dagzine's blog

Meet the Press: Plowing the Field (cross-posted on my blog, http://daginventory.blogspot.com)

Ruth Marcus, commenting on Hillary Clinton's success as a woman on this morning's Meet the Press, just now claimed that Clinton has successfully "plowed the field." Marcus was referring to Clinton receiving more primary votes than any other Democratic candidate in history and in doing so achieved more than any other Democrat in history and so more than any other man, yet I think it's worth pointing out

that sexism is built into our everyday language. A dick metaphor is a dick metaphor is a dick metaphor. I suppose we should do more than point it out. If the Clinton campaign has meant anything to me, it is that both Bill and Hillary Clinton have shown how two professional politicians will use any means necessary throughout their careers to stay in the game and win elections.

Hillary is simply not going to be rewarded with a job as a feminist candidate because she and her husband eschewed feminism throughout their marriage for a more traditionally conservative view of the place of men and women in a relationship when Hillary so publicly decided to stand by her man. This is a point that cannot be argued: it is a decision she made, and one that only could have helped him. In other words, she worked for he husband until she thought it was opportune for her to have a career, which just so happened to be after he retired.

For the Clinton campaign to be using tropes of American Misogyny as an excuse for losing the Democratic nomination flattens the complex of feminist discourse into a binary choice: For or Against Hillary Clinton.

To listen to the talking heads address feminism--like David Brody (CBN) and Maureen Dowd from (NYTimes)--is to hear the strain in American Discourse regarding gender. Folks don't want to address it. Maureen Dowd calls it "poppycock." In my opinion, we're flippant. For example: after Ruth Marcus claimed that Clinton plowed the field (of voters) like a man, she chided David Brody for describing Clinton as a whiner.

I am also annoyed with all the talk about "the white vote." And now that we know US elections are about white people, we will ignore that it took a successful black candidate to point it out to us.

Clinton fans, while quick to cry sexism, are not doing much at all to curb the implicit racist attitude constructed in the bargain their candidate asks working class white folks to make with wealthy white folks for their votes and support.

See Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream, "Two Men and a Bargain." This is the bargain rich white folks make with poor white folks: we keep the power and you get to be white. This is the bargain that permits wealthy Americans to locate the stink of American Bigotry in the poor neighborhoods. It unites a working class through hatred of one another: the working class will not unite when it cannot stop arguing about race.