Only days after the presidential election, I began receiving emails from the Democratic National Committee’s Organizing for America — formerly Obama for America. Several times a week, they implored me to show my support for this or that presidential initiative, and to send money. Such an email arrived a half hour after the president delivered his health care speech last week. “Judith,” it began. “I just finished laying out my plan for health reform at a joint session of Congress. Now, I’m writing directly to you because what happens next is critical — and I need your help.”

As always, I deleted it.

Death row inmates need my help, I thought. Teenagers trying to get late-term abortions need my help. Barack Obama, presidential candidate, needed my help. And on election night, when the TV maps turned blue and a text message appeared on my cellphone signed “Your friend, Barack,” I was thrilled — and proud that I had done my part.

But President Barack Obama, Leader of the fucking free world, needs my help? Dear OFA: I’ll get back to you.

Actually, he probably does. If you doubt this, go back to YouTube and watch those Republicans glaring from the well of Congress last week, their teeth (and, probably, their buttholes) clenched as the Democrats cheered.

Still, something in me recoils at the thought of supporting the president.

It’s not that I’m disillusioned. Sure, Obama has turned out to be a centrist. That’s because he was always a centrist — bohemian mother, Kenyan father and community-organizing stint notwithstanding. Whoever thought they were voting for a man of the left had not heard a word the candidate said on the campaign trail.

It’s not that I’m disappointed, either — though I am. In the last two weeks alone, the administration has moved toward escalating the war in Afghanistan. Obama failed to defend green-jobs czar Van Jones, who was pushed to resign by right-wing nuts objecting to his respectable progressive résumé. (George W. Bush never abandoned his appointees, who were far more radical than Jones, not to mention crooks and war criminals.) And then, in the health care speech, the president pledged to fund neither abortions nor medical services for undocumented immigrants.

He threw progressives, women and “aliens” overboard to keep an agenda afloat. Yuck.

But also, what else is new?

As I said, I had no illusions, so I’m not disillusioned. I’m not disappointed by a centrist, because I didn’t expect a leftist. Truth be told, I’m still pretty blown away that a left centrist — and, let’s not forget, an African American left centrist — is president at all.

My reluctance to support Barack Obama has less to do with the person he is, or even with the positions and actions he’s taken, than with this: I just don’t like presidents.

I have never lived under a president I could admire. From Eisenhower to Bush II, I have learned that part of the job description is a personal character ranging from mediocrity to monstrosity. Kennedy was no exception. In my communist family, we hung no portraits of the sainted martyr who practically took us to war against Cuba and launched the U.S. engagement in Vietnam.

But my distaste isn’t all about individuals. I have a hard time supporting the president because he is the president — or rather, President.

The President is not just a person. He is a symbol. He stands for the United States of America, a beautiful ideal corrupt in virtually every function, from its criminal “justice” system to the corporate ownership of its elected officials. The President stands for the global power of the United States, for its militarism and economic domination. The President stands for government. And, in spite of my late advocacy of a more robust welfare state, government arouses a profound skepticism in this old anarchist.

In fact, until 1980, nine years after I became eligible, I didn’t honor the presidency with so much as a ballot. “Don’t vote,” we used to say. “It only encourages them.” I had no time for encouraging them. I was in the streets discouraging them from doing most everything they wanted to do. That I personally despised practically every man behind the Oval Office desk only made this political opposition feel more cogent.

But now I vote — and, for the first time, voted for a person I fervently wanted in the Oval Office. I’m encouraging him. So the question becomes, Encourage him to do what, and how? Put another way, how can a radical support a centrist president and not sell her skeptical soul? Here are a few thoughts.

1. Be realistic. Progressives have been floundering between feeling reluctant to criticize the man they worked to elect and carping on the sidelines because he’s not the man they (naïvely) thought he would be. We didn’t get a leftist president because a leftist candidate’s chances of winning the 2008 U.S. election were about equal to my chances of winning the 2009 U.S. Open. The same centrist populace elected Congress. It goes without saying that whatever health care bill they pass will be greatly inferior to what progressives — and even the president — want. It will also be better than what we’ve got.

2. Be strategic. In spite of his rhetoric, Obama will not be the last president to deal with this mess. This bill is only the beginning. Failure to pass it could destroy the Democratic majority and, with it, the chance to continue working. We will hate portions of this bill, and must tell our representatives we won’t give up, for instance, on full access for all, including the undocumented, and on comprehensive reproductive services, including abortion. Then we should tell them to vote yes. The perfect should not be the enemy of the good.

3. Be consistent. One day I get an email from MoveOn.org exhorting me to oppose any bill without a public option in it. The next day, I’m asked to tell my representative to vote for whatever gets to the floor. This isn’t strategy; it’s Tweeting.

4. Be radical. The right has always been great at rewarding legislators for each intermediate step toward the radical ideal. At the same time, its activists remind elected officials that they won’t settle for one slice of a loaf. This persistent, uncompromising agitation has paid off in moving popular sentiment, discourse, legislation — and presidents — to the right. Progressives should similarly keep their eyes on the prize. The good should not be the enemy of the perfect.

5. I shock myself by saying it, but … support the president. One of the most endearing qualities of candidate Obama was his insistence that the campaign was about us, not him. Now, a president is not the same as a candidate; an executive is not a community organizer. The president’s job is to lead, and Obama’s collectivist spirit may be a mask for his timidity in doing so. This week, liberal pundits are kicking him for playing golf this summer while town halls burned. They wonder whether his decision to act “presidential” has come too late.

Still, leadership is nothing more than getting other people to do things. Obama’s instinctual style of leadership is the kind that does not dictate but inspires, that is more about community than command. If it’s the kind of leadership a leftist can love, that should be no surprise. He learned it from us.

If we sit on our hands now, embracing our radical marginality and rejecting everything but what is impossible to get — a single-payer system — we will not only sink the chances for a better health care system. We will also send the message that there is only one kind of leader: the “decider.” We will implicitly renounce the brand of leadership the left has been cultivating since the ’60s.

What makes following, or collaborating with, Obama easier is that this guy likes us; he knows we’re his people. In Minneapolis this weekend, the rapturous crowd cheered the loudest when he talked about the public option. He told them they were a lot more fun than Congress. The rally ended with him leading the chant “We’re Fired Up! And Ready to Go!” One woman told NPR that impetus for reform “has to come from the bottom up, not the top down.”

It has to come from both. We need President Obama’s help, and he needs ours.

Voting only encourages them. But this election seems to have discouraged us, the citizens, from holding our winner to his promises. Just as this health care bill is only the beginning of reform, voting is the beginning, not the end, of activism. By encouraging — that is, lending courage to — the president, we may actually get what we elected him for. In the process we may begin to redeem, even transform, the Presidency of the United States.

This column originally appeared in Seven Days.

Tags: Barack Obama, presidents
]]> http://www.judithlevine.com/2009/09/obama-nation-seven-days/feed/ 0 http://www.judithlevine.com/2009/02/poli-psy-tunnel-vision/ http://www.judithlevine.com/2009/02/poli-psy-tunnel-vision/#comments Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:36:50 +0000 Judith http://judithlevine.com/?p=405 We aggrieved purple Inauguration ticket holders want to be recognized as victims of crime,  a protected class, and an endangered species. And while we’re at it, we’ve got some high expectations of the Obama administration too. Read it at Seven Days. Tags: Barack Obama]]> We aggrieved purple Inauguration ticket holders want to be recognized as victims of crime,  a protected class, and an endangered species.

And while we’re at it, we’ve got some high expectations of the Obama administration too.

Read it at Seven Days.

It ain’t all pretty, but 2009 looks a lot better than anything this millennium has witnessed so far. As in all things psychological and political, the signs point every which way. So here are my predictions — some grim, some gleeful, some substantiated and some woven of the holey cloth of dreams. Here’s to a really new New Year.

Class struggle, welcome back
“JUMP, you fuckers!” This placard, carried at a September rally protesting the financial industry bailout, may be too explicit for some of you random-acts-of-kindness practitioners. But its underlying sentiment is probably a healthy one.

Admit it. Unless you’re a hedge-fund investor laying off your gardeners or listing your yacht on Craigs-list, your heart is not flooded with compassion for the Masters of the Universe whose universe has suddenly deflated. You are not moved to tears by the suicide of Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, the financier ruined by Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. The Villehuchets were so rich they lent money to Louis XIV; for such crimes many of them ended up on the wrong edge of the guillotine blade. Yet Rene-Thierry believed that the rich would forever get richer, and never pay.

Sisters and brothers, you are feeling a scintilla of schadenfreude, that slightly guilty pleasure in the misfortune of those who justly deserve it. Savor the emotion. The baby bankers throwing back $20 martinis in SoHo, the private-plane weekend commuters cluttering up Vermont’s woods with their 40,000-square-foot ski chalets, complaining all the while about their property taxes — these people’s needs and values have afflicted the rest of us long enough. Then crank your spite up to anger, a necessary ingredient of class struggle.

Not to worry, post-partisans. The U.S. isn’t on the verge of condemning Bill and Melinda Gates to the fate of the anciens Villehuchets. But when John McCain failed to convince voters that ending the Bush tax cuts would lead directly to Venezuelan-style communism, we may have witnessed Americans waking up to which side they are on. (Note to Joe the Plumber: I didn’t know Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, but I know you’re no Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet).

You’re a Wall Street investor? Me, too. Don’t let that confuse your loyalties. Your retirement fund is probably hovering in the high four figures. Sign a card, comrade. This year, we eat the rich.

Muddied green
If the rich, having faces, are not on your list of comestibles, you are in 2009’s avant-garde. Our food co-op is selling “artisan tofu.” Watch for the Gourmet Magazine feature on root vegetables.

But if designer rutabaga is the rage, its purveyors may be out of luck. Shoppers tell pollsters they are cutting back on organic veggies because of high prices. Magazine editors are deep-sixing their green issues. Hybrid-car sales are sluggish, while lower gas prices are boosting purchases of SUVs. Red (as in the deficit column) is shaping up to be the new green.

The lesson here is not that we should all build saunas, sit back and enjoy the Earth’s rising temperatures. It’s just that we can’t rely on consumer desire to save the oceans from boiling. Want gas-guzzlers off the road? Implement emissions standards that prohibit their manufacture. With climate-change experts and activists heading Obama’s new White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that just might happen.

The White House heats up . . .
It won’t satisfy aficionados of extramarital fellatio and cigar play, but when Michelle puts on that red dress, Mama, somebody’s going dancin’ tonight. The Obamas bring some much-needed mojo back to a household that has gone frumpy and depressed. And for America’s growing girls and boys, the First Woman is living proof that smart, strong and serious can be sassy and sexy, too. Abstinence only, RIP?

. . . and sells out
So Rick Warren, the “purpose-driven,” anti-gay pastor of California’s Saddleback megachurch, has been chosen to deliver the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. Is this trip to the dark side our new leader’s idea of crossing the cultural aisle? Or is it truly his first political faux pas? We’ll know after January 20, when he either pulls his own don’t-ask-don’t-tell or puts his money where his mouth isn’t and appoints some pro-equality judges. The question is how long queers will lie still and be sacrificial lambs to excessive ecumenicalism — and what we will all do if Obama doesn’t come to his senses.

Racism redux
This Christmas, Republican National Committee chair candidate Chip Saltsman sent committee members a little gift: a CD featuring “Barack the Magic Negro,” a song by conservative satirist Paul Shanklin of “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” In it, Shanklin regales listeners with an impression of Al Sharpton and ridicules not only Obama but also Snoop Dogg and Louis Farrakhan. Another highlight of the CD: “The Star Spanglish Banner,” an anti-immigration tune that begins, “Jose can you see . . .” And you thought the GOP had loaded neo-fascism, along with its cheerleader Sarah Palin, on a plane back to the permafrost. Dream on. Politico.com makes a good case that the flap over the CD could help, rather than hurt, Saltsman’s chances.

The new neo-atheism
Pastor Rick is giving that invocation. We still have not one but two prayers at the inauguration, not to mention one at the start of every Congressional day. The Washington National Cathedral, though it receives no government funding, is the congressionally designated “national house of prayer.” Conservative Christianity still exerts a deep influence on the politics of this purportedly secular nation. (Read Jeff Sharlet’s brilliant book The Family and shudder to learn how deep it is.) Still, there are signs that God may be taking a back pew in Washington. Obama has promised to nix the global gag rule, which prohibits reproductive-health providers in U.S.-aid-receiving countries from mentioning abortion to their clients. I’ve lost track of the number of times the word science has been spoken around Capitol Hill lately, uncoupled from its longtime companion, creation.

Prozac nation
The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM-V, won’t be out until 2012. But this year the controversy will keep heating up over whether the bible of psychological disorders (and guidebook for insurance-claim arbiters) should include Apathy Disorder, Caffeine Withdrawal Disorder, Internet Addiction and a host of other dubious diagnoses. These days, new psychological illnesses are almost invariably “discovered” by pharmaceutical companies that just happen to have devised drugs to treat them. The plot thickens when you learn (as the Center for Science in the Public Interest reported last May) that more than half of the new members of the DSM-V writing group have ties to Big Pharma. As the manual gets fatter, and more former human discomforts are enshrined as disorders, there will be fewer of us who are not certifiable — that is, certifiable consumers of psychotropic drugs.

Revenge of the nerds
First, the improbable happened: Republican pundits defected when McCain chose a dimwit as his running mate. Then the unimaginable: A candidate was elected not despite but because of his gift for uttering elegant sentences describing subtle and informed thoughts. Then that glimmer of possibility became reality in a Cabinet composed almost entirely of class valedictorians. Could the intellectual be making a comeback? Book sales are down, it is true, but publishers may be shedding mostly those customers who buy books (especially books by the likes of Tina Fey and Jamie Lee Curtis) and don’t actually read them. Call it the audacity of hope, but I’m putting my money on a brand-new product line that will pull the publishing industry out of the ditch: books for readers, written by authors.

Mission accomplished
Reports from Iraq tell us the courts are travesties of justice and the prisons are torture chambers; freedom of speech and the press are nonexistent (the journalist who threw his shoe at Bush was allegedly beaten brutally and faces seven years in prison); and women are in purdah. In other words, the U.S. “liberation” of Iraq has produced . . . Dick Cheney’s “democracy.” Next year in Afghanistan!

This piece appeared originally in Seven Days.

“The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep,” he declared. “But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.”

Personal temperament alone cannot account for Obama’s combination of impatient ambition and imperturbable calm, self-confidence and humility. Rather, these qualities signal an understanding of himself as part of something bigger than the personal. He arrived in this place, he acknowledged in his speech on race, in the river of history, carried by a social movement of “Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part — through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk — to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.”

“Yes we can”: The operative word is we.

This comes as a huge relief after eight years of a regime that refused the lessons of history because it believed itself directed by supernatural forces and transhistorical values — our “good” against their “evil.” This delusion was embodied in the doctrine of the “unitary executive.” It emerged from the president’s mouth in an almost daily utterance: “I am confident.”

The operative word was I.

The Obama election — and, in no small part, the economic crisis — takes a wrecking ball to the Ownership Society, which defined patriotism as personal consumption and citizenship as commitment to one’s own home and family. The fresh air that rushes in now is the conviction that personal responsibility is not antithetical to collective obligation — realized ultimately in government — and that personal reward comes not from getting mine but from creating ours.

The decisive triumph of unity over isolation and bigotry rendered even more dispiriting the passage of anti-gay-marriage propositions in California, Florida and Arizona, along with a measure in Arkansas, clearly aimed at gays and lesbians, prohibiting unmarried couples from adopting children or serving as foster parents.

The victory of these homophobic measures was bad enough, but almost equally dismaying was the reaction from the media and many white same-sex marriage proponents: Blame African Americans. “Proposition 8 Exit Poll: Whites oppose, blacks support, Latinos divided, the Los Angeles Times posted on November 4, before all the data were in. Because African Americans had come out in huge numbers to vote for the Democratic candidate, the press immediately christened it the Obama Effect.

Resentment bloodied the gay blogosphere. “I’m not sure what to do with this,” wrote the sex columnist Dan Savage in a typical post. “I’m thrilled that we’ve just elected our first African-American president. I wept last night. I wept reading the papers this morning. But I can’t help but feeling hurt that the love and support aren’t mutual.

“I do know this, though: I’m done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there — and they’re out there, and I think they’re scum — are a bigger problem for African Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color.”

A handful? Huge numbers? As the African-American lesbian blogger Lainad put it, “Oh, please.”

The initial reports turned out to be wrong. In the end, polls showed the only race-sex group that did not support Prop. 8 was white women, who came out against it 53 to 47. Indeed, nearly 70 percent of African-Americans voted yes, across income, education, age and sex. African American churchgoers — who voted, like other regular churchgoers, overwhelmingly in favor — were encouraged by their pastors, who in turn were lobbied by the proposition’s promoters, largely white groups not generally known for their alliances with people of color.

The proponents also lied. A slick flier produced by Yes on 8 and mailed to thousands of African-American households the weekend before election day featured a photograph of Obama, wedding band on prominent display, with Michelle laughing in the background. The large-type quote read: “I’m not in favor of gay marriage.”

In fact, both Obama and Biden oppose gay marriage and have said so plainly. But both have also stated their support for extending civil rights of partnership to all, and both explicitly opposed Prop. 8. They reiterated that opposition after the propaganda went out.

I’m not going to excuse anyone who cast a ballot for homophobia, no matter what the reason. And, while I’m at it, I’m not going to excuse Obama for his socially conservative positions and decisions, including sharing a stage with mega-evangelist Rick Warren, a star on the Christian gay-conversion circuit.

Still, blacks made up just 6 percent of California voters. Even 70 percent of 6 percent is not enough to pass anything. Why is Prop. 8 their fault?

As DailyKos opined, fingerpointing will get us nowhere.

What will?

The answer is not the cloakroom deal making suggested by Dan Savage: I supported “your” guy, so you should get behind “my” issue.

The answer is solidarity.

In his speech on race, Obama asked his black sisters and brothers to “[bind] our particular grievances . . . to the larger aspirations of all Americans: the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who’s been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family.” On election night, the president-elect broadened that circle of solidarity, calling in “young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled.” It may be the first time a president has pronounced the word gay, with respect and fellowship, in public.

If it was rare to hear such a rainbow-coalition recitation from Obama — whose own story belies the simplicity of any one of those labels — it is not because he is the first “post-identity-politics” candidate or “post-racial” black politician, as many pundits have dubbed him. (Apparently only politicians of color have to be either “racial” or not.) Read his books and you will discover a man struggling to embrace the African-American heritage that was, until his adulthood, mainly a matter of genes.

Rather, as Beck Young, a Barnard women’s studies professor, pointed out, Obama simply does not see race or racism primarily as a personal matter — and that is the only way the pundits, especially the white Republican ones, can see it. Obama is interested in institutionalized inequality. And, though he constantly talked about the middle class, the poor recognized in his rhetoric something no one dared name, except as a smear: class struggle. This does not make Obama pre-, post- or extra-identity politics. It makes his campaign, like Martin Luther King’s, a movement for more than civil rights: a movement for justice.

Ironically, the campaign that ran away from race and only surreptitiously allied itself with the left has moved the left’s antiracist politics from the margins to the mainstream. I suspect President Obama will have more trouble dealing with the left part than the antiracist part.

But the mainstream was already moving. Young and first-time voters cast their ballots for Obama two to one. In California, they opposed Proposition 8 by the same margin. Minorities who had voted Republican voted Democratic in significant numbers, and minorities will soon constitute a majority of the electorate. As the main protagonist of American politics, Joe the Plumber, RIP.

If some racial minorities do not yet recognize sexual minorities as legitimate members of the polity, then there is much work to be done. “This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change,” declared the president-elect. He exhorted Americans to “summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to . . . look after not only ourselves but each other.”

Call it patriotism. Call it solidarity. It is discombobulating to contemplate the two entwined. Still, like Michelle Obama, this is the first time in my adult life I have felt proud of my country. And when I look at the beautiful face of the first Kansan-Kenyan president, that pride moves me to relinquish blame and resolve anew to look after my fellow Americans — even those who are not yet ready to look after me and mine.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

For a while there — especially during the tense days between Obama’s victory and Clinton’s belated exit — it looked as if American feminism might not recover from the Democratic primary contest.

The media were spotlighting feminist mothers and their “post-feminist” daughters bickering like, well, mothers and daughters. Hillary was holding hostage her “18 million voters,” the most coveted of whom were her fierce female supporters. Those supporters were behaving like unpleasant children, by turns petulant (“Hillary for V-P — or else!” read a typical graffito) and compliant (“We want you to continue to be our leader,” was the overwhelming message of 350,000 emails reportedly sent to the candidate that week).

The candidate who had run mostly away from gender — except to flash her cohones as a potential Commander in Chief — was being defended by this diehard sisterhood because she was a woman. They excused her vote for the Iraq war, her vow to “obliterate Iran” should it menace Israel, her Bushesque fear-mongering in that red-telephone advertisement. They even excused the racism (more on that later). The constituency that global-feminist activist and writer Ros Pachesky called “uterine feminists” excused Hillary because Hillary is a woman. And when she lost, in step with their ruthless leader they blamed a vast sexist conspiracy in the press.

Feminists, at least those most visible in the media, were coming across as a bunch of doddering, doctrinaire altecachers, the sexual-political equivalent of unreconstructed Bolsheviks.

Of course, that sexist conspiracy existed (watch this YouTube clip, for instance), even if its exact vastness is still in dispute. But not far from HRC headquarters or the viewfinder of Fox News’ cameras, a critique of another sort was going on: other feminists — not the aforementioned doddering ones — rumbling about what went wrong with Hillary and the groundswell she’d mobilized.

Besides her militarism, that wrong could be summed up in a word: racism. During a contest that was universally described as “a woman versus an African-American,” Hillary did nothing to challenge the assumption that she wasn’t just a woman but a white woman. “The very fact that she ignores her own race, in a way that Obama cannot, is proof of the normalized privileging of whiteness,” wrote anti-racist feminist Zilla Eisenstein in a blog posted round the world. “She presents herself as a woman, but her real power . . . is as white.”

Worse than passively taking advantage of white privilege, Clinton chose to deploy racism to win votes — most glaringly when she lobbied superdelegates with the argument that she could win among “hardworking . . . white Americans,” and Obama could not. Many heard those words as not just description but prescription.

Then there was the red-telephone TV ad, which began with a ring in the middle of the night in a world where “something is happening” and ended with a confident Hillary, in suit and glasses, picking up the phone, protecting America. Orlando Patterson, writing in The New York Times, discerned racism as ominous as the phone’s ring. The sleeping children were blond or “vaguely Latino,” he noted; the threatening “something” was never named as “external terrorism.” The message: “An Obama presidency would be dangerous — and not just because of his lack of experience.” Rather, as a black man, “Obama is himself the danger, the outsider within.”

Women who have struggled to erase the assumption of a universal white sisterhood and to forge a movement linking sexual, gender, racial and economic justice with international solidarity heard African-American lesbian poet Audre Lorde’s words echoing back over a quarter-century: “All the women are white, all the blacks are men.” The last part of Lorde’s sentence — “but some of us are brave” — decidedly did not describe Clinton. After all, what would it have cost her to ask for votes not because she is white but because she was the better candidate?

Clinton didn’t deserve feminist support, Eisenstein argued; she “does not share a political identity with women of all classes and colors and nations simply because she has a female body. She first needs to claim that body and demand rights for it — reproductive, day care, health, education, etc. She has no multi-racial woman’s agenda because she has no anti-racist agenda.”

That she appealed to a multiracial “uterine feminist” constituency only complicated the picture, Petchesky said at the June conference of the National Council for Research on Women. Visiting Las Vegas during the Nevada caucuses, Petchesky was struck that most of the people carrying Hillary placards were Asian-American and Latina hotel workers. When she asked a fiftysomething Filipina why she was supporting Clinton, the woman “looked at me like I was stupid and replied, with great gusto, ‘Because she’s a WOMAN — and WOMEN have the POWER!’”

Young feminists of all races were hipper than that. For instance, feministing.com, the blog that gives voice to millennial feminists, hosted a lively, supersmart gabfest lacing together race and sex during the entire primary season — and it’s still going on. The bloggers admirably resisted divisiveness, repeatedly calling Hillary on her racism, but also praising her when that was due. For instance, Courtney Martin, writing graciously on Hillary’s concession speech, described herself as a Clinton supporter and an Obama voter.

Nor did feministing.com’s contributors swallow the media depiction of the Clinton-Obama split among women as a generational divide. When Frances Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice, a senior feminist herself, suggested in The Nation that a Hillary loss should signal Boomer feminists to quit the scene, the blog’s political editor, Jen Moseley, rose to respect her elders. “Obviously I support young women (or a wider perspective attributed to younger women) playing a more important role in the feminist movement,” she wrote, “but that doesn’t have to mean older women are kicked out entirely. Sheesh.”

This proliferation of talk — not just in feminist cybercommunities and conferences but on Slate.com and in The Washington Post and The New York Times — is itself occasion to send up fireworks. Yes, Hillary Clinton had inspired the passionate intensity of the worst, on both sides. But her candidacy has brought out, and brought back, the best, too.

Jo Freeman, a white civil-rights activist who became one of the founders of the second-wave women’s liberation movement, said as much in a celebratory op-ed circulated online. “That [Democratic primary] voters chose a black man and a white woman over so many outstanding white men is something of which we can all be proud,” Freeman wrote. “It illustrates what is good about America, at a time when many find it hard to see the good. It demonstrates that we can overcome historic prejudices, that we can change deeply buried values and attitudes.”

And if the blogospheric cretins and frat-boy pundits hoped to bury the girls under a shitload of misogyny, they have instead had a Miracle-Gro effect. Everywhere, people are broadcasting the word shamelessly, intensely and voluminously: Feminism. Say it again. FEMINISM! Didn’t hear you! FEMINISM!

Journalist Amanda Fortini described the experience of her peers, young women for whom gender inequality was a women’s history course they took in college. “The past few months have been like an extended consciousness-raising session, to use a retro phrase that would have once made most of us cringe,” Fortini wrote in, of all places, New York Magazine. “We’ve parsed the gender politics of the campaign with other women in the office, at parties, over email, and now we’re starting to parse the gender politics of our lives. This is, admittedly, depressing: How can we be confronting the same issues, all these years later? But it’s also exciting. It feels as if a window has been opened in a stuffy, long-sealed room. There is a thrill at the collective realization.”

The piece, headlined “The Feminist Reawakening,” ended with a question: “What next?”

And that’s where it gets really exciting.

First, to win those 18 million voters, Barack Obama has to speak about sex. So far, he has barely done so, though he leads by example — the proud son of a strong single mother, the husband of a powerful wife, the father of two apparently feisty girls.

He can reinject gender into those supposedly gender-neutral issues at the top of voters’ minds. Jobs, for instance. Yes, men are losing theirs. But even when employed, women earn less — and thanks to the Supreme Court, they now can’t do much about it. Last year’s ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber eviscerated a generation of anti-sex-discrimination law by requiring that a victim bring evidence of unequal pay within 180 days of hiring — in the real world, where paychecks are secret, impossible. The next president will have a lot of power to even the stakes when he nominates one, maybe two, new justices.

The mortgage crisis is another unequal opportunity afflicter. Writing in The Boston Globe, law professor Anita Hill showed how women — especially single, elderly and African-American women — are showing up disproportionately among those rooked by predatory lenders. Many of those women are losing their homes.

Nicholas Kristof suggested in the Times that Obama “show that gender issues are on his radar” by championing the combat against maternal mortality, “the orphan issue of global public health.” Yes, he should. But he can also embrace the broader issues of which maternal mortality is part: reproductive rights and even child care, which hasn’t been on “the radar” since Nixon.

Obama gets a 100 percent approval rating for his votes on choice; that’s why NARAL endorsed him. But it’s tough to find the word on his website (it’s hiding in the “Fact Check” section), and as far as I know he hasn’t uttered it since 2007, when he called abortion an “anguishing” decision involving a woman, her family, her doctor and her clergyperson. (It takes a village to have an abortion.) Say something about Roe, Barack. Hillary did, and it probably won her votes.

That’s what’s next for Barack Obama. What’s next for feminists?

How about this? We become what the Democratic Party has been longing for since the 2004 elections: its “moral-values voters.”

Not moral-values voters like “left-wing” anti-abortion evangelical Jim Wallis. Not the religion-on-your-sleeve values voters that Hillary called forth in 2004.

Not moral-values voters who will call for more censorship of pornography.

No, I mean the voters who care about everyday life — which is to say, all voters. Tom Franks was wrong in What’s the Matter with Kansas? The GOP didn’t distract people from the “real” issues with stuff like abortion and gay marriage. It reached people where they live.

People live in their bodies (thus the issues of abortion, racism, sexual and gender minority rights, health care, torture). They live in families and communities (gay marriage, immigration, child care, housing, food). They live as citizens and, increasingly, through symbolic communications (voting rights, “decency” and pornography, religion, the arts, surveillance).

I could go on — and hit numerous issues on which feminists do not agree (one fault line, especially for queers and people of color, opens along hate-speech laws). But the point is that feminists (and by this I mean internationalist anti-racist feminists) understand the intersection between the personal and political better than anyone — with the exception of conservative Christians.

So here’s my proposal: Feminists become for the Democrats and progressive politics what evangelical Christians have been for the Republicans and conservatism — its demanding, uncompromising base. Just as those religionists moved their party radically to the right, so can feminists push the Democrats — and if you can’t stand the Democrats, then progressives generally — more radically to the left.

I can imagine it now — politicians quailing before NARAL as they do now before the NRA. Teenagers wearing WWSTD (What Would Sojourner Truth Do?) bracelets. The first Vietnamese-African-American transgender president . . .

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

A women’s magazine I used to write for kept a large three-ring binder filled with story ideas. One section was called “Emo,” though, this being a women’s magazine, all the features were about emotions. Most of them were negative ones, which, presumably, the right shoes or handbag would clear right up (See: Accessories, page 116).

The problem was, the ideas rarely reflected anything like real life. At one point, the binder was stuffed with crying: “Have a good cry!” “There, there, don’t cry! “What if he cries?” And this one: “Women who cry at work.”

My editor was keen on the last one. “You know,” she said, “those girls who are constantly bursting into tears at the office.” I said I didn’t. After all, wasn’t holding it together for eight hours Job 1 for any employee? And if women were bursting into tears, might it be counterproductive to publicize that fact, given the still-fragile cause of workplace equality?

I didn’t do the piece. But I suspected then what I know now: that the media could generate endless copy (and ad revenue) keeping their sights on women on the edge, the edge between crying at work and rejecting the very idea of crying at work; between vulnerable, incompetent, manipulative or otherwise old-fashioned femininity and the sort of sexual equality that expects women to dish it out and take it, just like men.

I thought about those weeping workers when an exhausted Hillary Rodham Clinton teared up and — the pundits surmise — won the hearts of enough New Hampshire women to take the state’s Democratic primary. My first reaction was, What? Women voted for her because she cried? Had we gotten nowhere since the crying-at-work story? Maybe the anti-suffragists were right. Women are too sentimental to vote rationally.

Then I remembered that nobody votes rationally. In this most apolitical of nations, folks choose the person they’d relish having dinner with. It’s called “likeability,” and it’s apparently what won George W. Bush the White House in 2004. Even after Abu Ghraib, more than half the voters still wanted to eat a burger with the guy.

Gallup gauges our dinner-companion preferences with a “feeling thermometer,” whose scale of warmth and coolness ranges from zero to 100 degrees. In September 2007, Barack Obama was the only candidate whose readings averaged over 50 — 53, to be exact — among both Democrats and Republicans. But go figure: The vicious, petty and none-too-bright Rudy Giuliani was right behind him at 50, with Hillary trailing Rudy by a point.

Hillary’s scorching 82 degrees among Democrats was balanced by the coldest of cold shoulders nationally. The latter was surely an expression of sexism, nauseatingly evident on the Internet: “Stupid bitch,” her detractors call her. “Cunt,” “slut,” “lesbian,” “feminazi,” “Satan.” But even that 82-degree warmth wasn’t translating into the desire to vote for her. At least it hadn’t in Iowa.

The conventional wisdom about Hillary’s tears was that they “humanized” her. I don’t think so. I think they feminized her. Columnist and leading Hillary-basher Bill Kristol called the show of emotion stagecraft. But Clinton has been assiduously self-feminizing since Cookiegate, and anyone who’s paid attention can tell the real from the crocodile tears; these were authentic. Why, then, did she move so many women this time? My guess is they, too, were tired; and they saw in Hillary their own frustrations in the relentless, maybe futile, effort of balancing femininity and humanity. Let’s just say, feminism’s work is never done.

Still, feminism has knocked down some of the most rigid of gender’s strictures. For proof, look not at Hillary Clinton but at her Democratic opponent Barack Obama.

So far, Barack has suffered none of the personal scrutiny Hillary has. He is, as she admits, one likeable guy. But is he presidential? If he is, it’s not in the mold of any of his rivals. Obama is not a war hero like John McCain. He is not a Christian patriarch like Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee. He’s not even a wise and world-weary father figure like Bill Richardson. He is not, in short, conventionally, presidentially masculine.

Indeed, I’d argue the quality that makes Barack Obama likeable — and potentially electable — is that he is not a particularly manly man. His youth makes him charismatic, but his is the youthful charisma of a generation that embraces metrosexuals and daddies with Snugglis. He is sexy, but he doesn’t swing his dick to prove it, like the strutting Dubya or the molasses-mouthed Bill Clinton or even like Obama’s hero, that other philanderer, Jack Kennedy. (The effect of this laid-back sexiness isn’t all pretty. It may also mitigate racist terrors among white men of the mythic hypersexual African.)

Hillary still must walk a skinny path between being a woman and looking like a (read: male) president. We’ve come a long way — she’s on the stump — but the story of her campaign would not be out of place in that Emo binder.

Meanwhile, the decades since the second wave of feminism have only broadened the emotional field for male politicians. One indicator: Since 1972, when an errant tear sank Edmund Muskie’s boat, the roster of presidents and presidential hopefuls who have wept includes Bob Dole, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Mitt Romney.

On this field, Obama is free to be both sweet and steely, diplomatic and belligerent. And if he wins the White House, his wife won’t have to squeeze her tall frame into the space left by the cuddly Laura Bush. Rather, Michelle Obama will assume the mantle of a professional, egalitarian First Lady, secured at considerable personal cost by her husband’s rival.

In the fickle calculus of American sexual politics, a female candidate may never hit the perfect balance between femininity and humanity. No wonder it moves so many of us to watch Hillary try, even when she looks clumsy doing so.

But I like her best when she stops trying. When she tells the world she’s just going to be herself: a woman, like most women and men of the 21st century, who lives somewhere between the genders. One of those moments came five days before the famous tears. It was during the last New Hampshire debate, when the moderator asked her to respond to critics who say she isn’t likeable enough to win.

“That hurts my feelings,” Clinton said, her mouth assuming a moue that both transmitted her vulnerability and parodied the very softness she was being condemned for lacking. Then she laughed and added, “But I’ll try to go on.” Not going on — that is, pausing to be wounded — may be tough for Hillary. But no one in that audience doubted she’d have to try very hard to go on. They laughed with her, the girl who refuses to burst into tears at the office.

Neither Clinton nor Obama is my ideal candidate (mine would never win in America), but I’ll be thrilled to vote for either of them. At this point, I’m leaning toward Obama because I believe he is marginally better on the war. But I’m trying to calculate how gender will factor in the final contest. Obama may be different enough from McCain to beat him, if McCain wins the Republican nomination. On the other hand, that Gen-X masculinity could be crushed by the machismo of the grizzled prisoner of war. Whereas Hillary may be man enough to beat McCain.

Early in the women’s movement, some wondered whether feminism would free men first. In this election we’re witnessing one way in which it has. I don’t begrudge Obama the advantage; I much prefer his brand of masculinity to the older kinds. But let it be acknowledged: The feminism that is an albatross around Hillary Rodham Clinton’s neck is giving Barack Obama wings.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.