Hello world.
I begin my blog, my first blog, with...a guest blog by a dear old
friend. The writer covered HRC in the 2000 senate election and
wrote a terrific book about doing so, "The Girls in the Van."
(Nevertheless she has asked me not to name her directly.)
I do hope that Café Espresso of Portsmouth, NH has the good
sense to develop a drink, or a dessert, that they can call
Hillary Tears. As you read the remarks below, please allow the
back of your mind to formulate an appropriate recipe,
and kindly post it in the comments.
David, you asked me if I thought Hillary's tears were real. Here's my answer.
The question that prompted Hillary's emotional response Monday in NH was, "Who does your hair?" Yes, that was the question. The question she answered was, "How do you deal with the pressure?"
I believe she and her campaign had decided after Iowa that she had to open up to the voters, and that she had to look for any opportunity to do so, any question that was a personal question as opposed to a policy question, where she could talk about her feelings. I don't believe the emotion was feigned - but I do believe the opportunity to reveal herself was being hoped for and sought. I'm sure she was sad, disappointed, upset with herself and her staff and the voters, and I'm sure she was exhausted, and that's what the emotion was about. But a dynamic that has been true for Hillary for years is that her popularity surges when she is victimized. It was true in the 2000 election and long before, when she was the wronged wife, and also when she was attacked by her opponents in the New York Senate race in 2000. It's an odd dynamic for a campaign to manage, because nobody wants to see their candidate damaged, nobody wants to cause their candidate pain, and yet when she's down and out, and then picks herself up and brushes herself off, her support among voters increases. That is part of what happened Monday.
In case you care here is my take on why the polls were wrong.
Polls are a snapshot in time and of course voters can be volatile in their leanings. But there are two other things to remember. There is a well-known phenomenon in which white voters don't tell pollsters the truth about how they are going to vote when a candidate is black. So polls often overstate white support for black candidates. I believe in Hillary's case we also see people routinely underreporting their support for her. I believe some people are embarrassed to admit they are voting for Hillary. I believe women especially may be intimidated and not want to admit to their husbands and co-workers that they are voting for Hillary. Maybe this is part of why Obama won Iowa. It's not 'cool' to stand up in a public caucus and say you're for Hillary but it is cool to do it for Obama. In the privacy of the voting booth, where no one will know what you did, maybe it's easier for women to vote their hearts. Even in NY in 2000, where it was widely predicted that Hillary would win, the predictions vastly underestimated the margin of her support. Could it be that polls underpredict Hillary's votes by 10 points because so many of her supporters can't admit to themselves and others that they really want her to win?
Also: Iowa has never elected a woman statewide. NH has. I believe Hillary will do well in states where voters have supported female candidates in the past, such as Michigan, and not so well in states where women have not done well, such as SC.
In my opinion this election rides more on Hillary exploiting the gender gap than on Obama achieving a milestone for black candidates. In the last debate, when the "change" issue came up, Hillary said she was the "embodiment" of change because she would be the first female president. Just before the NH primary, she talked about breaking through the ultimate glass ceiling. She has been afraid to mobilize the female electorate until now because of a potential backlash among men. After her teary moment, chatboards were full of comments like "Will she cry when the president of Iran is mean to her?" Obviously her campaign decided that allowing her to express her true feelings was more important than the potential backlash, but you can't get away with that too many times. (By the way, in 2000 she had a teary moment too - she was accused of anti-Semitism and held an emotional news conference that August at her Westchester home where her eyes welled up. We were certain we even had a photo to prove it, but alas when we checked the film, the tear was nowhere to be found - like a ghost on a polaroid, it had vanished.)
When she won in NH, she told voters, "Thank you for helping me find my voice." This is a line right out of a 1970s feminist group - thank you my sisters for helping me unleash my soul. It's like "The Awakening," Hillary's version of "A Room of One's Own" - "A Campaign of One's Own," perhaps. She can't come on too strong by asking women to make history by voting for her because it could be seen as insulting the breakthrough aspirations of Obama. But it is worth noting that women got the vote in 1920 and almost 90 years later, none has come this close to becoming president. Whether you like her or not, Hillary has already made history by becoming the only first lady ever to run for office, and ever to win office, and she is also the first woman to win statewide office in New York. She is not the only woman ever to run as a candidate for her party's nomination, but it remains to be seen whether she will become the first in either of the two major parties to win the nomination.
David, thank you for asking my opinion and for listening.
