"The Lady Doesn't Vanish"

I found this blog post, "The Lady Doesn't Vanish," by Hendrick Hertzberg in The New Yorker to be a unique (outside the Obama vacuum) perspective on Hillary Clinton's speech Tuesday night.

"I’m persuaded that the speech was a bad show. Oddly, however, from inside the room—from inside the bunker—it didn’t seem so bad. In fact, in light of the honcho’s preview, it seemed rather good."

"The rest of the speech, so I thought at the time, was indeed more about comforting her supporters than about continuing the fight."

"I’m sure that this speech looked confrontational and intransigent on television in ways that it just didn’t in the hall, inside the bubble. In the hall, you don’t see the speaker in closeup. You see her in the distance, in the midst of a crowd. The effect is communal, not egotistic. There are no replays of selected highlights, no panels of experts. You’re left with a mood, and the mood was calm."

Update: Here is interesting article by Michelle Goldberg in The New Republic about the animosity many women and feminists feel about perceived misogyny and sexism that occurred during the Democratic Primary.

"Feminists who supported Obama were incredulous. Harvard Law professor and civil rights activist Lani Guinier suggests that Clinton's supporters were trying to turn her into the Al Gore of 2008. "It appears that some of Hillary's supporters want to externalize the problem, which is why the analogy to 2000 seems to work," she says. "Then they can say it wasn't anything wrong with her candidacy--instead, it was an injustice that was done to women."

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"I do think [Obama] could talk more about the contributions that feminism has made to this country, from pay equity to basic respect for women, and, in particular, he should acknowledge the legitimate frustrations of women who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s," says Guinier. "The way you speak to people who are in pain is to acknowledge their pain."

Clinton and her feminist supporters, though, also have work to do, because their rhetoric of disenfranchisement has become destructive--witness the chants, during Clinton's speech on the night Obama won the nomination, urging her to continue on to the convention. It would be the grimmest irony imaginable if feminist irredentism helped elect a candidate as anti-feminist as John McCain. In recent weeks, Clinton has fashioned herself as a standard-bearer for women's rights. Ultimately, her work on behalf of Obama will show whether she means it."