with rusting Chevys on their lawns and conservative Wall Streeters who guzzle beers after work and cops with gun collections are not wild about Hillary Clinton. But it is surprising that women - her most natural constituents, the dream demographic of her pollsters - are not wild about her either.It makes sense that a certain type of man is, as feminist cant would have it, threatened by Hillary Clinton, that a certain type of man doesn't like her dogged refusal to be feminine, or rather her extravagantly faked efforts to be feminine (note the soft pink sweater and pearls she wore in her video announcing that she was running for senate; the embarrassing effort to discuss cookie recipes). But why do the women of New York state feel threatened, or if not threatened then extremely put off? The lukewarm support Clinton has received from her most likely supporters is a problem the press has been puzzling over since the beginning of the campaign, with the New York Times periodically running articles such as "Clinton campaign confronts erosion of women's support".
If you designed a candidate on paper to appeal to the women of New York it would be a tough, high profile, liberal woman who could represent the state in Washington and have enough clout to be heard. A female senatorial candidate who could plausibly run for president, with intellectual heft, the sheen of celebrity, with (after all this time and work and hair dye) the ability to appeal to mainstream voters - in other words, Hillary Clinton. And yet there is a hesitation, a cloud that passes over the faces of women across the state when her name comes up. They may vote for her in November in a lesser- of-two-evils sort of way, but they won't really, ardently like her. A poll early this week put Clinton seven percentage points behind her Republican rival, Rick Lazio.
In fact, it is women who are most icy and vitriolic in their attacks. Consider this headline for a New York Post column written by a woman: "Just what is it about a phony like Hillary that makes my skin crawl?" Another woman writes, also in the New York Post: "The time is at hand to set aside our petty hatreds and vis ceral fears, and to make an objective, dispassionate examination of the Yankee loving, Suha Arafat kissing, Al Sharpton pandering woman from Chappaqua."
But where does all this antipathy come from? It is a difficult question because most women have trouble pinning down exactly what it is they don't like about Clinton. One thing women often say is that they don't trust her. Which is particularly strange since her cheating, womanising husband's approval ratings remain fairly high. It seems that she is the recipient of any lingering discomfort we may feel with the arrangement that the Clintons call marriage. Strangely enough, it is she who emerged from the embarrassments of the past year seeming slippery. And it has nothing to do with lying, it has to do with reserve, with standing aloof.
The dignity with which Clinton conducted herself during her husband's impeachment seemed at first to be an asset. She was on the cover of Vogue. Her popularity soared. The mere fact of her humiliation, of the circumstances constructed around her by her husband, had elevated a vaguely unpopular first lady to an ideal without her having to say or do anything. But then she took the dignity thing too far. She wouldn't show bruises. She wouldn't express emotion. And when she did it sounded eerily scripted.
The rumours swirled through Washington and New York that she had faked being mad at the president, that she wouldn't hold his hand on the way to Martha's Vineyard as part of a deliberate effort to appear angry - to prove that her marriage had some flesh and blood in it. This was probably just a rumour but it fed into and reflected an image of the Clinton marriage as a sham, a cool arrangement of convenience, that many people already believed. Her decision to stand by her man started to seem to many like a shrewd bargain in which she would get the senate seat.
And then two weeks ago a widely circulated anecdote from the sensationalist book State of the Union fed into a similar suspicion. It described a letter she allegedly wrote to Clinton before they were married: "I know all of your little girls are around there. If that is what this is, you will outgrow this. Remember what we've talked about. Remember the goals we've set for ourselves. You keep trying to stray from the plan we've put together."
This is the chilling, Lady Macbeth-like Clinton that the country always imagined. Her high-school newspaper had predicted that the 16-year-old Hillary Rodham would become a nun called Sister Frigidaire, and it is the Sister Frigidaire side of her character that reveals itself in this gossip. The "evidence" of her calculating side is probably lies and certainly a caricature, but the fact that it exists at all indicates a fundamental distrust: she is not just pretending to be a New Yorker and a New York Yankee fan, she is pretending to be a woman.
Even if it were all true, this cynical opportunism, this lack of feeling at the centre of her life shouldn't necessarily alienate the sophisticated high-heeled masses of New York city. One might argue that Clinton, carpet- bagger that she is, is only reflecting the values of New York: power, drive and ambition. Perhaps the problem is not that the bitchy, ambitious women of New York do not accept her as their own, but that they do. They accept her so completely that they resent her, they admire her, they secretly want to see her fall.
It may be that Clinton taps into a competitive energy that runs through the state like water pipes. That other women who did well in law school and are partners in law firms more prestigious than hers, but who happened to marry TV executives or aspiring sculptors instead of future presidents of the United States, think to themselves: what has she ever done? And somewhere beneath that commonly articulated thought is the nagging whisper, why not me? (Clinton has, in a sort of indirect way, acknowledged the competition problem she seems to have with women in the state: "I think it's understandable that people say, 'Well, who is she, and why is she doing this, where is she coming from, and what has she ever done on her own?' ")
Political strategists are always looking for groups that can "identify" with a candidate. Clinton has hired the super pollster and former corporate mastermind, Mark Penn, to research her potential constituents so that she can seem more like them. But in New York it may turn out that having voters identify with you is more complicated and perilous than it might be in other places.
The truth is that New York has never been easy on women candidates. You would think with all of the politically minded, moneyed, liberal women in New York that it would be one of the first states to produce a woman governor or senator, a female politician of real charisma and national importance - but we have yet to elect a single one. In fact we have yet to produce a woman candidate that we are strongly behind for any length of time whatsoever.
Even relatively high- profile congresswomen such as Elizabeth Holtzman and Geraldine Ferraro have a hard time when they run for higher office, or even when they just try to hold on to their jobs. We turn against them. We start to dislike them. Part of it may be the mediocrity of our candidates, the fact that we haven't had a female version of the current New York senator, Pat Moynihan. But even if we did, it seems to me, we might turn a particularly ferocious scrutiny on her and pick her apart like sophomores in a high-school lunchroom: Just what is it about that phony Hillary Clinton that makes my skin crawl? Could it be that in New York we love the idea of a strong woman, but we don't actually like strong women?
How do you diffuse that competitive instinct? Most women who have come as far in life as Clinton know how to do it. A self-deprecating joke. A story of incompetence. A hint of emotional neediness. Of course if she were warmer, or simply cleverer, she could have done the equivalent on a larger political scale.
If she gave the American public a hint of the Bridget Jones/Princess Diana sense of weakness and vulnerability (I am also worried about my thighs/husband) then more women might see their way to liking her. But this is precisely what she won't or can't seem to do. She is willing to change almost everything about herself - her hair, her views, her attitude toward baking chocolate-chip cookies, her accent (which suddenly became extremely southern when she famously appeared on Sixty Minutes to explain her husband's first public infidelity) - but she is not willing to change that one crucial thing: she will not show weakness.
In a way this makes her a feminist icon, a chilling feminist heroine: a woman who refuses to be vulnerable, who deftly manipulates power, who does not allow love to get in the way of her career goals. In a way she is so perfect a feminist, liberal candidate that she seems almost to have been programmed like an iMac. But then the question is, why are so many of us so uncomfortable with her? If Clinton is the embodiment of certain feminist ideals, then it may be that many of us, even those of us who have benefited by it, don't actually like feminism in its purest form.
Clinton seems willing to do anything to become senator and instead of admiring her determination we dislike it. The idea that she is cynically using her marriage to propel herself into ever loftier positions is less palatable to most women than the possibility that she was pathetically loyal to a womaniser. There is something soulless about this kind of politics and this kind of politician, something cold and unsubtle. And although it is appreciated, her upstandingness, her correctness, her belief in the right issues, her determination, her willingness to vote in the right ways doesn't inspire passion. The ideal embodied feels glassy, brittle.
When Bill Clinton was first running for president people talked a lot about how great it would be to have a "strong woman" in the White House. People liked Hillary Clinton simply because of her image - brainy, powerful, outspoken. Everywhere, there were badges that read: "Hillary for President". Now those badges seem like antiques. Relics of a more rigid, hopeful era.
•Katie Roiphe is the author of The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism
Do you think she's going to bring out that hideous pink outfit that she wore that one time and do another television show?
And Dad? As far as your sleeping on the couch...I'd say you're safer there. MUCH safer.
Love, Chelsea
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