By Damozel | Amid news stories of a record turn-out in New Hampshire (ABC), here are a couple of points of interest which have emerged regarding Hillary's campaign----which the media, and even some of her supporters, seem to be busily writing off..
First, an interesting report of the death---a bit previously, I'd have said, but anyway---of Hillary Clinton's campaign by an "internet storm" appears in a fascinating post (complete with graphs) at The Belmont Club. D Cupples and others have pointed out how the media sculpts---if not controls---public opinion of the candidates. This piece looks into a different aspect: how the internet affects it.
How did an apparently impregnable position collapse so quickly? How did the trend develop? How did the idea of a Clinton weakness, which was perceived by relatively few people suddenly propagate across the Internet and become the conventional wisdom?...
The frequency with which the words "Clinton" and "loser" appeared in blog posts is shown in the graph below. From January 3 onward they peaked drastically; it shows the whisper beginning to spread. Hillary was a loser. But it is the speed with which an Internet storm can propagate which makes it so deadly. The storm can catch those who are accustomed to the statelier pace of broadcast media completely unaware. Traditional political consultants, whose plans were geared to the timing of newspaper editions, talk shows, prime time newscasts, etc can be rendered as totally useless by the relentless 24x7 pace of the Internet as the troglodytic French Army was by the Blitzkrieg. Before...Hillary Clinton could even understand what was happening [she was] buried. (The Perfect Storm)
I am not sure it's all, or even mainly, down to the internet, mind you. This incident in Dartmouth---rather unpleasant for the Clintons---may shed some light on some of the underlying influences.
About thirty minutes into Bill Clinton's nearly two-hour stop here at Dartmouth College, a steady stream of students started walking out of the venue.
Moments later, Clinton -- his voice hoarse, sometimes cracking -- took arguably the toughest question of the night.... "My main concern is, if Hillary were elected, it would create a dynastification of American politics. Bush, Clinton, Bush. What do you think?" asked Sebastian Ramirez, standing less than a hundred feet from the former president....
"I am not anti-Hillary, I am not anti-Clinton, I love Bill Clinton. But I just think we need a fresh start, a new face," Ramirez told The Trail. "All my life I've known the Clintons. As much as I like them, it's time for someone like Barack."...
"I think it's really hard that you're campaigning for change -- Clinton's been using that word a lot too -- when, if you were elected, then the past presidents would be Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton," said Landers, 21. (The Trail)
And it seems to me that it's not so much that people regard Clinton as a "loser" as that the "change" meme propagated by Edwards (and he may live to regret characterizing both himself and Obama as the "change candidates") and deplored by my colleague D Cupples is in fact driving a lot of the voters. I concede that it's driving me (towards Edwards, at least provisionally, rather than Obama, since Edwards seems to me the more progressive of the two).
In the meantime, at The New York Times, Gloria Steinem has written an angry and pessimistic article called Women Are Never Frontrunners. As noted above, I am not sure it's gender politics that are making people, especially young ones, choose Obama over Hillary. Nor do I believe that the following still applies.
Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House. This country is way down the list of countries electing women and, according to one study, it polarizes gender roles more than the average democracy.
That’s why the Iowa primary was following our historical pattern of making change. Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter).....
So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what. (NYT)
I think it is laughable to compare (unfavorably) the position of white women in public life to the position of African-American men or women. But as between African-American men and African-American women, my own perception is that the women actually seem to do a little better (no idea why, unless of course it's actually down to even more unfavorable racial stereotyping of African-American men). But I've no idea whether this is true or untrue.
I love Ms. Steinem and I'd like to introduce her to the New Millennium. I love Hillary Clinton too, and I agree with Steinem about her qualifications, but I think she is a victim more of the new-broom-sweeps-clean metaphor than of any gender politics. People may in fact be rejecting her precisely because of her "unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training in the White House." (NYT)
And as the Dartmouth story illustrates, many of those people may be young women.
Part of it also is that Hillary just hasn't managed to project herself as likable. Maybe, as Ms. Steinem suggests, it's because gender politics preclude this: but I wonder. I wonder if, in fact, a woman candidate who played her womanliness up rather than down wouldn't do better. Perhaps Hillary's mistake has been in trying to show that she's as good a man as Obama and Edwards (in the manner of the Mrs. Thatcher "Maggie is our man!") school of politics.
Oh well, just a thought. Though the Obama-mania is running high, I'd say the reports of her campaign's death are premature unless she in fact makes what I imagine would be the dreadful mistake of abandoning her campaign at this very early stage. You never know: this might be the year when everyone elsewhere says, "Oh, who cares what New Hampshire and Iowa think or want?" and votes completely differently.
UPDATED: Bill Clinton has gone after the media for its coverage of Obama. He's not wrong, people.
"It is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year, enumerating the years, and never got asked one time--not once, 'Well, how could you say that when you said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution? You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war. And you took that speech you're now running on off your Web site in 2004. And there's no difference in your voting record and Hillary's ever since.'" Mr. Clinton said at a town-hall style meeting Monday afternoon at Dartmouth College. "Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."...
What did you think about the Obama thing calling Hillary the senator from Punjab? Did you like that? Or what about the Obama handout that was covered up, the press never reported on, implying that I was a crook. Scouring me—scathing criticism over my financial reports. Ken Starr spent $70 million to find out that I wouldn't take a nickel to see the cow jump over the moon."...
"But the idea that one of these campaigns is positive and the other is negative when I know the reverse is true and I have seen it and I have been blistered by it for months is a little tough to take. Just because of the sanitizing coverage that's in the media doesn't mean the facts aren't out there." At that point, Mr. Clinton seemed to realize he had launched into a bit of a finger-wagging tirade. "Otherwise, I don't have any strong feelings about that subject," he joked...
The criticism of Mr. Obama and the press appeared to be the sharpest Mr. Clinton has offered publicly since his interview with Charlie Rose last month. The former president seemed to take care not to repeat his widely-reported suggestion that a vote for Mr. Obama was a "roll [of] the dice," but Mr. Clinton delivered most of the hard-edged points from that critique and then some. The Sun monitored the Dartmouth event via a CNN video feed. (The Sun)
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"I am not sure it's all, or even mainly, down to the internet, mind you."
You are being charitable - absent any proposal explaining cause and effect, why not just figure that the internet chatter was about as meaningful as a cheering crowd at a baseball game? (Which is not to say meaningless, since there are home field effects, but cheering rarely produces a home run yet often follows one.)
The absence of a cause/effect mechanism is especially glaring since Wretchard specifically makes a comparison to the rather case, where the mechanism (bloggers claim Rather broadcast forgeries) is pretty clear.
Bill Clinton has gone after the media for its coverage of Obama.
A Harvard study on media coverage of the candidate said the same thing last fall:
" Overall, Democrats also have received more positive coverage than Republicans (35% of stories vs. 26%), while Republicans received more negative coverage than Democrats (35% vs. 26%). For both parties, a plurality of stories, 39%, were neutral or balanced.
Most of that difference in tone, however, can be attributed to the friendly coverage of Obama (47% positive) and the critical coverage of McCain (just 12% positive.) When those two candidates are removed from the field, the tone of coverage for the two parties is virtually identical."
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/miscellaneous/invisible_primary.pdf
Posted by: TM | January 09, 2008 at 01:38 AM