Hillary and Sonia Fall, But Not Really

Hillary Clinton fell and fractured her elbow today. Not a painless accident. She had to miss her public appearance with Angelina Jolie, who just so happens to be staying in a house with her family and stay-at-home dad Brad Pitt close to my home in Oyster Bay. There are "sightings" that people upload onto the local newspaper web blog. I missed them by five minutes at the local grocery store one Sunday, but the cashier showed me her cell phone photo of the family.

Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's nominee, for the Souter vacancy on the Supreme Court, also tripped last week, breaking her ankle.

One of those bombastic assholes who makes a lot of money angering people on their radio and television shows--either Rush or Bill or Sean--claimed that Sotomayor fell to get sympathy, and her ankle probably wasn't even broken.

So what's happening to our women? I had dinner last night with a friend who was one of the first women I met when I started college. We've known each other for way over forty years. She was the most athletic of us all--a cheerleader, women's softball, an avid golfer now. She has disc problems that are causing radiating pain down her arms and legs. She's the one I figured would stay in the best shape of any of us. But alas.

Do women have to lose our grace as we age? I don't think so, although several years ago, I tripped in the NYC subway and broke my ankle. Is it that we are rushing too much? Is it that we can't believe that we can't do everything? Is it that we don't know how to slow down, because if we do, we are terrified that we might turn into our mother's?

What's Really Happening

With her approval ratings over 70%, higher than her husband's, Michelle Obama has moved from angry black woman to America's best mother, wife, and First Lady. Not on Fox News, but everyplace else.

Cousin Laura sent me some wonderful photographs this weekend, including this one of Hillary Clinton huddled in a conversation with Michelle Obama. The caption: Bill thought he was president, too!

Prague in the Czech Republic

There is something about the first moment when I see a new city; we arrived at 4:30 in the morning on a Saturday. It was dark, it was snowing as we drove through abandoned streets, not a single car, not a single person, into Old Town where our hotel is located.

These buildings each has a novel inside it, just from the facade without even walking into a hallway.

We had breakfast, Iwent to sleep for two hours, and then I was drawn out of bed and onto the streets.

Prague is a city that was never bombed, so it is medival in architecture. Even the Soviets respected the aesthetic of the city. Each building is unique with statuary, murals on some, metal work, a wooden door. In just an hour, I shot over 65 images. In an hour, I was freezing, because it is cold, chilling to the bone, windy, but so beautiful, so full of a history that remains unknown to me.

I came back to the hotel for another sweater and went out again, walked across the Charles Bridge to the Lesser City, wandered with our friends up and down streets, just taking in the age of everything.

So Hillary is going to be Secretary of State. I wonder how Bill will be kept in check.

So it feels OK to be an American here again. People are excited despite the economic disaster that is spreading all around. The whole world is hoping that this mortal man will succeed.

The Election Aftermath: How Women Might Feel

TheDailyBeast.com, Tina Brown's latest publishing enterprise, published a poll today on how women feel post-election. I don't have the credentials to discern whether the poll is accurate or conforms to the rigor of polling, like the polls analyzed by fivethirtyeight.com, the premiere election site. What it shows is an underlying dissatisfaction among women that women don't get a fair shake in the media, at work, at home, or anyplace.

"By an overwhelming 61% to 19% margin, women believe there is a gender bias in the media."

I agree. I believe that public women are still judged differently than men and often by bizarrely unconscious standards. It doesn't seem to matter whether the judging is coming from men or women. Take Maureen Dowd as an example. She seems to hate all women whether their name is Hillary or Sarah.

"48% of women thought Hillary Clinton received fair media treatment and only 29% believed Sarah Palin was treated fairly."

Hillary has never been treated fairly by the media. She has been portrayed as a bitch, a scold, a ball-buster. When she stood by her man, she was critiqued unmercifully for it by everyone, even the Christian Right. I've met her. She is charming, attentive, shrewd, and brilliant. She lost the primary for many complicated reasons, one of which might have been media bias. But let's not forget her husband Bill and her own reactionary political tactics.

The Sunday before the New York primary on Super Tuesday, I spent the day in bed with my laptop, trying to decide between Clinton and Obama. I didn't find much "dirt" on Obama that day, but a helluva lot about Clinton. Of course, she is married to Bill and had been First Lady under assault from the extreme Right for eight years. She wasn't being paranoid. She was attacked.

However, I disagree with the perception that Sarah Palin was treated unfairly by the press. She was the wrong pick; she didn't have the credentials, the knowledge, or the expertise to be vice president. She was treated as Dan Quayle had been during the Bush I run and presidency. Let's recall that Dan Quayle is best remembered for his attack on the morals of Murphy Brown, a fictional television character.

As reported then in Time: And yet the Vice President dared to argue last week in a San Francisco speech that the Los Angeles riots were caused in part by a "poverty of values" that included the acceptance of unwed motherhood, as celebrated in popular culture by the CBS comedy series Murphy Brown. The title character, a divorced news anchorwoman, got pregnant and chose to have the baby, a boy, who was delivered on last Monday's episode, watched by 38 million Americans. "It doesn't help matters," Quayle complained, when Brown, "a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid professional woman" is portrayed as "mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another 'life-style choice.' "

Quayle was cute and telegenic, just like Palin. He couldn't read a script as well and didn't have her fantastic comedic timing. But Palin didn't have to go on Saturday Night Live. She didn't have to sit through that degrading rap during the news segment. She chose to be a media hog and was properly criticized for her narcissistic desires for attention. If you haven't seen Amy Poehler's rap, click here.

I don't believe it was sexism that brought Sarah Palin down, but her own and McCain's incompetence.

Where I do see sexism, however, is on behalf of the McCain aides who chose to deflect criticism away from how the McCain campaign was run by picking on Palin. John McCain is responsible for his loss, no one else.

We are all weary of the hysteria of the election, yet strangely, I'm longing for the intensity. President-elect Obama is keeping cool in his Chicago transition office, making decisions behind closed doors. Joe Lieberman keeps his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, a decision I deeply regret. Eric H. Holder, Jr. is tapped, perhaps, as Attorney General, a decision I support. Hopefully, the Obama administration won't be Clinton III, although it is looking that way.

What Obama will have to deal with is the rage of women, especially Democratic women, whose fury might have solidified and been named by the inadequate substitution of Sarah Palin for Hillary Clinton. Whether it was the press; the Democratic Party; the men we are living with ( 4 in 10 men freely admit sexist attitudes towards a female president. 39% of men say that a male is “naturally more suited” to carrying out the duties of the office.); our jobs, bosses, and colleagues at work, we know that something was let out of Pandora's Box, according to this survey, and we while we are dealing with our racism, let's deal with sexism, too.

Hillary as Secretary of State: Wait a Minute, What About Bill?

Although the Guardian is saying that Hillary is about to accept the invitation to become the third woman to serve as Secretary of State, I am wondering how she can take this position and not put some restraints on Bill Clinton's ability to raise funds for the Clinton Global Initiative.

According to its own website, the Clinton Global Initiative has pledges from 1,000 entities amounting to $30 billion to "improve the lives of 200 million people in over 150 countries."

That's an awful lot of money. It's not just the Global Initiative, but the Clinton Presidential Library, too. Bill likes to ask people for money. According to the New York Times, Clinton has raised $500 million since he established the Library Foundation in 1998. Last year he collected $10.1 million in speaker's fees. According to The Daily Beast, Bill just collected $500,000 for a single speech in Kuwait. That's even high for Bill.

How can he continue to collect that kind of fealty with her acting on behalf of the United States government?

Yet the Guardian reports that vetting the donations to the foundation is unlikely to cause Hillary a problem.

Back in March 2008, when Hillary was still battling Barack for the Democratic nomination, Bill Bradley (former NBA star, Rhodes Scholar, US Senator from New Jersey, and former contender for the Democratic nomination) worried about the impact of Bill's fundraising on Hillary's ability to run for the presidency against John McCain, if she won the nomination. Here is what Sam Stein reported Bill Bradley said in the Huffington Post:

"I think Barack Obama has a much stronger chance of beating John McCain in the general election. I think Hillary is flawed in many ways, and particularly if you look at her husband's unwillingness to release the names of the people who contributed to his presidential library.

And the reason that is important -- you know, are there favors attached to $500,000 or $1 million contributions? And what do I mean by favors? I mean, pardons that are granted; investigations that are squelched; contracts that are awarded; regulations that are delayed.

These are important questions. The people deserve to know. And we deserve, as Democrats, to know before a nominee is selected, because we don't want things to explode in a general election against John McCain."

Ummmm. Transparency?

Things I'd Like to Forget About the 2008 Election

I wish I could say that my anxiety levels have decreased after the Election, but as one colleague said to me today: What's the matter with you? Aren't you exhilarated?

That's when my deeply neurotic self appeared. Yes, I celebrated like everyone else on Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. I had spent an exhausting yet inspiring thirteen hours at the polls making sure that the promise of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was fulfilled. I cried, I laughed, I hugged and kissed strangers. I listened to people's stories and began to believe that a new America was dawning.

Then when I saw just how exhausted Barack Obama seemed at Grant Park, I began to worry again. Will this mortal man drown in the world's expectations?

By this morning, when I read about the U.S. bombing of the wedding party in Afghanistan killing 40 and injuring 28, I was almost back to 2001-2006 anxiety levels.

With advice from a social worker friend, I am about to shed some burden. I have decided to purposefully forget specific things about this election season.

First and foremost, I want to forget about Sarah Palin, her husband Todd, her pregnant teenage daughter, her newborn, and all of the other members of the Palin brood. According to the Anchorage Daily News, November 5, 2008, Alaska, too, is hoping to forget about the Sarah Palin who appeared on the national scene pandering to Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder, calling Obama a terrorist and a socialist, and assuming that her conservative values were best for everyone. As the McCain team begins the nasty process of distancing itself from the "Wasilla Hillbillies," who looted Neiman Marcus from coast to coast, more reasons to reduce Sarah Palin to a flash in the pan of celebrity politics will surface. Like her answering the door to her hotel room dressed only in a towel when Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter, top McCain aides came a calling.

Jordan, my husband, is staking his reputation on never hearing about any wedding between Sarah's pregnant teenage daughter Bristol and that hockey-playing boyfriend Levi.

Like Tina Fey, I will be happy to allow Sarah Palin to fade into memory, although I suspect that one of two things will happen. She will either bone up on her geography (Fox News reported that she didn't know Africa was a continent) and try to convince the last vestiges of the slain and defeated Republican Party's ultra-right, Confederate-based, fundamentalist Christian wing that she could have been a contender, and should be a contender in 2012. Or more likely she will become a talk show host or pundit on Fox News for a day and a half. And then, we will never hear from her again.

I can also let go of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. But not for the content of his sermons, which I didn't find offensive. And not for the passion, disappointment, regret, anger, despair that he communicated in the sermons that were somehow mysteriously discovered and uploaded onto YouTube when Barack Obama was first emerging as a serious candidate. I don't believe that any white person, myself included, has the right to dismiss, let alone judge, the emotions and experience of being an African American living in the United States. Certainly I have no right to call those feelings un-American, since they are the result of being treated as an outsider in one's own country.

The appearance of the Rev. Wright YouTube videos forced Obama to speak about race in the heat of the Democratic primary season, and that turned out to be a good thing for him and for our country. His March 18, 2008 speech in Philadelphia was a turning point in the campaign.

Race was out in the open for the first time. For Obama, he began to attract the attention of African American voters who had previously kept their allegiance with the Clintons. Afterall, Bill Clinton had been crowned the "first black" president, because of the scrutiny he withstood throughout his two terms in office. ( The label is properly attributed to Toni Morrison from an October 1998 essay in The New Yorker. ) After Philadelphia, Obama was finally black.

I fretted. I worried then big time that this would be the end of him. But it wasn't. It all fell aside until last weekend when I was in Tucson and turned on MSNBC. There it was: the horrendous 527 ad from the National Republican Trust featuring the Rev. Wright once again, intending one thing: to scare people in Arizona and across the battleground states into fearing Obama as some kind of radical. Thankfully, it didn't work.

Lastly, I'd like to forget the Hillbilly Hillary phase of the Democratic Primary season. I've always admired Hillary Clinton. I got to meet her back when she was still First Lady during her "listening" tour of New York when she was deciding whether to run for the Senate. I met her at Mario's Pizza where she kindly and thoughtfully spoke to my then ten year old daughter. I've heard her speak before partisan crowds, at the New York Democratic Women's luncheons, where I stood and clapped and called out approvingly. I've heard her speak before mixed audiences where she showed how smart and hard working she has been for her constituents.

Up until Super Tuesday, I wasn't sure whether I would vote for Hillary or Barack. I wanted a different tone to politics, I wanted an engaged electorate that included everyone, especially young people, so I cast my primary ballot for Barack Obama. Then I worried that I had made a mistake. My daughter berated me late into the night, screaming at me for betraying my desire to see a woman in the White House as president.

Then Hillary went hillbilly. Not surprisingly on March 18th, the same day Barack Obama delivered his moving speech about the role of race in America. By April, Hillary was downing beers to try to prove, despite her Wellesley College and Yale Law School degrees, that she was one of the people. This was code, of course, for Hillary trying to become the candidate of white working people. She changed her rhetoric to try to paint Obama as an inexperienced elitist.

Even Bill, the first black president, went down the tubes. I remember the night before the Iowa caucus. My daughter and I watched a speech on C-Span that Bill gave in an Iowa high school gym. He spoke about why people should vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton. He never used the word "wife." We cried together. We marveled at how smart he is, how smart she is. I adored Bill Clinton until South Carolina.

I want to remember Hillary Clinton as a sophisticated, smart, savvy woman who wanted to be the first woman president of the United States, but because we shouldn't have dynasties, missed her chance. She is a great Senator, she is a great person, and she certainly has a lot to offer us in her public life. But let's forget the hillbilly phase.

Maybe I will be able to sleep tonight.