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Hillary & Barbara

by Tracee Sioux on May 8th, 2008

Did anyone watch Barbara Walter’s interview with Charlie Gibson on ABC last night?

I wanted to weep with gratitude for what she’s done for women.

After watching old clips of her most famous interviews with some of the most powerful leaders, infamous criminals, and biggest stars of the world Charlie asked Barbara about her interview style.

Barbara’s interview style, in my opinion, could be characterized as feminine. She does not interview like a man. She hardly ever asks direct or confrontational questions. She is very demure and passive in her body language and behaves in a word, like a “Lady.”

That’s the secret to her success as the first woman in television journalism.

I was reading a New Yorker Talk of the Town Column titled “Going Positive,” by Dorothy Wickenden.

The column looks back at the 1988 election in which George H.W. Bush’s campaign manager studied The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, to beat Michael Dukakis. He ran two vicious ads with caricatures of Dukakis’s running mate depicted as a black escaped murderer and another of Dukakis himself on a tank depicted like Rocky the Flying Squirrel.

End of career for Dukakis. All is fair in love and war was the feeling of the American people and George Bush #1 lost no love and won.

A few weeks ago I was having lunch with a friend who said she has a negative emotional response when she sees Hillary stand up to her contestants and to criticism.

In effect, she said she’s from the South and women aren’t supposed to be so aggressive and bold like Hillary is in public. If they are, bad things happen - like being socially shunned or being criticized or called a bitch or whore. When she watches Hillary be so confident and bold and “unladylike” she suffers anxiety in the pit of her stomach as she waits to witness the inevitable fallout women face when they act like that.

I too have that feeling in the pit of my stomach.

The New Yorker examines why Hillary Clinton’s similar campaign tactics resulted in public support in 1988, but in public backlash in 2008. (Interestingly, The New Yorker attributes the nastiness of the Bush campaign to the campaign manager, but the nastiness of Hillary rests squarely on Hillary herself.) According to one cited public poll 68% of voters thought Hillary was attacking Barack Obama unfairly.

“Nobody seems to know what to make of all this, but one thing does seem clear in the aberrant election of ‘08: Barack Obama and John McCain lifted themselves above the pack, despite enormous odds, largely because they pledged to be civil,” The New Yorker reports.

Really? Is that clear?

What is clear to me is that it is still socially unacceptable for women to speak boldly, directly, aggressively and with confidence. It is still socially unacceptable for women to play men’s games by men’s rules, which see being mean as fair play. They must play men’s games by playing feminine roles.

As my Barack Obama supporting husband put it, I think she’s just being mean.

Women are no more accepting of a woman stepping out of feminine roles than men are. Witness millions of women who obviously would prefer a “charming man” to a “strong woman” precisely because of the anxiety in the pit of their stomachs. This anxiety that makes women simultaneously pray she wins to change the rules for women and hope she loses so they can stop feeling so damn uncomfortable about their own place in society.

Yet, here’s Hillary’s trap: Barbara’s strategy of “nice” would never have worked for Hillary in this election. Nice looks charming on a man like Barrack Obama because strength is automatically assumed of his gender. Nice looks weak on a woman where strength is assumed contradictory to her gender.

We’re a nation at war and Americans claim they want military strength from their next president. Barbara can afford to get chummy with fascist dictator Fidel Castro (as pictured above). Hillary needs to show us she can kick his ass if she has to. The job requires some “mean”.

As far as Barack Obama and John McCain being “above the fray and staying positive,” I’d say it’s not a matter of their superior character. The rest of the media simply made it unnecessary for them to get their hands dirty.

There has been so much negative media about Hillary’s womanness these two men didn’t have to lift a finger to have Bush #1’s Art of War tactics work for their campaigns.

Search the media images in your head and you’ll find one in which Hillary is depicted as an actual ball breaking nutcracker; nude on a magazine cover; a caricature (strikingly similar to that of Dukakis riding a tank) as an weak idiot woman riding a tank with water pistols; references to her being so sexually undesirable not even her own husband wants her; and references to bombing her vagina.

What we have here are three equally-flawed politicians, but only one of them is being held to the standard of the feminine ideal with its unrealistic expectation for perfection.

Image source: Newscom.com

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