Oh, My!

Chelsea Clinton campaigned for her mother, Senator Hillary Clinton,  with this tag: “I want her for my president!”

To this, I reply with a simple,  onomotopaeic cry:   Eeeeuwwww!!!  Having suffered nearly eight years of Republican misrule under GW Bush, I cringe at the notion of a “personal president.”  Chelsea’s creepy locution echoed dangerously close to the evangelical notion of a “personal savior.”  But maybe Chelsea’s tic is yet another Protestant conceit.  Hyper-individualistic Protestants own their Jesus.  He’s an individual, i.e.  “mine.”  By extension, the next highest-ranking authority figure, the President, similarly becomes “mine.”

Having been raised Catholic,  the concept of personal possession of  Jesus,  much less the U.S. President, seems alien, if not outright weird.  In Catholicism,  neither God, nor his Son, nor  the Son’s Mother, Mary,  were claimed as “mine.”  They were “ours.”  Or, the world’s.  Or, belonging to and creatures of and belonging ever after, to eternity, if you will.

So, in keeping with my lapsed Catholic theology, the President of the U.S.  is simply “the” President.”  Or, at worst, “our” president.  I would never claim him (or her) as mine. Even Obama!  How on earth does one assign a personal, possessive pronoun to an institution?  The Executive Branch?  It’s not “mine.”  It’s ours.  As in, the People’s.

Guilt By Association

My Chicago connections keep rearing up and biting me on the bottom, this time when Hillary Clinton’s attack machine clubbed Barack Obama with his not-for-profit connection to Bill Ayers. In the 21st century Bill and wife Bernardine Dohrn had become mainstream political fixtures in Chicago, doing good work around education and children’s issues. They have led a positively tame life. Bill and his late father frequently took Bill’s kids to Cubs games, and Bill and Bernardine burst with pride when their kids made it to the Ivy League–and won a Rhodes Scholarship. But in the eyes of media and political scandal-mongers, mere “association” with aging radicals is enough to taint one for life. This has me worried. It also has me grinning at the irony.

I worry because my husband Monte recently “associated” with Bill Ayers at a dinner in Chicago. The host is a relative of Bills, and Bill had dropped by for a visit. Recalling the dinner, I immediately fretted that Monte’s recent “association” with Bill might imperil my chances of election to the PTA .

I grin, however, at the irony of at my own long-ago “association” with Bill and Bernardine. I met them at an election night party in November 1992 celebrating Bill Clinton’s Presidential victory returning a Democrat to the White House. Bernardine was distracted by residual pain from a wisdom tooth extraction, but Ayers was ebullient, and chucked our infant daughter under the chin. Both cheered elatedly when the networks called it for Clinton.

Oh, and where was Barack Obama in 1992? Spearheading a voter registration drive in Chicago–to help elect Bill Clinton.

Known Associates

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” so goes the old saw. My political bona fides span four decades, three states, and two continents. Here are some of the public figures whose paths I’ve crossed since my Missouri childhood.

Our Catholic Archbishop for the Springfield-Cape Girardeau Archdiocese in the 70s and 80s was a Bostonian named Bernard Law. The Vatican sent a series of up-and-comers through that Ozarks posting, a hardship position and a great training ground for Bishops of potential rising through the ranks. Truly the “buckle of the Bible Belt,” Springfield boasted the world headquarters of the international Assemblies of God, sponsor of the local affiliate Evangel College. Two other fundamentalist colleges graced our fair city, Central Bible College, and Baptist Bible College (alma mater of the late Jerry Falwell.) The President of Evangel College in whose years was a man named Ashcroft, whose son graduated the Springfield public schools before heading off to Yale, and Yale Law, of whom more later.

Bishop Law’s predecessor, a kindly, bald and bespectacled fellow named Baum, bounded off to Rome from Springfield, landing a high level policy job and his Cardinal mitre with barely an intermediate stop in Kansas City. The Vatican welcomed him as “Cardinelli Boom.” Cardinal Law also launched his rocket climb up the hierarchy from his seat as Archbishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau. After Springfield, Bishop Law rose to Cardinal and Archbishop of Boston, where, sadly, he gained notoriety for his morally bankrupt, his politically inept, obstructionist rejection of allegations of priestly child abuse in his archdiocese. Law ended up in Rome, after all, put out to a pasture by a Vatican desperate to keep him out of sight and equally desperate to quell the Catholic public uproar.

My connection to Law dated back in the mid-1970s, when Law was counselling my sweetheart Mike S. (who dubbed Law “Bernie”) during Mike’s years in priesthood prep at St. Meinrad’s Seminary in rural Indiana. Bernie often reminded Mike that Bernie, originally from Boston, attended Harvard before he enrolled in his own ecclesiastical studies. Bernie spoke of those years with a wink-and-a-nudge, innuendo that was reassuring to a seminarian struggling with a future of forced celibacy. I recall Mike taking me by Law’s archdiocesean offices in downtown Springfield for an introduction and visit, and I would like to believe no wink or nudge passed between the men that day.

Incidentally, Mike’s late father, a public school educator, was a social studies teacher in his early career. One of his prized students at Study (rhymes with “Judy”) Junior High, on Springfield’s North side, was none other than the young John Ashcroft. As he lay ill with cancer, Mr. S. still referred to Ashcroft fondly as one of “his boys.” By then, Ashcroft had been elected to county, then statewide office,well on his way on the trajectory that (he credited Jesus for fueling) put him in the Attorney General’s seat in George W. Bush’s first term. I later wondered whether then-Missouri Attorney General Ashcroft ever met with then Bishop Law, in those quiet years before both burst onto the national scene. My father played pick-up basketball games with Ashcroft from time to time from the 1960s through the 1980s on the campus of what was then Southwest Missouri State College. Ashcroft avoided the draft by teaching business at SMS for a few years in the 60s; my dad was an English lit. prof. there his whole career.

My mother attended Wal-Mart shareholder’s meetings in Arkansas in the 1980s. She met Bill Clinton at one such meeting. Mom described looking up at the “best looking man she’d ever seen.” Bill Clinton taught my friend Marin’s Constitutional Law class at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville in the 1980s. Marin did not ask Professor Clinton for a reference at the end of the semester. Marin’s friend, who did, won a cushy job at State in 1993.

In the late 80s, my Chicago chum E. became the first chief of staff for a newly-created ABA Commission on the Status of Women in the Law, whose champion and creator was the wife of Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, his Yale Law School classmate Hilary Rodham. Rodham added “Clinton” to her name, made her fortune in commodities trading, left her mark on the ABA, then returned to Arkansas to tackle the state’s education system. E.stayed at the ABA, but moved from the Commission on Women into the Torts division by the mid-1990s. By 1992, Governor Bill embarked on his presidential campaign, back in the days the primary season stretched from February to August. E. and her then-husband, an aspiring Chicago Alderman , hosted a series of small gatherings to introduce candidate Bill Clinton to the locals providing my one and only chance to meet Mrs. Clinton. I saw her up close in an event at the executive offices of the YWCA in early April of that year.

Ah, the Chicago years. Those were the days. My book group included the future wife of Rahm Emmanuel.My closest friend in Chicago–who coincidentally attended high school with Rahm–married a speechwriter for a Democratic presidential frontrunner. Our 1988 Wedding guest roster included one sitting and one future member of Congress; several Illinois legislators, one sitting and one future Chicago Aldermen; the eventual chief of Staff to mayor Daley; an eventual Evanston School Board Member; Congressional staffers; policy wonks, and various other unsavory types. I had been an attorney for the City of Chicago in the exciting days of the progressive administration of Harold Washington, the Black mayor of Chicago who unseated the political machine.The following year I went to work for the venerable Leon M. Despres, who had been the most notable and accomplished dissident Alderman to oppose the first Mayor Daley in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. In 1990 my husband, who had worked for a Congressman, then an alderman, then as a lobbyist for a consumer group, was a volunteer fundraiser and supporter of the upstart U.S. Senate campaign of the late, great Paul Wellstone.

These days, my connections are remote, the politics tame. Having moved to Australia for three key years in the late 90s, then relocated to the Washington, DC area on return stateside, the Chicago glory days of political elbow-rubbing are but a distant memory. These days I even have to scrape up connections to Republicans: my mother-in-law’ friendship with Richard Armitage’s mother-in-law; my brother’s former job as pitchman for Amway products under Doug Wead, who later becaume a staffer in George W. Bush’s first term; or my college chum who served as a town council member in her Pittsburgh suburb.

The elected officials I now encounter run along the lines of our PTA executive board. In a company town where government is the industry, rubbing elbows with politicians seems like work–and triggers yawns, not thrills. Oh, I’m officially a “Friend” of an impressive freshman member of Maryland’s House of Delegates, Tom Hucker. And I finally stepped up to the plate to campaign for Donna Edwards, an exciting progressive challenger to our sclerotic incumbent Congressman. True, my oldest and dearest friend in DC is an elected official, but ours is a personal, and not political, connection. I have fun tweaking her Hill colleagues when they see us together at dinner,especially when they appear to worry that I’m “someone” they should remember.

My dear Chicago friend’s husband still writes those Presidential campaign speeches, but most of the elected officials at our wedding have left office. Chicago Mayor Harold Washington died 20 years ago November. We lost our beloved Paul and Sheila Wellstone in 2002. My husband went back to work for the Aussies last year, and I practice law just part-time, on contract, for Maryland and DC employment lawyers who support good Democrats. Politics should be essential, urgent, and vivid. But these days I’m blogging, opining, listing known associates. Taking stock alongside, no longer inside, politics.

Gloria Gets It Wrong

Gloria Steinem’s rant in yesterday’s New York Times, apparently written over the weekend, may have been the second most popular op-ed piece in the Times this week, but not because she was right–or accurate. Except for the brief few days of post-victory bounce enjoyed by Senator Barack Obama between the Iowa caucus and yesterday’s New Hampshre primary, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has been the front runner in nearly every national and local poll of likely Democratic voters. Forget her high negatives; never mind nagging voter concerns about “electability;” Clinton has been the top choice of the plurality, if not majority, of self-identified Democrats for many months. So Steinem’s tirade about women “never” being “front-runners” rings false, and sounds whiny.

Steinem also misses the mark with her attack on Senator Obama’s biography. In the guise of a thought experiment interrogating the role of gender, Steinem huffily demands whether a woman with an identical c.v. might claim the “biography of someone who could be elected to the United States Senate?”

Has Steinem now forgotten that in long-ago 1992, the same year Bill Clinton won the Presidency, the good people of Illinois elected an African American woman to the United States Senate? Remember Carol Moseley-Braun? Senator Moseley-Braun, a lawyer and former state legislator, was born and raised and made her political base on the South Side of Chicago. Unlike Steinem’s fictitious “Achola Obama,” Mosely-Braun boasted no Ivy League degrees, although she graduated from the top-ranked University of Chicago Law School. Also unlike her fictional counterpart, Moseley-Braun hailed from an intact, African-American family. Moseley-Braun was, however, divorced–from a white ex-husband, with whom she had a son. During her senate term she forged an exceedingly a close attachment to her chief of staff whose first name, Kgose, was at least as exotic as either “Barack” or Steinem’s made-up moniker, “Achola.” Finally, if memory serves, Moseley-Braun in 2003 formed an exploratory committee as she pondered a run for the presidency.

Neither race nor gender “restricted” Moseley-Braun in her race for the U.S. Senate. In fact, she was the beneficiary of widespread feminist and civil rights-activist based outrage at incumbent Senator Alan Dixon’s judiciary committee vote in favor of Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court. And, yes, her presidential trial balloon fell absolutely flat. No one ever touted Moseley-Braun for her charisma, but look how far she went nonetheless? No goose-cooking there.

No question, 20th century American voters traditionally discounted women seeking high political office, strong or not. I vividly recall the late Harriet Woods describing her 1982 campaign against [the phlegmatic] John Danforth for the U.S. Senate seat in Missouri. Her polling revealed that the majority of Missouri voters would never elect “a woman” at the head of a ticket, irrespective of “qualifications,” “charisma,” “experience,” or even party identification. By 1982 Woods was already an elected Lieutenant Governor, a post she had handily won, and had served with distinction in St. Louis county politics. Still, the voters had a visceral reaction against elevating her to the top. And Danforth, who was Missouri’s incumbent Attorney General (where he mentored a young Yale Graduate named Clarence Thomas; see above), sailed to victory.

So who now holds that very U.S. Senate seat in Missouri? A woman, former Missouri Auditor/Attorney General/Jackson County Prosecutor Claire McCaskill, elected in the Democratic sweep of 2006. McCaskill is one tough cookie, an ambitious, savvy, career politician who was already in the Missouri State House of Representatives back in 1982.

Like Missouri’s Democrats, millions of American voters act ready to knock back the phantom “sex barrier” Steinem divined in the Iowa results. Together with her friends and allies, Steinem, a fearless second-wave feminist foremother, achieved so much in the latter third of the 20th century. She rallied and organized and exhorted and cajoled women and men alike, to name, and then resist the sexism, patriarchy, and gender oppression that held women back and prevented a just society. Look how much we’ve gained! Here we are, with a woman front-runner! I just wish Steinem would step back and take credit for the successes her movement achieved.

Smart Girls

Glenn Greenwald made this observation today in his roundup of press reports of and blogger reactions to an otherwise minor Iowa campaign trail snippet:

Just contrast the frosty, petulant reception they gave Hillary when she entered their bus with the way White House press reporters at the President’s news conferences, for years, cackle at his every attempt at humor and light up with glee when he deigns to engage them in his insulting frat-boy repartee. But in contrast to George the Popular Jock to whom they’re grateful for any attention, Hillary is the overly competitive, know-it-all girl at the front of the class with all the answers, and so instead of acting like professionals and just treating like her like a candidate running for President, and taking the opportunity to ask questions when she entered the bus, they instead band together like they’re in eighth grade and give the mean, unpopular girl the cold shoulder.

Is it any wonder that Hillary never boards the press bus? Personally, I’d rather be in Siberia than be in Iowa around all of that.

Hoo, boy, does that trigger rotten memories of my Ozarks grade school, junior high, and high school years in the 60s and 70sl! Like Glenn, I don’t have to support Hillary to be pained and disgusted by the story. (We know-it-all Seven Sister grads still need to stick together!) I’m disgusted to see that pack anti-intellectualism still reigns supreme, and pained to be reminded of behaviors I’d hoped to escape when I left Missouri more than 30 years ago.

Unlike Glenn, I don’t conflate “mean” with “smart.” A brainy girl who knows the answers was bound to be unpopular in 1960, but not necessarily because she was “mean.” I still recall, vividly, the hatred directed across the classroom toward my eagerly waving hand. The meanness came at me, not from me. Our freshman civics teacher, Coach Roweton, chided three of my female classmates who equaled or out-scored me on pop quizzes: “Donna, Peggy, you’re hiding your intelligence,” he’d say. Donna and Peggy were no dummies. Coach was right about that. Each shrewdly kept her light under a bushel, knowing full well the key to popularity was an apparently empty head. I can’t speak to classroom dynamics in Park Ridge, Illinois, but I have to imagine that it wasn’t far ahead of Parkview High School a decade later. Like Hillary, I fled the hostile middle west for an all-women’s college out East where achievement from young women was expected, not resented.

And, like Hillary, I’ve had to learn the hard way that, no matter how far we flee, lots of folks still dislike gals who know stuff. Having been chided at Washington dinner parties for my command of “facts,” I know all too well the malice aimed toward the female, gifted, and smart. “Walking dictionary” is still an epithet, not an accolade.

There was an internet joke circulating a few years back, calculating the comparative dollars/per/second earned by Michael Jordan versus Bill Gates. “Nerds rule!” they chortled. But smart, confident girls? Rule? Remains to be seen.

Experience

United States Senator and former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton touts herself as one of the most “experienced” candidates in the Democratic field. Dana Milbank’s quote in today’s Washington Post profile of her campaign is typical: “Her ‘35 years of experience’ make her ‘the best-qualified and experienced person to hit the ground running.’” Here’’s the link to the full story:href=”http://http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/08/AR2007120801442.html”>

In addition to her own formidable accomplishments–Yale Law, Watergate Committee, children’s advocacy with Marian Wright Edelman, partner at Rose Law Firm, ABA committee work–Senator Clinton heavily underscores the “experience” she gained through opportunites created by her marriage to an elected official–the Governor of a small southern state turned two-term President. More practiced pundits have tried to puncture that balloon by noting that former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson wins the resume sweepstakes, and that Senators Dodd and Biden both have logged far more years in Congress than Senator Clinton.

Well, of course she’s no Lurleen Wallace, pushed stumbling into the Alabama governorship her term-limited husband could no longer fill, and widely viewed a pawn or puppet of George Wallace’s political machine. Nor is Senator Clinton comparable to Missouri’s Jean Carnahan, who also touted experience from her long marriage and active political partnership with her late husband, Governor Mel Carnahan, but was also pushed forward to fill in for a husband tragically killed before he could complete his own Senate campaign. No one doubts Senator Clinton’s very own and very real drive, ability, policy smarts, ambition, and discipline. No one drafted her on short notice to fill someone else’s shoes.

So why does it stick in my craw that she claims credit for, and “experience” based on the happenstance of being (or, perhaps more accurately, staying) married to Bill Clinton? I finally put my finger on the source of my unease as I revised my own resume in connection with recent job hunting.

I’ve been married nearly 20 years to a finance professional. For nearly 18 of the 20 years he has advised and educated pension fund trustees. More recently he has worked with pension funds on the “sell” side, setting up a US office for an overseas company that makes investments on behalf of its union-owned pension funds. I’ve read my husband’s speeches, met his colleagues, attended conferences, edited his research papers, followed pension fund stories in the business press and popular press, and developed a pretty good, albeit not particularly sophisticated, understanding of some of the issues, strategies, and concerns facing Taft-Hartley jointly trusteed pension funds, public employee pension funds, and other similar institutional investors.

And, if I tried to apply for work in the pension fund industry, based on my so-called “experience,” I guarantee you I’d be hooted out of the room. I might have been by his side, but I wasn’t the one hired for those jobs. And while Hillary Rodham Clinton sat through cabinet meetings, set up shop in the East Wing, and traveled on taxpayer-funded trips all over the world, no one “hired” her for or “elected” her to the job.

And herein lies the feminst’s dilemma. On one hand, a major part of the feminist struggle was to put a stop to derivative status and identity. Calling oneself “Mrs. John Smith” went out with Black and White TV. We middle class, Seven Sister college-educated professionals marched forth to create our own identities, build our own resumes, take credit for our own achievements, and not rely on “some man” for any of that. Senator Clinton has plenty of achievements, for many of which she deserves full–and sole–credit.

Yet another component of feminism was to assign value and meaning and worth to the very real, but also often invisible, unpaid “work” of being the supportive spouse. Years ago the wife of the former president of the University of Massachusetts created quite a stir when she refused to take on the formerly unpaid duties of the president’s wife unless given a title, a salary, and the ability to limit the hours she was expected to be on call as hostess, fund-raiser, and all around assistant to the President.

Our First Lady drew no salary for her very real work in that role, but she wouldn’t have been in that position but for being “Mrs. Bill Clinton.” I have a friend from law school who is married to a six-term member of Congress, but my friend is also a partner in a major U.S. law firm. Under the Hillary Clinton model, my friend could run for Congress when the spouse retires, claiming “experience” from 20 years of marriage to the Member. Somehow I don’t think the voting public in their district would buy it. Regarding Mrs. Bill Clinton, I’m not ready to buy it, either.