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Post-mortems of the 2008 elections, with many pages dedicated to the women involved, are not in short supply. Examples include Notes from the Cracked Ceiling: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and What It Will Take for a Woman to Win by Washington Post reporter Anne Kornblut, You've Come a Long Way, Maybe: Sarah, Michelle, Hillary, and the Shaping of the New American Woman by broadcast personality Leslie Sanchez and Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.
One of the most recent entries, Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election That Change Everything For American Women, is by Rebecca Traister, author and senior writer for Salon.com. Many excellent reviews have been written already, and I would only be adding to them. I loved the writing, which is clear, coherent and comprehensive. I loved the sentiments, which are personal, political and pointed. And I loved the analysis, which I boil down to this: Maybe we should have been able to predict some of what happened to Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama, but it's unlikely that hindsight would or could have changed a single thing. It all had to happen more or less exactly as it did, we've got a lot of learning to do from it, and we are further along now than we were two years ago.
So instead, I'm offering up the results of a phone interview I conducted with Traister last week. I think you'll find her reflections fascinating.
The Interview with Rebecca Traister
JMZ for BH: How much of Clinton’s “failure” in what she presented was due to how hard the public is to read, both men and women? How much of it (the failure) was due to targeting issues, such as basing strategy on models and time-honored beliefs of how female voters, in the aggregate, act?
RT: I’m not a pollster or political strategist. I’m just telling the story, so the kind of guessing I’ll do is really as a civilian observer. I’ve done a lot of thinking and writing about it, but I've never been on the polling end.
That said, my civilian sense is that while it may be true that voters are hard to read, it’s also true that, and my guess is that the electorate is changing more rapidly than we know.
But I have a larger complaint, that I have with the Democratic party. You can see my piece just published in The Nation, "Democrats: Remember the Ladies!". There’s been historical evidence, the history of women’s issues that led Hillary Clinton’s strategists to act the way they did. It’s easy for me to say this, but I hate the soccer mom stuff, the people pleasing stuff. That’s nuts - [the idea that we] find out what people want you to sell to them, and then sell it.
But the larger point is that I think they were relying on a lot of historical, and in fact what turned out to be dated evidence.
I do believe that there is a renewed appetite, and a re-engagement to talk about gender. Does that mean women are feminists like their moms and grandmoms? No, but I do think that people in politics – and in the Democratic party - have really failed to listen to, since Hillary Clinton ran, [the fact] that 19 million voters supported her. When she became her own candidate and stopped running as a man and [as someone who was] claiming her place in history, and really was allowed to come into her own, rather than be subdued and controlled, there was so obviously an appetite for female leadership. And we see it on the right: the right is selling women on a feminist-friendly message based on the Republican assumption that we like feminists more than we did in the last 30 years and I am very unhappy that Democrats aren’t paying attention to this.
That was probably a mistake that they [the Clinton campaign] made with youth voters but Obama did not. Not reaching out to young women was another mistake – they [the Clinton campaign] relied on outdated assumptions [that caused them to not reach out to young women].
JMZ for BH: Would you say that this change makes candidates have to be more honest, in that they must trust themselves and us to see that while they are women, they are not running because they are women? And
