Tag Archives: US politics

Day 56: Hillary Has Pneumonia

13 Sep 2016 By in Candidates and Campaigns Tags: , , , , , 4 Comments

day-56
On Thursday, I took about 300 aerial photographs and re-watched All the Way, the HBO film about LBJ, on the plane.  I turned up the volume just as LBJ is entering the Capitol to make his first public remarks as president before Congress.  Still absorbing the fact of Kennedy’s assassination and his own sudden elevation to the presidency, Johnson, played by Bryan Cranston, is the cynosure of all eyes, cameras and former colleagues turning toward him in a swirl of suspenseful curiosity.  Meanwhile, the memory of a recurrent nightmare from childhood spools through Johnson’s mind.  In it, he hides in terror under the floorboards of a house during a Comanche raid.  Cowering in the dark, yet certain of his eventual discovery and death at the hands of an unseen enemy, he intones with grim conviction, “It’s only a matter of time before they haul me up into the light where their knives gleam.”

On Sunday, I caught the nightly news, which showed footage of an obviously unwell Hillary Clinton leaving a 9/11 ceremony and collapsing while trying to get into a car.  It came out that she had been being treated for pneumonia and dehydration.  Shortly after her collapse, Clinton re-appeared, waving at the crowd and asserting that she was just fine.  Having known since Friday that she had pneumonia, Clinton later justified glossing over it, saying “I just didn’t think it was going to be that big a deal.”

Part of me wants to believe that the electorate is capable of understanding what’s entailed in recovering from this common but dangerous ailment.  Hillary must rest, independent of a time-table; doing so needn’t have any ill effect on the prospect of her winning.  Let her surrogates fill the gap.  Let Hillary herself stay at home and wage a modern-day front-porch campaign.  Behaving commonsensically could be a path to victory.

But what if Johnson’s murderous vision of American politics is more realistic?  Will Hillary’s untimely illness destroy her chances?  As All The Way ends, Johnson’s dark vision of politics dogs him, even as the 1964 election validates his claim to the presidency.  As the adulation of devoted friends and supporters washes over him at his victory party, still that inner voice murmurs its grim prophesy:

But the sun will come up, and the knives will come out.  And all these smiling faces will be watching me, waiting for that one first moment of weakness.  And then they will gut me like a deer.

Power Lines: Hillary’s Nomination

10 Jun 2016 By in Candidates and Campaigns Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky wedding, NYC
Interesting to find this picture circulating on Twitter soon after Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination.  Of the millions of extant photographs of Hillary—whether taken from throughout her public career or in the company of her husband former president Bill Clinton—, the choice of this particular image to punctuate news of her unprecedented political achievement was almost shocking.

It pictures Hillary with her late mother Dorothy and daughter Chelsea, taken on the day Chelsea married.  Standing to one side of her aged mother, Hillary is the embodiment of conventional femininity and maternal pride.  She is simply a mother and a daughter, occupying a place in the generations celebrating a classic rite of passage.  Sartorially, the lady politician famous for her pantsuits has disappeared: if anything, her fancy dress wears her.

How far we have come, the picture telegraphs, particularly in light of Mrs Rodham’s story.  She managed to surmount a hard loveless childhood to raise and inspire a daughter who has bent tradition to become the symbol of something new in American history.  Mrs Clinton’s own ambitions, coupled with those of her husband, long ago catapulted them to the heights of political celebrity, a journey synonymous with radical social mobility.  The Clintons have grown dramatically more wealthy.  And who knows what the future holds for Chelsea?

Though a quintessential American success story, the Clintons are no longer representative of most Americans.  In that regard, Chelsea’s fancy wedding in Duchess County, New York, encapsulates everything that a segment of the American public dislikes about the Clintons.  The private and public lines of Hillary’s destiny are awkwardly entwined, as controversies over her email server make clear.

If this were a photograph of Kennedy men, taken back on the day of Jack’s wedding, say, how different our reactions would likely be.  Ah, yes, we would say: here is Jack getting married, perpetuating the Kennedy dynasty.  We might not pause to criticize the expense of his suit or the nature of his political ambitions.

Bill’s absence from the picture: yes, he may be absent.  Should Hillary become president, increasingly she will be writing her own story, and, as this photograph’s appearance on the internet suggests, the visual culture of the presidency, and women’s sense of their place in the nation, will also change.  The story line is being written even now, of the power lines that have gotten American women to where they are.

Image:
Photograph by Barbara Kinney

Related
Judith Shulevitz, How to Fix Feminism (NYT)

Why Trump Wins

6 May 2016 By in Candidates and Campaigns Tags: , , , , , ,

A previously unpublished post from 2016

close-up of the Republican candidate talking

“It’s the economy, stupid”—Bill Clinton

The painfully long GOP primary season reached its climax Tuesday, as real-estate mogul Donald Trump secured a victory in Indiana that scuttled his two remaining opponents and all but gave him the presidential nomination.  In recent contests, Trump has scored lopsided victories, finding support in suffering areas of the Rust Belt, as well as among the residents of northern cities and coastal states.  In New York and Pennsylvania, for example, Trump carried every county except his own Manhattan Borough.

Trump’s emergence as a political force is engendering widespread irritation and dismay, even alarm.  Trump has a vicious streak; he is not a gentleman.  He affronts the Republican establishment by upending their principles; he affronts everyone else by eschewing the etiquette of statesmanship.  At rallies, he turns on the crowd by stoking base tendencies, insinuating that it’s okay to be violent; it’s okay to hate.  In a stagnant political moment, Trump promises radical and stark action on middle-American issues.  On policy, he’s cagey.  Unfortunately, it’s impossible to separate the message from the man.  He’s driving a stake through the heart of the parties and feeding on identity politics’ innards, horrifying every decorous conservative and liberal.  Donald Trump is free speech at its worst.

Last night, CNN’s large panel of political experts squirmed in their chairs, their very skirts and suits discomfited as they contemplated the magnitude of Donald Trump’s triumph over a field that once included 17 talented and determined rivals. This morning, the New York Times ran an editorial, ‘GOP Steps Deeper Into Darkness,’ essentially skirting the dilemma of millions of voters and lamenting that ‘Instead of rejecting what Trump stands for, the Republican Party is falling in line behind his nomination.’  Meanwhile, Donald Trump subliminally responds, “It’s the economy, stupid,” in every one of his victory speeches.  In truth, we have no way of knowing what part of his crowd is evil and what part is wise.

Beating Trump will depend on honing in on the part of his message that’s constructive and co-opting it.  Trump is unique in his focus on the downside of unbounded global capitalism.  He’s winning because of his prescriptions for the American economy, prescriptions unpalatable to an upper-class establishment that shrugs off evidence of declining US prestige and lower-class suffering.  Trump is winning because he has a consistent perspective on a few key issues, expressed in a compellingly urgent way.  He’s winning because the complacency that has allowed our infrastructure to decline and industries to decay must end.

Trump is rising despite lacking the virtue that republican government requires.  His election would further dim the light of American ideals.  If only Trump’s opponents were equally gutsy in acknowledging and promising to redress the nation’s ills.  Ultimately, their failure is why Trump wins.

Columbia Has Her Eye On You

27 Feb 2016 By in History Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

A modern Columbia reminds American women to vote

A very modern-looking Columbia, dressed in a becoming flapper style, adorns the cover of Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper on October 2, 1920.  Her message?  “Don’t Forget!  Columbia has her eye on You and expects You to vote for the Good of the Nation”  (Columbia being the traditional female personification of the United States).

Her message had special meaning, given that women had gained the right to vote just months earlier, when the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified on August 26.  Women were about to cast ballots in a presidential election for the very first time, the fruit of an epic political struggle that American women began way back in 1848.

Over the decades, myriad arguments had been advanced both for and against women’s suffrage.  Some opponents to suffrage argued that political participation would degrade the female sex; others worried it would quickly lead to a government by females.  And of course it was argued that woman suffrage was contrary to the vision of the Founders, as laid out in the Constitution.  Americans of the Progressive era understood that the female vote would inevitably alter the dynamics of American politics–they just didn’t know how.

Suffragists responded partly by arguing that women would have a civilizing effect on political life, an attitude that Leslie’s get-out-the-vote appeal was eager to prove.  As it turned out, newly enfranchised women voted in far smaller numbers than did men.  Not until 1980 would the size of the female vote exceed that of males.  Even today, it’s unclear how the female vote as such will influence the outcome of the current campaign.

Don’t forget!
  Cast your vote for the good of the nation this Super Tuesday.

Image: Drawing by [William] Haskell Coffin
from this source.

The Feminist Gap

11 Feb 2016 By in Candidates and Campaigns Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

There was something poignant (and grotesque) about the ‘scolding’ that Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem gave younger American women this week.  The subject was Hillary and the support that female voters—as women—supposedly owe her.  The tone was dire yet dismissive.  Madeleine Albright, revered for her achievements as a diplomat, essentially threatened wayward women with punishment, warning that if they didn’t ‘help’ Hillary they would go to hell.  Gloria Steinem, now a shocking 81, relied on sexual stereotyping to explain why some young women have chosen to vote for Bernie.  These women, she claimed, care only about ‘where the boys are’—lemming-like, they have gravitated to Sanders because ‘the boys are with Bernie.’  In other words, young women in Sanders’ camp suffer from an out-of-control sex drive!  Both Albright and Steinem asserted in different ways that young women had forgotten their rightful duty, which, in the eyes of older feminists, is to practice sex solidarity.  This tenet, so central to first-generation feminism, is outmoded and deeply unpalatable.

The desperate awkwardness of these protests points up a problem that Hillary is having.  How does her sex, how does the women’s movement, figure in her campaign?  Hillary never was much of a bra-burner; she never wasted much time railing against society’s constraints or male tyranny.  Instead, she crossed over early, believing that doors were open and assuming that full equality and freedom were hers.  She carved out a remarkable path, relying more on her own grit and talents than on the dictates of feminist ideology.

In some profound sense, Hillary is not free to tell her story, which is that of a woman who has been more in the public eye for more of her life than any other woman in American history.  Contrary to Steinem’s assumption about the fate of women, Hillary has not ‘lost power’ as she’s aged.  Instead, Clinton is one of the most well-known and powerful women on the face of the globe.

As Clinton has grown more unusual, more distinguished, and more famous, her capacity to pass as a representative woman has inevitably waned.  The fact is one to reckon with in the remaining campaign.