Cracks in the Glass Ceiling
During the campaign, it was her opponent who owned the lofty rhetoric. But on the day she finally conceded defeat, it was Hillary Clinton's words that soared.
"As we gather here today," she told her supporters and staff members at the National Building Museum yesterday, "the 50th woman to leave this Earth is orbiting overhead. If we can blast 50 women into space, we will someday launch a woman into the White House."
Two hundred forty miles below the international space station, the midday sunlight pouring into the 100-foot-high atrium illuminated the thousands who had come to bid the Clinton presidential candidacy farewell: most of them women, many of them with young children, some of them in tears.
"Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it," the former candidate continued. "And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time."
It will be up to the historians to ponder why Clinton waited until the very last day of her campaign to give full voice to the epochal nature of her candidacy. Through the Democratic primary race of 2008, she had played down the significance of being the first woman within reach of the presidency. It's tempting to wonder whether things would have turned out differently if she had embraced the theme earlier -- but there can be little doubt that her last speech of the campaign was also her best.
-- Dana Milbank
By Dana Milbank |
June 8, 2008; 12:00 AM ET
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Posted by: Bruce Becker | June 9, 2008 7:59 PM
As a member of the White Working Class I Ponder our Bleak Future; Lose-Lose
In America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters,
....the Republican resurgence from the 1980s to the 2000 election was due to non-union white working-class men abandoning the Democratic party, with over 20 percent of them switching from Democrats to non-voters or third party supporters or Republicans between 1960 to 2000.
debunk the myth ...of a swing towards rightwing, conservative values. Polls show ..... these voters, like most of the country, became slightly more liberal in the 1980s and 1990s. Nor did working-class white men become more anti-government. They did, however, become...disappointed in government, feeling....little for them. ....those "not protected by a union, a bachelor's degree or affirmative action [who have] lost much ground in wages and benefits over the past quarter-century, while often being culturally and politically lumped into the 'white male' power structure with whom they share little but the color of their genitalia."
When income trends are broken down, working-class white men are the only group for which median income actually fell from 1979 to 1998.......who actually saw a new generation earn less than their fathers. Deindustrialization, globalization and de-unionization meant good jobs disappearing...... attribute the change in voting patterns to bitterness at falling behind economically. They recommend that the Democratic party take up a platform that would help working-class white men as well as other working-class people -- universal health care, retirement security, and access to education.
When I told one long-time progressive activist I was writing a cross-class alliance building manual, this reply popped out of her mouth: "We don't have to worry about those red parts of the country anymore, now that people of color are a majority." She was referring to the color code of the 2000 Bush/Gore election map, in which the middle and south of the country tended to vote red Republican and the northern coasts and northern midwest tended to vote blue Democrat, labeled Red America and Blue America by David Brooks in "One Nation, Slightly Divisible" (Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 2001). She was also referring to a recent Census announcement that people of color are now over 30 percent of the US population, but would be over 50 percent by 2050. I had not specified white working class people in my description of the project; it's interesting how often the words "working class" evoke a white image, and usually a white male image. And her image was not only white, but middle American and conservative. Her voice was full of scorn for white working class people, and relief that she now didn't need to work with them to keep the Republicans out of office. She was imagining a voting bloc made up of people of color and white middle-class liberals like herself.
Posted by: Anonymous | June 12, 2008 2:54 AM
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Why did she wait until Saturday? Clinton waited to attempt to heal the mess she had created for two month, until Saturday, because she was forced to do it, by persons outside her campaign, who have political lives of their own to consider.
She demonstrated on Tuesday night that she is incompetent, again. The campaign is a long way home, to fully "vett" a candidate, and in this case, before America and Charlie Rangel, she acted a fool. Tuesday was her 3 AM phone call and she was too tired or too self-obsessed to do the right thing. She needed time. Presidents dont get time to heal of their neediness. And even after she was asked/told to do it by Friday during the news hour, she pushed back, one last time and did it on Saturday, the eternal adolescent, all about her.
Even now, she has surrogates out on ABC pretending to tell us, and Obama, how to run the rest of the campaign, to choose her as his VP. Nonsense.
1. There are other woman candidates, who didnt get there on their husbands coat-tails. Sen Boxer and Sen McCaskill have more real experience.
2. There are other candidates whose spouses are not so full of dirty laundry that it would take a week to list them all.
3. My personal favorite: Clinton, ever craven of FOX, says nothing about the restoration of the Constitution and habeas corpus, and disqualifies herself to be Obama's running mate on that alone, even if she had run a competent campaign and even if her husband wasn't hiding his library laundry.
What's going on now, really?
The truth is, Sen Clinton is also a former First Lady, and for a while I forgot, that like with all First Ladies, a lot of women fell in love with her. On the blogs now, women are finally admitting, in the face of VP considerations about experience, that while Sen McCaskill and Sen Boxer are much more experienced, one a former governor and state auditor, the other a star in local politics and then in the House of Representatives the entire time Clinton was in the White House, the fans of HRC love the former First Lady. Her surrogates seem to be counting on the pure love of her fans to make them just deranged enough to run off and eat worms in the garden, to make Obama choose her before the First Lady fans commit political suicide. We shall see, boys and girls.