“You’ve Come A Long Way, Maybe”: The Women Who Ran Before Hillary And Carly
In a blast from the past, two women who ran for president, Pat Schroeder in 1988 and Carol Moseley Braun in 2004, liken their experience to what Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina are up against today. It’s a very different world but still frighteningly similar in the assumptions made about female candidates.
Clinton has shattered stereotypes about women and fundraising, and she’s put in place a campaign infrastructure that surpasses any of her rivals. Fiorina is testing the boundaries of what once might have been dismissed as a catfight by taking direct aim at Clinton. And both camps are exploring how much gender solidarity exists with fewer glass ceilings and a millennial generation that is much more willing to elect a woman to the White House.
Democratic Representative Schroeder said the thing that made her nuts was people saying, “I just can’t imagine having a man for First Lady. How do you relate to that? Images are so hard to crack.” For example, how do you show a woman working hard? With a man, he loosens his tie and rolls up his sleeves. Women look like unmade beds or models, she said.
Schroeder coined the phrase “Teflon president” for Ronald Reagan, and she took on the sexism in Congress, declaring, “I have a uterus and a brain and I use them both.” A long-serving member of Congress on the Armed Services Committee, she dropped out of the ’88 race in September ’87, before any votes were cast. She said the media covered her only when she spoke to women’s groups.
Ambassador Braun was the first and still only African-American woman elected to the U.S. Senate. After serving a single term and losing her bid for reelection, she ran for president in 2004 after a short stint as ambassador to New Zealand. She dropped out before the Iowa caucus, but lives on in the highlight reel of debates with her quip that the black vote decided the 2000 election—Clarence Thomas’s vote in the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision.
Money was a problem for both women, but they were also running against ingrained images of what a president is supposed to look like.
“We don’t have the equivalent of looking large and in charge,” said Braun in a conference call organized by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which is partnering with the Center for American Women and Politics to provide historical context for the current race.
“The concept of a woman reviewing the troops is almost incomprehensible,” she said. “Will we have the equivalent of Angela Merkel? I hope so…You have to navigate cultural quicksand in a way no male candidate has to do.”
“The commander in chief thing is a hang-up,” agreed Schroeder, who was criticized for crying in the press conference when she withdrew from the presidential race. Irked by what she perceives as a double standard, Schroeder for years kept a “crying folder” filled with newspaper clips of men who were applauded for crying.
A woman getting into it with another woman was always dangerous territory. Several times in a congressional career that spanned the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, Schroeder faced a female opponent for her congressional seat. “We had to be so careful. The media wanted to make it a catfight. We had to make it a tea party.”
Leslie Sanchez, a Republican consultant on the conference call, said she has gotten lots of calls about Fiorina and the way she goes after Clinton. Some say it’s a catfight but Sanchez says, “That’s her style, she’s very direct. People can make of it what they want it to be.”
Much of what Schroeder and Braun had to say is turned on its head by Clinton, who can hold her own on any of the standard ways a campaign is measured. Toughness doesn’t appear to be her problem, and after watching her perform as secretary of state, reviewing the troops doesn’t seem out of bounds as an image that Americans could get comfortable with.
But there are clues in these earlier campaigns to what some Democrats are giving voice to, and that is the lack of enthusiasm for Clinton and the historic nature of her candidacy. She is no Barack Obama, exciting young people and minorities; she doesn’t have her husband’s empathy with the voters, and she’s not a one-woman reality show who can (almost) fill a stadium the way Donald Trump can.
To win, she needs the sisterhood to turn out in force, and the historical data isn’t there. Kathleen Harrington, deputy campaign manager for Elizabeth Dole’s 2000 presidential race, said on the call that older women—women older than Dole, who was 54 at the time, were “incredibly supportive.” Among women over 60, “There was hunger for a woman president,” said Harrington. Younger women, not so much—they’ve got time for history.
The rallying cry since the 1980s is that the time for women had come, and in 2008 when Clinton ran for president, “We really assumed women would gravitate toward a female candidate. And that was true for women over 45,” says Sanchez. “Democratic women under 45 voted on personality and policy, not gender.”
Sanchez did research across the aisle for her 2009 book, You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe. Her advice for Fiorina, who’s used to being in business circles and the only woman in the room, is to remember the ladies. “I don’t see her talking to conservative women although they have evangelized around her. There are so many woman entrepreneurs she can talk to.” As for Clinton, keep riding the Girl Power movement, as this piece of history has been a long time coming.
By: Eleanor Clift, The Daily Beast, August 23, 2015
“The Nature Of Campaign Reporting”: The Circular Logic Behind Media Coverage Of The Clinton Email Story
Yesterday, Hillary Clinton took some questions from the press about her emails, a story that jumps back on to the front pages whenever there’s some new development, whether it’s truly meaningful or not. And without much indication of serious malfeasance on Clinton’s part, we’re reaching the point where a circular logic is taking over: the story is a story because it’s a story, and therefore we need to keep talking about it because it’s a story.
A reporter asked Clinton at that press conference: “Is this an indication that this issue isn’t going to go away for the remainder of your campaign?” It was an all too familiar meta-inquiry, not about the substance of the issue (though there were questions about that too) but about the questions the reporters themselves are asking, and whether the candidate thinks reporters are going to keep asking them. Unfortunately, candidates get questions like that all the time. How will this controversy affect your campaign? Why aren’t these questions going away? Doesn’t this issue suggest that this is an issue? It’s as if the reporter decides that asking about the substance isn’t getting anywhere, so they might as well treat the candidate like a panelist on The McLaughlin Group. And the candidate never says anything remotely interesting or informative in response.
Now before the chants of “Clinton apologist!” begin, let me say that like many liberals, I have complicated feelings about Clinton, some positive and some not so positive. I’ve written many critical pieces about her in the past; I’ve even criticized her for setting up a private email server.
But we have to be clear about just what it is we’re looking for in this story.
Republicans are no doubt hoping that lurking somewhere in Clinton’s emails is evidence of a terrible crime she committed whose revelation will destroy her career forever and deliver the White House to the GOP for a generation. But just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that no such horror will be revealed. What do we have then? Well, we have the plainly foolish decision to use a private server for work email, which we’ve known about for months. Maybe you think that a person who would do such a thing is unfit for the presidency, or maybe you don’t (though that would disqualify Jeb Bush).
Then there’s the possibility that she discussed sensitive or classified material in emails. She says she didn’t, but as yet we don’t know for certain. You might or might not consider that disqualifying as well. But the government classifies an absurd amount of material, even things that are publicly available; what would really matter is the details, like whether somebody else said something about a classified matter in an email to her (which wouldn’t be her fault), and more importantly, what specifically the material was. And while some argue that private email servers are more vulnerable to hackers and therefore it’s particularly bad if she ever discussed classified information there, government systems get hacked all the time. That isn’t to excuse the original decision to set up the private account, it’s just to say that if there’s going to be a new accusation, like “She received classified information!”, then we should get as specific as we can about it so we can judge how serious it is.
Or maybe you want to argue that this issue is important because it shows that Clinton has a “penchant for secrecy.” Which she obviously does, but you have to go further and say exactly what that means and how it might affect her presidency. It isn’t enough to say, “Cuz, um, Nixon!” The problem with Richard Nixon wasn’t that he was secretive. All presidents are secretive to one degree or another. The problem with Nixon was that he and his aides committed dozens of crimes, for which many of them went to prison. Out of Watergate we got the oft-repeated cliche, “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up,” but that’s completely misunderstood. It’s the cover-up that gets you caught; the crime is what matters (and in Nixon’s case, the cover-up involved committing more crimes).
We’re still waiting for somebody to explain the crime Hillary Clinton committed. And to repeat, maybe there is one; who knows. Reporters who find this story interesting should keep digging into the substance, and eventually they and the investigators looking into it will be able to tell us definitively whether there’s anything there.
But the campaign reporters trailing Clinton around aren’t adding much of anything to the story, they’re just asking whether they’ll be asking more questions about it. That’s partly the nature of campaign reporting, and partly because with a Democratic race that’s far less compelling than what’s going on over on the Republican side, they’re starved for things to talk about (and they’d be much more interested if Bernie Sanders and Clinton were attacking each other, which they aren’t). It’s also because of what are often referred to as the “Clinton Rules,” which state that when it comes to Bill and Hillary Clinton, you can whip up a faux scandal out of nothing, then keep talking about it because it’s “out there,” regardless of whether anything problematic has actually been discovered.
The email story may not be the most ridiculous fake scandal in the history of the Clintons, because there’s a lot of competition for that title. As has often been the case, it was a poor decision Hillary Clinton made that got the scandal ball rolling. But there are only so many times you can ask “What is she hiding???” before you have to come up with something that she might actually be hiding.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, August 19, 2015
“The National Bitch Hunt Is Definitely On”: Why Hillary Clinton Drives Her Enemies Crazy
Same as it ever was. Once again, according to pundits on the influential Washington, D.C. cocktail party circuit, Hillary Clinton is in deep trouble. The National Bitch Hunt is definitely on. Surely you didn’t think we could have a female presidential candidate without one?
Rolling down the highway, listening to Diane Rehm’s NPR talk show last week, I wondered if I hadn’t driven into some kind of weird political time warp.
In a sense, I had.
“Someone said the other day that Washington may now have reached the state-of-the-art point of having a cover-up without a crime,” pronounced the Washington Post. By failing to come clean, Hillary had managed “to make it appear as if the Clintons had something to hide.”
“These clumsy efforts at suppression are feckless and self-defeating,” thundered the New York Times. Hillary’s actions, the newspaper continued, “are swiftly draining away public trust in [her] integrity.”
OK, I’m teasing. Both editorials appeared over 21 years ago, in January 1994. They expressed outrage at Hillary Clinton’s decision to turn over Whitewater documents to federal investigators rather than to the press, which had conjured a make-believe scandal out of bogus reporting of a kind that’s since grown too familiar in American journalism. (Interested readers are referred to Joe Conason’s and my e-book The Hunting of Hillary, available from The National Memo.)
However, by failing to roll over and bare her throat, Hillary Clinton only “continued to contribute to the perception that she has something to hide.”
Another joke. That last quote was actually The Atlantic’s Molly Ball on the Diane Rehm program just last Friday. It’s the same old song, except that Ball was complaining about Hillary’s turning her email server over to investigators looking into a dispute between the State Department and the CIA about which documents should have been classified, and when.
She should have turned the gadget over six months ago, Ball opined.
Ah, but to whom? There wasn’t a State Department vs. CIA dispute back then.
No cage filled with parrots could have recited the list of familiar anti-Hillary talking points more efficiently than Rehm’s guests.
The email flap, opined the Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “creates and feeds into this narrative about the Clintons and Mrs. Clinton that the rules are different for them, that she’s not one of us.”
Most Americans, she added indignantly, “don’t have access to a private email server.”
Actually, most Americans don’t know what a server is, or why the hardware is supposed to matter. Then, too, most Americans have never been Secretary of State, aren’t married to a former president, and don’t enjoy Secret Service protection at home.
Stolberg saw a perception problem too. Nobody was rude enough to ask her about the perception caused by the Times’ public editor’s conclusion that her own newspaper appeared to have an axe to grind against the Clintons after it falsely reported that the emails were the object of a criminal investigation.
Stolberg also complained that both Clintons “play by a separate set of rules, [and] that the normal standards don’t apply.”
Which normal standards? According to, yes, the New York Times: “When [Clinton] took office in 2009…the State Department allowed the use of home computers as long as they were secure…There appears to have been no prohibition on the exclusive use of a private server; it does not appear to be an option anyone had thought about.”
So why are we talking about this at all? No Secretary of State previous to Clinton had a government email account.
Bottom line: when they start talking about narratives and perceptions, these would-be insiders, they’re talking about themselves.
But leave it to the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, who’s written about little else lately, to sum it all up with classic wifebeater logic. Hillary’s emails, he told NPR’s audience, “remind [voters] of the things they don’t like, the secretiveness, the paranoia, the sort of distrust….And then I also think it just feeds the perception that she is a candidate of the past. Do you really want to go back to this? Yes, the Clintons bring many good things. But they also bring this sort of baggage, this stuff that always follows them.”
See, if Hillary would just quit fighting for herself and her issues, they could quit ganging up on the bitch. Meanwhile, this has to be at least the fourth time the same crowd has predicted her imminent demise, if not indictment and conviction. All based upon partisan leaks (this Trey Gowdy joker is nothing compared to Kenneth Starr’s leak-o-matic prosecutors) and upon presumed evidence in documents nobody’s yet seen.
From the Rose Law Firm billing records to Benghazi, it’s the same old story. Because when the evidence finally emerges, it turns out that Hillary has been diligently coloring inside the lines all along.
And that’s because she’s smarter and tougher than her enemies — the very qualities that drive them crazy.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, August 19, 2015
“No, Hillary Clinton Is Not Spiraling Downward”: Clinton Cast As Lyndon Johnson, Email Controversy Is Parallel To The Vietnam War
There’s no question which is the more interesting and dynamic primary campaign right now, which inevitably leads reporters covering the other one to search for something new to write about. And in a race where there’s an obvious (if not quite certain) nominee, there will always come a point at which the press will decide that that candidate is spiraling downward, the cloak of inevitability is torn and tattered, the campaign is in crisis, the whispering from party loyalists is growing louder, and the scramble is on to find an alternative before the fall occurs.
This is the moment we have come to with Hillary Clinton.
First there was the fevered speculation about Vice President Biden running against her, based on second-hand reports that Biden has had conversations about the possibility of running. I’m sure that Biden thinks about being president about as often as he brushes his teeth, but that doesn’t mean there’s an actual candidacy in the offing. But it isn’t just him. ABC News reports that “a one-time high-ranking political adviser to Al Gore tells ABC News that a group of friends and former aides are having a ‘soft conversation’ about the possibility that Gore run for president in 2016.” Gore himself is not interested, but who cares? People keep asking John Kerry if he’s going to jump into the race, no matter how many times he says no. Time magazine says Democrats are headed for a repeat of the 1968 election, with Clinton cast as Lyndon Johnson and her email controversy offered as a parallel to the Vietnam War (pretty much the same magnitude, right?).
Guess what: you put two or three former staffers to just about any major politician in a room, and they’ll have a “soft conversation” about how he really ought to run for president. If there’s one thing that stories like these should never be based on, it’s the mere fact that people who used to work for a particular politician would like that politician to run. Longtime political figures like Gore and Biden trail behind them a tribe of former staffers, advisers, fundraisers and the like, all of whom have entertained fantasies about either a job in the West Wing or at least a heady proximity to the most powerful person on earth. If you called up any of them, you could extract a quote that would make it sound like maybe, just maybe their guy might get in the race.
So right now there’s virtually no evidence that the Democratic field is going to expand beyond the current five candidates. And what about the idea that Clinton is in a drastic decline? Bernie Sanders has generated plenty of interest and some support, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Democrats are rejecting Clinton; if there’s any evidence that Sanders supporters won’t be perfectly happy to back her if and when she’s the nominee, I haven’t seen it.
If you look over the long term at Clinton’s favorability ratings, you do see a drop, but it’s not a huge one, and not the kind of precipitous decline you’d associate with a campaign in free fall. Her favorability is down substantially from when she was Secretary of State, but that’s a natural consequence of her becoming a partisan political figure again. A year ago her favorability was just under 50 percent, and now it’s around 41 or 42 — not what she’d like, surely, but hardly a crisis. As a point of comparison, at this time four years ago, Barack Obama’s job approval was in exactly the same place, 42 percent. You may recall who won the 2012 election.
As Nate Silver observes, whether or not the movement in the polls is terribly meaningful, reporters have an incentive to describe it as such, and then run with the implications:
Even if there were no Clinton scandals, however, she’d probably still be receiving fairly negative press coverage. The campaign press more or less openly confesses to a certain type of bias: rooting for the story. Inevitability makes for a really boring story, especially when it involves a figure like Clinton who has been in public life for so long.
Instead, the media wants campaigns with lots of “game changers,” unexpected plot twists and photo finishes. If the story isn’t really there, the press can cobble one together by invoking fuzzy concepts like “momentum” and “expectations,” or by cherry-picking polls and other types of evidence. The lone recent poll to show Sanders ahead of Clinton in New Hampshire made banner headlines, for example, while the many other polls that have Clinton still leading, or which show Sanders’s surge slowing down in Iowa and nationally, have mostly been ignored.
As a result, the flow of news that Americans are getting about Clinton is quite negative. Indeed, the steady decline in her favorability ratings seems consistent with the drip, drip, drip of negative coverage, as opposed to the spikes upward and downward that one might expect if any one development was all that significant to voters.
Perhaps Republicans will get their wish, and we’ll learn that Clinton sent an email ordering the attack on Benghazi to cover up the fact that she’s the leader of an Al Qaeda sleeper cell whose goal is to enslave all Americans into a satanic Alinskyite death cult. If that happens, I’m sure some other Democrats will declare their candidacies. The other possibility is that the race will have some ups and downs, Bernie Sanders may even win a primary or two, and in the end Clinton will prevail.
That’s not as dramatic a story as a reporter covering the campaign might like. But at this point it’s still the most likely outcome.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, August 17, 2015
“Republicans Willfully Misrepresenting Fundamental Facts”: Still Perplexed And Worried About Hillary Clinton’s Emails? Calm Down
Amid the ongoing hysterics over Hillary Clinton’s email server – now turned over to the FBI, along with a “thumb drive” maintained by her attorney David Kendall – it was refreshing this morning that ABC News, at least, appears to understand basic facts about this overblown affair.
In a handy question-and-answer format, the network’s Justin Fishel and Mike Levine explain why the FBI wants to examine the server, namely to ascertain that it contains no classified information, and reiterate what everyone ought to know by now: that despite propagandistic nonsense spread by Republican operatives, the bureau is not undertaking a criminal investigation of Clinton herself.
As noted in the ABC News Q&A:
The Intelligence Community’s inspector general said from the beginning that it made a “counterintelligence referral” — not a “criminal referral” — to the FBI. The main concern was that classified information could be compromised because it was sent over unsecured networks and remained in the hands of Clinton or her legal team, not that any crimes may have been committed, a spokeswoman for the Intelligence Community’s IG previously told ABC News.
But even the comparatively sober ABC News analysis omits crucial facts that seem to have eluded many observers – several of which were outlined by Jennifer Palmieri, the Clinton campaign’s communications director, in a useful briefing she posted on Medium. Yes, it is Palmieri’s job to remind everyone of these facts. And it is the job of journalists to report them – not ignore them – so that readers and viewers can understand this story’s context.
As discussed in this space before, the State Department asked the four Secretaries of State who preceded John Kerry to turn over work-related electronic mail for archiving. Only Hillary Clinton has provided any materials so far, sending over 30,000 emails from her server. According to Palmieri, at least 1,200 of those messages will be returned to Clinton, because State officials say they are wholly personal in nature.
(I still wonder why reporters seem so uninterested in the emails sent by Colin Powell on his personal account, particularly concerning Iraq. Powell insists he didn’t keep any of those messages, but nobody seems too eager to test that convenient assertion.)
Palmieri also addresses the confusion over information that wasn’t classified when Clinton sent it but may have been classified since she left office:
It’s common for information previously considered unclassified to be upgraded to classified before being publicly released [as Clinton’s official emails are being examined, redacted, and released by the State Department]. Some emails that weren’t secret at the time she sent or received them might be secret now. And sometimes government agencies disagree about what should be classified, so it isn’t surprising that another agency might want to conduct its own review, even though the State Department has repeatedly confirmed that Hillary’s emails contained no classified information at the time she sent or received them.
We can expect some partisan figures – like Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and his fellow Republicans on the House Select Committee on Benghazi – to continue to willfully misrepresent these fundamental facts. Gowdy seems to believe that smearing Clinton, using millions of taxpayer dollars, is his job.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, Featured Post, The National Memo, August 13, 2015
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