Using the Sexism on the Left

Zuzu has an interesting post at Shakesville about how the choice of Palin may be an attempt to use the unchecked sexism within the Democratic Party against it:

Right on cue, the sexist attacks against Palin began on the left– which the McCain people were undoubtedly counting on.

Let’s look at how McCain’s selection of Palin fits in to the Rovian playbook. Already, feminists on the left are asking whether McCain thinks that women vote with their vaginas — but that only allows the GOP to turn that back on the Dems and ask why feminists think that Palin was chosen only because she’s a woman. Same with all the “what kind of mother” talk — aren’t Democrats the ones who are supposed to be all for working mothers?

Then there’s all the “Governor Barbie,” bimbo, golddigger, VPILF, CUNTRY, etc. crap. Oh, the Republicans will undoubtedly say, look how much the Democrats value women. All that unity business was a steaming pile of bullshit; they don’t value you when the chips are down.

And what the Republicans will do that the Democrats will not is call out the misogyny against their candidate. I’ve said it before — the Republicans would never, in a million years, stand by and let the media and the party rank-and-file treat one of their female candidates the way that Clinton got treated during the primary.
Thus, they turn a Democratic strength into a weakness. Or, rather, expose it as a weakness.

Now, as to why I don’t think that McCain actually thinks that disaffected Democratic women will flock to him just because he picked a wingnut gun-nut creationist woman with some ethical problems as a running mate: because he doesn’t have to get them to vote for him. He has to get them to stay home in swing states.

And what better way to get them to stay home than pick a running mate who not only helps him with his own base, but whose very physical presence he knows will bring out the misogynist bully boys who made Hillary’s life (and those of her supporters) such hell? The ones who never tire of making it perfectly clear that women who want attention paid to their issues in this election are not welcome in the Democratic Party?

Making it all the more perfect is the fact that Obama is boxed in — if he fails to rein in the football hooligans who comprise his rabid fan base, he will be (rightly) accused of supporting the misogynistic attacks against Palin, but if he publicly reins them in, he will be (rightly) accused of failing to do the same when those attacks were directed against Clinton, which will allow the Republicans to question the legitimacy of the process that put him over the top on the delegate count.

That genie isn’t going back into the bottle, not now.

And all those football hooligan fanboys who’ve turned their unleashed ids onto Palin now that Hillary’s out of the race and in the fold? They’re doing Karl Rove’s work for him. And so are the astroturfers and concern trolls.

I supposed Rove is enough of a snake to think that strategy all the way through — and to see the sexism of the Left/Democrats for what it really is; a dangerous, handy tool to be used against them. Whether he picked the right woman to place in the VP slot is another story, but the idea is plausible.

Continue ReadingUsing the Sexism on the Left

Sarah Palin and John McCain’s Judgment and Health

For progressives and Democrats, there’s lots to dislike about the GOP VP choice Sarah Palin.
As Melissa McEwan notes:

For the record, there is plenty about which to criticize Palin that has absolutely fuck-all to do with her sex. She’s anti-choice, against marriage equality, pro-death penalty, pro-guns, and loves Big Business. (In other words, she’s a Republican.)

Now for me the pro-death penalty and pro-gun stances aren’t a concern, but the rest is, and those two issues are core Democratic platform stances. Much as I dislike the folks at the DailyKos – many items on the list of 45+ Problems for McCain’s VP in just 35 Hours is worth a look.

Palin’s also got some pretty serious ethical problems, the surface of which is Troopergate as Doug Masson explains:

Palin’s sister apparently did not exercise great judgment in choosing her husband, Mike Wooten, a State Trooper. She filed for divorce, and things got ugly. No real political problem there. Messy divorce proceedings aren’t exactly uncommon.

But then, while the divorce was pending, Sarah Palin got elected governor and she and her family began pressuring the State police chief to fire Wooten. The police chief wouldn’t do it, and she fired him. Then she denied that she and her family had been involved in pressuring for Wooten’s termination.

Now she is backtracking on her denial that she pressured for Wooten’s termination, and an investigation has been launched into whether the police chief’s termination was improper.

There are some other ethical questions waiting in the wings to come to light as well that list of 45 problems covers the beginnings of them. I haven’t even begun to read through all those links yet.

Palin also has very little experience governing, and as Paul Begala notes on CNN, that’s a dangerous choice for VP:

Palin a first-term governor of a state with more reindeer than people, will have to put on a few pounds just to be a lightweight. Her personal story is impressive: former fisherman, mother of five. But that hardly qualifies her to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

For a man who is 72 years old and has had four bouts with cancer to have chosen someone so completely unqualified to become president is shockingly irresponsible. Suddenly, McCain’s age and health become central issues in the campaign, as does his judgment.

Emphasis mine. Steve Benen echos that concern:

Palin’s qualifications are, to a very real degree, secondary to the issue at hand. What matters most right now is John McCain’s comically dangerous sense of judgment. He picked a running mate he met once for 15 minutes, who’s been the governor of a small state for a year and a half, and who is in the midst of an abuse-of-power investigation in which she appears to have lied rather blatantly. She has no obvious expertise in any area, and no record of any kind of federal issues. McCain doesn’t care.

Sensible people of sound mind and character simply don’t do things like this. Leaders don’t do things like this. It’s the height of arrogance. It’s manifestly unserious. It’s reckless and irresponsible. It mocks the political process. Faced with a major presidential test, McCain thought it wise to tell an imprudent joke of lasting consequence.

That may sound like a flippant question, but it deserves a serious answer. Is there something wrong with him? Might this be evidence of some kind of impulse problem, as reflected in his shoot-first, think-second approach to foreign policy?

When I think about the respect that John McCain had worked so hard to develop, the stature he’d taken years to cultivate, and the reputation he’d built his career on, it’s breathtaking to see him throw it all away. If there’s a more complete collapse in modern political times, from hero to clown, I can’t think of it.

We’re poised to learn a great deal about Sarah Palin, but we’ve just learned even more about John McCain. He’s fundamentally unsuited for the presidency.

These are all serious and legitimate questions — and ones that deserve some examination and thought. It’s unfortunate that some of the first things out of the gate we’re hearing about from many so-called progressives on the choice of Palin are:

— VPILF.com
I hope I don’t need to explain why that’s sexist asshatery.

former beauty queen/McCain’s new girlfriend
Ditto.

— She has 5 kids! How will she care for them?!
Her husband and nanny are there to help with the kids, same as if she were a guy with five children. And asking the question in the first place is sexist asshatery.

She has a downs syndrome child! How will she care for it?!
Ditto.

Her daughter had the kid, and she’s pretending to be the mom!

OMFG. You’re kidding with this, right? Way to shit on her sixteen-year-old daughter. That’s just ugly, and mean-spirited.

And I know at least one family who handled a teen pregnancy this way. (No, a real family, not Bree Hodge.) I don’t
think it’s my place to pass judgment on a tough situation like that. When a kid needs to be taken care of an a young woman needs to be able to have a young-adulthood and prepare her for her adult life, I can see why some families might decide this is the best thing.

I’ve been breathing fire lately about all of the sexism thrown around in this election — If you’ve truly not seen it — the Shakesville blog has been running multi-part series about this subject throughout the election cycle that have provided more coverage than I ever could:

Hillary Sexism Watch (currently on part #109).

Michelle Obama Racism/Sexism Watch

Obama Racism/Muslim/Unpatriotic/Scary Black Dude Watch

and now:

Sarah Palin Sexism Watch

Continue ReadingSarah Palin and John McCain’s Judgment and Health

Damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t

The day after Hillary Clinton delivered one of the best political speeches in American history — CNN has come out with this bit of fucking loveliness:

(CNN) — What did Hillary Clinton’s body language give away at the Democratic National Convention?
Dan Hill, a body language expert and author of “Face Time,” told CNN that even while the words Clinton delivered offered an unequivocal endorsement of Barack Obama, her body language was much less affirmative.

“When she spoke about Obama, she really did not emote very much,” Hill said. “The only thing she showed was a very weak smile, the cheeks didn’t tend to lift very much, it was really almost what I would call a ‘crocodile smile’ where even the slight corners of the lips sometimes raise into a little bit of a smirk.”

“I don’t think that helped move the 30 percent of her supporters who say they won’t vote for Obama,” Hill added. “What she did do was appeal to voters at large, that she did more emotionally.”

What the hell do you want the woman to do? Fuck Obama on stage to show how much she supports him? Shine his shoes and iron his shirt on stage? Jesus fucking Christ on god damned cracker.

Clinton just can’t fucking win, no matter what she does or says.

It’s like they want her to fucking apologize for running the first place, and they want those of us who voted for her to apologize for doing it.

FUCK THAT NOISE. Fuck it all to hell.

When the mother fuck are Obama supporters going to learn that SHITTING ALL OVER HILLARY AND HER SUPPORTERS IS NOT GOING TO MAKE THEM WANT TO VOTE FOR HIM?

And the notion that there are 30% of her supporters that “aren’t going to vote for him” is bullshit. We’ll all vote for him if we absolutely have to, but we don’t have to like it, because he isn’t the best candidate.

Continue ReadingDamned if she does and damned if she doesn’t

Hating Hillary

Andrew Stephen in the New Statesman:

Gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind has been shamelessly peddled by the US media, which – sooner rather than later, I fear – will have to account for their sins

History, I suspect, will look back on the past six months as an example of America going through one of its collectively deranged episodes – rather like Prohibition from 1920-33, or McCarthyism some 30 years later. This time it is gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind. It has been shamelessly peddled by the US media, which – sooner rather than later, I fear – will have to account for their sins. The chief victim has been Senator Hillary Clinton, but the ramifications could be hugely harmful for America and the world.

I am no particular fan of Clinton. Nor, I think, would friends and colleagues accuse me of being racist. But it is quite inconceivable that any leading male presidential candidate would be treated with such hatred and scorn as Clinton has been. What other senator and serious White House contender would be likened by National Public Radio’s political editor, Ken Rudin, to the demoniac, knife-wielding stalker played by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction? Or described as “a fucking whore” by Randi Rhodes, one of the foremost personalities of the supposedly liberal Air America? Would Carl Bernstein (of Woodward and Bernstein fame) ever publicly declare his disgust about a male candidate’s “thick ankles”? Could anybody have envisaged that a website set up specifically to oppose any other candidate would be called Citizens United Not Timid? (We do not need an acronym for that.)

I will come to the reasons why I fear such unabashed misogyny in the US media could lead, ironically, to dreadful racial unrest. “All men are created equal,” Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed in 1776. That equality, though, was not extended to women, who did not even get the vote until 1920, two years after (some) British women. The US still has less gender equality in politics than Britain, too. Just 16 of America’s 100 US senators are women and the ratio in the House (71 out of 435) is much the same. It is nonetheless pointless to argue whether sexism or racism is the greater evil: America has a peculiarly wicked record of racist subjugation, which has resulted in its racism being driven deep underground. It festers there, ready to explode again in some unpredictable way.

To compensate meantime, I suspect, sexism has been allowed to take its place as a form of discrimination that is now openly acceptable. “How do we beat the bitch?” a woman asked Senator John McCain, this year’s Republican presidential nominee, at a Republican rally last November. To his shame, McCain did not rebuke the questioner but joined in the laughter. Had his supporter asked “How do we beat the nigger?” and McCain reacted in the same way, however, his presidential hopes would deservedly have gone up in smoke. “Iron my shirt,” is considered amusing heckling of Clinton. “Shine my shoes,” rightly, would be hideously unacceptable if yelled at Obama.

Evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, American men like to delude themselves that they are the most macho in the world. It is simply unthinkable, therefore, for most of them to face the prospect of having a woman as their leader. The massed ranks of male pundits gleefully pronounced that Clinton had lost the battle with Obama immediately after the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, despite past precedents that strong second-place candidates (like Ronald Reagan in his first, ultimately unsuccessful campaign in 1976; like Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson and Jerry Brown) continue their campaigns until the end of the primary season and, in most cases, all the way to the party convention.

None of these male candidates had a premature political obituary written in the way that Hillary Clinton’s has been, or was subjected to such righteous outrage over refusing to quiesce and withdraw obediently from what, in this case, has always been a knife-edge race. Nor was any of them anything like as close to his rivals as Clinton now is to Obama.

The media, of course, are just reflecting America’s would-be macho culture. I cannot think of any television network or major newspaper that is not guilty of blatant sexism – the British media, naturally, reflexively follow their American counterparts – but probably the worst offender is the NBC/MSNBC network, which has what one prominent Clinton activist describes as “its nightly horror shows”. Tim Russert, the network’s chief political sage, was dancing on Clinton’s political grave before the votes in North Carolina and Indiana had even been fully counted – let alone those of the six contests to come, the undeclared super-delegates, or the disputed states of Florida and Michigan.

The unashamed sexism of this giant network alone is stupendous. Its superstar commentator Chris Matthews referred to Clinton as a “she-devil”. His colleague Tucker Carlson casually observed that Clinton “feels castrating, overbearing and scary . . . When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.” This and similar abuse, I need hardly point out, says far more about the men involved than their target.

Knives out

But never before have the US media taken it upon themselves to proclaim the victor before the primary contests are over or the choice of all the super-delegates is known, and the result was that the media’s tidal wave of sexism became self-fulfilling: Americans like to back winners, and polls immediately showed dramatic surges of support for Obama. A few brave souls had foreseen the merciless media campaign: “The press will savage her no matter what,” predicted the Washington Post’s national political correspondent, Dana Milbank, last December. “They really have their knives out for her, there’s no question about it.”

Polling organisations such as Gallup told us months ago that Americans will more readily accept a black male president than a female one, and a more recent CNN/Essence magazine/ Opinion Research poll found last month that 76 per cent think America is ready for a black man as president, but only 63 per cent believe the same of a woman.

“The image of charismatic leadership at the top has been and continues to be a man,” says Ruth Mandel of Rutgers University. “We don’t have an image, we don’t have a historical memory of a woman who has achieved that feat.”

Studies here have repeatedly shown that women are seen as ambitious and capable, or likeable – but rarely both. “Gender stereotypes trump race stereotypes in every social science test,” says Alice Eagley, a psychology professor at Northwestern University. A distinguished academic undertaking a major study of coverage of the 2008 election, Professor Marion Just of Wellesley College – one of the “seven sisters” colleges founded because women were barred from the Ivy Leagues and which, coincidentally, Hillary Clinton herself attended – tells me that what is most striking to her is that the most repeated description of Senator Clinton is “cool and calculating”.

This, she says, would never be said of a male candidate – because any politician making a serious bid for the White House has, by definition, to be cool and calculating. Hillary Clinton, a successful senator for New York who was re-elected for a second term by a wide margin in 2006 – and who has been a political activist since she campaigned against the Vietnam War and served as a lawyer on the congressional staff seeking to impeach President Nixon – has been treated throughout the 2008 campaign as a mere appendage of her husband, never as a heavyweight politician whose career trajectory (as an accomplished lawyer and professional advocate for equality among children, for example) is markedly more impressive than those of the typical middle-aged male senator.

Rarely is she depicted as an intellectually formidable politician in her own right (is that what terrifies oafs like Matthews and Carlson?). Rather, she is the junior member of “Billary”, the derisive nickname coined by the media for herself and her husband. Obama’s opponent is thus not one of the two US senators for New York, but some amorphous creature called “the Clintons”, an aphorism that stands for amorality and sleaze. Open season has been declared on Bill Clinton, who is now reviled by the media every bit as much as Nixon ever was.

Here we come to the crunch. Hillary Clinton (along with her husband) is being universally depicted as a loathsome racist and negative campaigner, not so much because of anything she has said or done, but because the overwhelmingly pro-Obama media – consciously or unconsciously – are following the agenda of Senator Barack Obama and his chief strategist, David Axelrod, to tear to pieces the first serious female US presidential candidate in history.

“What’s particularly saddening,” says Paul Krugman, professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton and a rare dissenting voice from the left as a columnist in the New York Times, “is the way many Obama supporters seem happy with the . . . way pundits and some news organisations treat any action or statement by the Clintons, no matter how innocuous, as proof of evil intent.” Despite widespread reporting to the contrary, Krugman believes that most of the “venom” in the campaign “is coming from supporters of Obama”.

But Obama himself prepared the ground by making the first gratuitous personal attack of the campaign during the televised Congressional Black Caucus Institute debate in South Carolina on 21 January, although virtually every follower of the media coverage now assumes that it was Clinton who started the negative attacks. Following routine political sniping from her about supposedly admiring comments Obama had made about Ronald Reagan, Obama suddenly turned on Clinton and stared intimidatingly at her. “While I was working in the streets,” he scolded her, “. . . you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board of Wal-Mart.” Then, cleverly linking her inextricably in the public consciousness with her husband, he added: “I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes.”

One of his female staff then distributed a confidential memo to carefully selected journalists which alleged that a vaguely clumsy comment Hillary Clinton had made about Martin Luther King (“Dr King’s dream began to be realised when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964”) and a reference her husband had made in passing to Nelson Mandela (“I’ve been blessed in my life to know some of the greatest figures of the last hundred years . . . but if I had to pick one person whom I know would never blink, who would never turn back, who would make great decisions . . . I would pick Hillary”) were deliberate racial taunts.

Another female staffer, Candice Tolliver – whose job it is to promote Obama to African Americans – then weighed in publicly, claiming that “a cross-section of voters are alarmed at the tenor of some of these statements” and saying: “Folks are beginning to wonder: Is this an isolated situation, or is there something bigger behind all of this?” That was game, set and match: the Clintons were racists, an impression sealed when Bill Clinton later compared Obama’s victory in South Carolina to those of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 (even though Jackson himself, an Obama supporter, subsequently declared Clinton’s remarks to be entirely inoffensive).

The pincer movement, in fact, could have come straight from a textbook on how to wreck a woman’s presi dential election campaign: smear her whole persona first, and then link her with her angry, red-faced husband. The public Obama, characteristically, pronounced himself “unhappy” with the vilification carried out so methodically by his staff, but it worked like magic: Hillary Clinton’s approval ratings among African Americans plummeted from above 80 per cent to barely 7 per cent in a matter of days, and have hovered there since.

I suspect that, as a result, she will never be able entirely to shake off the “racist” tag. “African-American super-delegates [who are supporting Clinton] are being targeted, harassed and threatened,” says one of them, Representative Emanuel Cleaver. “This is the politics of the 1950s.” Obama and Axelrod have achieved their objectives: to belittle Hillary Clinton and to manoeuvre the ever-pliant media into depicting every political criticism she makes against Obama as racist in intent.

The danger is that, in their headlong rush to stop the first major female candidate (aka “Hildebeast” and “Hitlery”) from becoming president, the punditocracy may have landed the Democrats with perhaps the least qualified presidential nominee ever. But that creeping realisation has probably come too late, and many of the Democratic super-delegates now fear there would be widespread outrage and increased racial tension if they thwart the first biracial presidential hopeful in US history.

But will Obama live up to the hype? That, I fear, may not happen: he is a deeply flawed candidate. Rampant sexism may have triumphed only to make way for racism to rear its gruesome head in America yet again. By election day on 4 November, I suspect, the US media and their would-be-macho commentators may have a lot of soul-searching to do.

Continue ReadingHating Hillary

Resonance

This particular paragraph of Hilary Rosen’s post on continuing to support Clinton hit home for me, and more than explains why I still am supporting Hillary. The emphasis added is mine…

But Hillary’s campaign is still going for every woman who has spoken up in a meeting and was greeted with silence only to have a man say the same thing and be praised. It endures for the mothers who are taking care of their children and their parents and their home and has no time to take care of herself. It endures for women who are so scared to see her fail because of what it may say about their chances in life. And yes folks, it resonates for all the women who have seen the younger guy come along and get the promotion even though she has worked in the company loyally for years.

I can more than identify.

Continue ReadingResonance

Wil Wheaton on Hillary Clinton

One lovely thing that has come out of all the election crap — I’ve pruned a lot of dead wood out of my blog roll. Several supposedly progressive blogs just couldn’t keep their sexist assholishness hidden over the last six months with a female candidate in the race, and have gotten the heave ho – the latest being Wil Wheaton. Sorry, Wil, but you don’t get to tell me what’s a strawman argument.

It’s a shame all these jackhole guys are tarnishing their chosen candidate with their behavior. I was going to be happy to vote for Obama, but now all I can think about is guys comparing Clinton to Fatal Attraction. I don’t think they understand who the villain in that movie actually was, and who was the victim.

But it’s nice – much more time to read books instead.

Continue ReadingWil Wheaton on Hillary Clinton

Press attempting to push Hillary out of the Race

Eric Boehlert at Media Matters for America has some interesting points comparing Hillary’s ongoing campaign to past presidential races:

Looking back through modern U.S. campaigns, there’s simply no media model for so many members of the press to try to drive a competitive candidate from the field while the primary season is still unfolding.

…And the fact is, the media’s get-out-now push is unparalleled. Strong second-place candidates such as Ronald Reagan (1976), Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson, and Jerry Brown, all of whom campaigned through the entire primary season, and most of whom took their fights all the way to their party’s nominating conventions, were never tagged by the press and told to go home.

“Clinton is being held to a different standard than virtually any other candidate in history,” wrote Steven Stark in the Boston Phoenix. “When Clinton is simply doing what everyone else has always done, she’s constantly attacked as an obsessed and crazed egomaniac, bent on self-aggrandizement at the expense of her party.”

…No longer content to be observers of the campaign, journalists now see themselves as active players in the unfolding drama, and they show no hesitation trying to dictate the basics of the contest, like who should run and who should quit. It’s as if journalists are auditioning for the role of the old party bosses.

Shakespear’s Sister refers to this sexist phenomenon as the “take your boobs and go home” media push.

Continue ReadingPress attempting to push Hillary out of the Race

links for 2008-03-01

Continue Readinglinks for 2008-03-01

Election 2008 and Hillary Clinton

A while back I posted about my belief that the media was illustrating a sexist bias against Hillary Clinton in their coverage of election 2008. Erinposte actually collects and documents numerous examples of it here in s fascinating catalog of anti-female hate.

And pop matters has a great list of helpful hints for Hillary, compiled from various media reactions to her campaign.

It’s a great list because it applies not just to Hillary, but to all women out in the workforce today.

It’s okay to appear ambitious. Ambitiousness shows that you’re confident and secure—a leader.

Don’t appear too ambitious; it freaks men out and offends less accomplished women.

Don’t cry, or it will expose you as too weak to lead our fine nation. And, remember, if you cry, then Jesse Jackson, Jr. will accuse you of crying out of self-pity, rather than for Hurricane Katrina victims.

Do cry, because you don’t want to appear unfeeling and robotic; crying humanizes you! And even if you simply well up a bit, they’ll call it crying, anyway, so you may as well let the waterworks flow.

For God’s sake, don’t laugh. Your laugh is a crazy cackle, and whenever you let loose, you’ll be accused of deflecting attention away from an issue you don’t want to confront.

Do laugh, or else people will think you have no sense of humor, and the last president to lack a sense of humor was Nixon—you certainly don’t need that comparison.

Don’t allow fine lines to appear on your face, or Rush Limbaugh, that paragon of GQ handsomeness, will question whether the nation is ready to witness a woman age in office.

Do age naturally, because if you go for cosmetic surgery or even Botox, it will reinforce the perception among some voters that you are not genuine.

Flash some cleavage to remind us you’re a woman.

Cover it up because it’s unseemly for a woman “of a certain age” to dress like a slut.

Wear pantsuits because they make you look both fashionable and authoritative.

Don’t wear pantsuits, because Anna Wintour says not to, and you don’t want to mess with the devil.

Use Bill Clinton to campaign on your behalf because he’s the best there is (or at least he used to be) and people still like the two-for-one deal.

Don’t use Bill Clinton because you ought to run on your own record and, besides, he’s really annoying the crap out of a lot of party leaders.

Refer to yourself as ‘Hillary’ because it makes you seem accessible.

No, refer to yourself as Senator Clinton because it reminds people of your experience.

No, call yourself Hillary Rodham Clinton to show show you maintain an identity separate from your husband’s.

No, call yourself Hillary Clinton (without the Rodham) to show you are committed to your marriage despite all the whispered rumors.

Oh, hell with it, call yourself ‘Hill’. It’s a win-win-win: it makes you one of the gals and it reminds people that you work on Capitol “Hill” and it lets you avoid the whole ‘Clinton’ imbroglio.

Continue ReadingElection 2008 and Hillary Clinton