UGH, MORE CLINTON! All weekend I watched the comment thread on this grow. It finally topped out at 98, which I think is some kind of record for this site, barring spam attacks. I’m pretty much done talking about Clinton for now, but I do want to respond to Ezra‘s last post, since he pretty aggressively misread me. Scott Lemieux, on the other hand, got what I was talking about:
as I read her she’s claiming that 1) the male dominated pundit class is not likely to have representative views of what Democrats think of Clinton, and 2) people’s judgments can never be fully abstracted from their social circumstances. Both of these points are, I think, correct.
If Ezra wants to read that as personal accusation of sexism, he is, of course, welcome to do so. But that’s not what I was saying — I was saying that we all, men and women, make judgements about the world based on our different experiences, and that this is the most logical explanation for why Democratic women between 30 and 49 prefer Clinton by 20 points over Democratic men aged 18-29, and that this might even have some effect on how opinion journals and opinion pages at MSM outlets, and maybe even us Tappers, too, dicuss Clinton. How is this even a controversial statement? (No, really, you don’t have to tell me again — I read the comments.) I said as much is a comment over the weekend in over at Matt‘s place. Further, in my Tapped posts on Clinton, I haven’t been trying to argue what anyone should do in terms of picking sides in primary 2008 — so of course my argument is unconvicing on those grounds! Rather, I’ve been trying to come up with a explanation for what people are doing, and develop some hypotheses about what is going on. If my arguments on this blog have read less like full-throated roars for a specific candidate, that’s because I very intentionally have not been making such. I think it’s too early to be taking sides, and my job to be more of an analyst than an advocate, in any event.
One reason I think Ezra wants a different approach from me is that he’s taken such a full-throated roar course himself. Since 2005, his personal site, EzraKlein.com, has been an important node in the pro-Edwards blogosphere. EzraKlein.com guest-poster Melissa McEwan was hired by the Edwards campaign, before resigning under attack. EzraKleincom guest-poster Neil Sinhababu is a former John Edwards volunteer and long-standing Edwards supporter. In 2006, he was blogging at both EzraKlein.com and The John Edwards ’08 Blog. In 2005, prior to joining The Prospect, Ezra was invited to an Edwards dinner with bloggers, something Neil reported on EzraKlein.com in his item, “Why Everybody Should Love John Edwards”, which, in retrospect, was a kick-off event in John Edwards’ years-long effort to become the netroots candidate. Reported Neil on EzraKlein.com :
This is a brilliant move by Edwards — not only does it bring him closer to very smart people in the blogosphere, but it enables me to post about how awesome he is and how everybody should vote for him in 2008.
In addition to saying that Clinton should not run for president, ever, Ezra’s also taken to op-ed pages to cast doubts on Barack Obama. By December 2006, the Edwards campaign was so confused about Ezra’s positions that it invited him to cover the Edwards campaign announcement partly at its expense (The Prospect rejected the idea), as blogger Robert Scoble did. In short, he’s been much more of an advocate, and is asking for me to be one, too. But that’s not what I want to do.
Ezra also points approvingly to this item by his roommate Brian Beutler, formerly of RAW Story, who tendentiously concludes “As pernicious as gender-driven antagonism is to determining who should be president, I think gender-driven camaraderie is, in its own right, harmful to answering the same question.”
Brian this attitude being “politcally incorrect,” but I think it’s just conservative, part of the the long-standing anti-progressive tendency to see women supporting women as an illegitimate political act. Gender solidarity is the only reason we’ve been able to get any women in office in this country, thanks to the heroic efforts of groups like Emily’s List, The White House Project, and so on. More than 200 years after America was founded, this country has evolved to such a point that it now has a whole, whopping 16 percent women in its Congress (up from three percent as recently as 1977). Very little of that happened because of the generosity of male progressives. It happened because women like Alice Paul to refused to put her drive for suffrage aside so America could focus on the war in Europe in the early 20th century. (War has long been used as an excuse to block social progress and the expansion of political power for historically disenfranchised groups, though post-war periods tend to result in rapid changes.) The most recent shift in women’s political power took place because the women of the New Left, civil rights, and anti-Vietnam War movements got so fed up with their roles in those movements, and were so steeped in the cause of equal rights and the techiniques of social change activism, that they decided to advocate for their own equality. Hence: Second Wave feminism. By the mid-80s, women realized that women weren’t going to be elected “naturally” or thanks to the ministrations of men on the left or within the Democratic Party, and that they’d have to specifically organize to help fund and train themselves. Hence: Emily’s List.
As recently as the 106th Congress, there were no female committee chairs. We finally have the first female Majority Leader. There’s been a lot of progress. But there’s a long way to go, too. Anyway, one thing I’ve learned from this whole event is that progressives are extremely unfriendly to the idea of a feminist case for Clinton, which is probably why you’ll never hear her campaign make such an argument. They poll everything.
–Garance Franke-Ruta