Why I’m Supporting Hillary Clinton, With Joy and Without Apologies
Joy? Really?
I’ve come to feel passion for Clinton herself, and for the movement that supports her.
Uh huh.
Hillary is the passion candidate.
Well, for the girls' club, anyway.
“Do you think women—especially women—are ready to vote for a woman?” a young woman in Toulouse asked me nervously.
“Yes,” I told her. Then I added, reassuringly: “Yes, we are.”
Faced with her anxiety—and I admit I could be projecting across cultures here—I did something in France I don’t often do at home: I came out of the closet as a full-fledged Hillary Clinton supporter.
And this time, as opposed to 2008, I’m backing her without apology, as the right and even radical choice.
More than without apology; after 40 years of voting for male presidents, I’m supporting Hillary with excitement, even joy.
It's all about the lady parts.
Consider this revealing stretch of prose.
Had I not declared myself last week, in a Toulouse university lecture hall, I’d have probably done it here anyway, after watching the CNN Democratic presidential town-hall meeting Monday night.
. . . .
But one moment got me particularly excited, and not in a good way.
It came when a young white man—entitled, pleased with himself, barely shaving yet—broke the news to Clinton that his generation is with Bernie Sanders.
“I just don’t see the same enthusiasm from younger people for you. In fact, I’ve heard from quite a few people my age that they think you’re dishonest. But I’d like to hear from you on why you feel the enthusiasm isn’t there.”
“I’d like to hear from you on why you feel the enthusiasm isn’t there.”
I’m not sure I can unpack all the condescension in that question.
I heard a disturbing echo of the infamous 2008 New Hampshire debate moment when a moderator asked Clinton: “What can you say to the voters of New Hampshire on this stage tonight, who see a resume and like it, but are hesitating on the likability issue?”
Yes, the “likability” issue.
I found myself thinking: Not again.
Why the hell does she have to put up with this again?
Of course, it's not about likability.
As far as that goes, if recent news is right, the Bern is personally unloved and unlovable even among his liberal peers.
So that one is probably a wash.
But the kid was talking about enthusiasm, and he was telling the truth.
And Hill's dodgy reputation even among Democrats for dishonesty, and that's also the truth.
Come to that, isn't the person being slammed hardest about likability in this primary season Ted Cruz?
And Kathleen Parker has a different take altogether on that kid and his question.
My problem wasn’t merely with the insulting personal tone of the question.
It was also the way the young man anointed himself the voice of his generation, and declared it the Sanders generation.
Now, I know Bernie is leading among millennials by a lot right now in the polls.
Nonetheless, millions of millennials, including millions of young women, are supporting Hillary Clinton.
And my daughter, as Nation readers know, is one of them.
I find it increasingly galling to see her and her friends erased in this debate.
Hmm.
Imagine the dismay of the YAF kids when hippies, radicals, feminists, and sexual revolutionaries like Joan, back in the day, claimed to speak for the entire 60's generation.
And after that bit we get paragraph upon paragraph of the mom Joan waving her finger, almost in tears, angrily demanding "Don't you dare ignore my daughter, you, you beardless boy!"
Anyway, besides considering the above hysterical mom remarks, go back and look at Joan's uninhibited enthusiasm for Nelson Mandela when he was using race to sell communism, or maybe it was communism to sell race.
She barely noticed the communism part, and for her while the Cold War was nearly imaginary the global struggle of non white peoples to free themselves from the terrible yoke of white racist men, mostly so that they could be immediately subjected to the much worse tyrannies of rule by locals who (Oh Joy!) were not white even if they were men, was the cause of the century, the arc of history bending toward justice.
Really? The Boxer Rebellion? Apartheid and the Belgian Congo? You want to go there?
Then think Khmer Rouge, the Shining Path, Rwandan genocide, or even Robert Mugabe.
For that matter, think Mao and the red emperors or Uncle Ho and the reds of Vietnam.
Phooey.
Joan is and always has been all about the tribe, all about having the right identity.
For her, the choice between Hillary and Barack was a terrible, wrenching choice between a woman and a black man.
Lucky for her, the choice between Hillary and Bernie is an easy choice between a woman and a white man.
And old white man, at that.
Eight years ago . . . I was genuinely torn about not supporting the amazing African-American senator running in the primary against her.
This time, I feel a slight twinge of regret that I’m not supporting the socialist [Jewish and from Brooklyn, she later explains] in the race . . . but it’s not at all the same.
As for Bernie calling Planned Parenthood part of the establishment, she has this to say about the absolute centrality of a woman's right to kill her unborn children to her radicalism.
Which brings me to another reason I’ve felt compelled in the last week to come out publicly and forcefully for Clinton, which is Sanders’s dismissing Planned Parenthood’s endorsement (and that of NARAL Pro-Choice America) by labeling them part of the “establishment.”
I appreciated Sanders supporter Kathy Geier’s acknowledgment here in The Nation that her candidate once again came off as tone-deaf on an issue of gender.
Yet Geier seconded Sanders’s assertion that these two groups fighting for reproductive justice deserve to be termed “establishment”—and therefore unfavorably compared to the upstart, grassroots, and genuinely radical groups that back Sanders.
I just don’t see it that way.
I think there are few issues as radical as advancing the reproductive autonomy of women.
And I think it’s hard to be truly establishment when dangerous men are shooting up your clinics, and the Republican Congress is persistently voting to strip you of your funding.
Months and months ago I said Joan and the sisterhood would not support Bernie, that old white guy.
And so it came to pass.
Read Joan's entire piece.
From here to the end it's nothing but girl identity stuff, triumphant at last.
And she finishes up a bitter virago.
I’m tired of seeing her confronted by entitled men weighing in on her personal honesty and likability, treating the most admired woman in the world like a woman who’s applying to be his secretary.
I’m stunned anew by the misogyny behind the attacks on her, and her female supporters, including my daughter.
I’m sick of the way so many Sanders supporters, most of them men, feel absolutely no compunction to see things through female Clinton supporters’ eyes, or to worry they might have to court us down the road, take special care not to alienate us lest we sit the race out in November, if our candidate loses.
Of course we won’t do that; we’re women!
We’re trained to think about everybody else’s needs first.
It’s not just that: women will be hurt the most by a GOP presidency.
Naturally, I will back Sanders if he’s the nominee. I promise I’ll eventually feel joy about it—after grieving, if Clinton were to lose again.
But if that were to happen, it wouldn’t be because I was too busy protecting my lefty bona fides to say I support her, enthusiastically, this time around.
I stand with a lot of women who feel the same way, including my daughter, and we won’t be erased.
Oh, there's a new movie out about a very remarkable life involving achievements unmatched by anyone to this day, achievements of the Olympics of 1936 and the years around that.
Achievements and an exemplary life that were possible for a black man in America during the years of segregation, Jim Crow, and the triumphant racism of the South.
But given the recent bio of Martin Luther King, I won't vouch for the film's veracity or even promise it isn't a lying, hate filled, racist diatribe against America and American whites.
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