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Responding to the talk about the roles of sexism and racism in this election, Patrick writes in:
Hi Ezra, Look, it's much more complicated than this. Hillary and Obama both get boxed into particular identities by their race and gender, but they also both have learned to turn those identities to their own advantage. For Obama, it's been easier (at least in the primaries). As a black man, he's constrained from voicing the kind of anger that Edwards expresses every day, because the moment he talks like that, he'll scare the hell out of a lot of white folk who are intimidated by the spectre of the angry black man. But on the other hand, just the existence of that stereotype helps him, because people implicitly trust that he COULD get tough and angry, if he WANTED to, in a way that they don't necessarily trust a white woman could. Hillary, as a woman, has felt that she really had to prove that she could be just as tough as the toughest guys out there. That wasn't necessarily a wrong assessment, but it's boxed her into being pro-military, pro-Iraq war, etc, all kinds of things that I don't want my candidate to have supported. I don't BLAME Hillary for being constrained by identity politics, but I want my president to be someone who's learned how to GAME those politics rather than someone who's been victimized by them, as it seems she has. Not her fault, sure. But if sexism is going to force her to be a super-hawk, I'll vote for Obama.I think it's too reductive to say that Hillary was only pro-war because she feared sexism, and tripping into the subconscious misogyny of the electorate. All the evidence I've seen suggests that she harbors genuinely hawkish tendencies, and that her vote in favor of the Iraq War was sincere and well thought out. But there's no doubt that she's had to project a peculiar brand of toughness, and that this has made certain elements of the campaign harder on her, particularly as the electorate turned against the war. It's hard to disentangle the reasons she's hewed to a centrist, cautious aggressive foreign policy, but a traditionally Clintonian fear of the underlying militarism of the electorate mixed with the conventional wisdom about the dangers faced by the first female candidate seem like factors.
