Big Girls Don't Cry by Rebecca Traister

Author:Rebecca Traister
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

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As the candidates set up camp in Pennsylvania before the late-April primary, the politics of gender, race, and class were proving ever more complicated. Pennsylvania had a huge working-class population and was chock-full of seniors, two of Clinton’s strongest demographics. In April the University of Pennsylvania scholar Adolph Reed wrote a piece for the Progressive titled “Obama No,” in which he accused the Illinois senator of being “a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him,” and described the “disturbingly ritualistic and superficial” enthusiasm of young Obama supporters. I didn’t share Reed’s harsh perspective on Obama’s candidacy, though I certainly agreed with him about Obamamania, and about something else he observed: “Increasingly, Obama supporters have been disposed to cry foul and charge racism at nearly any criticism of him, in steadily more extravagant rhetoric.” As Obama supporters were ever more certainly avowing the progressive superiority of their candidate, they had fixed on another explanation (besides birdbrained female solidarity) for why people were still voting for Clinton: racism. Assumptions about the age, class, and whiteness of Clinton’s base made it easy enough to assert that perhaps those who were supporting the woman were doing so in part because of an unwillingness to vote for a black person.

I hoped that Pennsylvania was a state that might challenge the ugly idea that Clinton’s late-primary surges were fueled largely by racial intolerance. In eastern Pennsylvania Clinton support was multiracial, led by Philadelphia’s then very popular African American mayor, Michael Nutter. Nutter wasn’t just backing Clinton. Like Reed, he was openly disdainful of Obama. “This is not the Martin Luther King oratorical contest,” he told Bloomberg News in late March. “It’s a contest for president of the United States.” But the Pennsylvania primary wound up challenging what was fast becoming my own idealization of Clinton and her supporters.

In April political reporters were running stories describing how exhausted the electorate was by the ongoing primary battle; Democratic pundits were agonizing over the money being spent by two Democrats working to expose each other’s weaknesses. But on the weekend before the primary an improbably merry Hillary Clinton was shouting “Isn’t this exciting?” to a crowded high school gymnasium in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. “We love you!” came a young female voice from somewhere in the bleachers at the precise moment that paramedics wheeled in an empty stretcher. For one discombobulating second I wondered if the rally might have produced an Obama-esque scenario in which a twitterpated youngster collapsed in Beatlemaniac ecstasy for her candidate. The stretcher was actually for a middle-aged guy who’d had a brief diabetic episode, but the fact that the possibility had even crossed my mind was testament to the buzzing enthusiasm that characterized many of Hillary’s spring events. This renewed exhilaration contradicted the fretful story line about how everyone was sick of the election and how John McCain was growing stronger while Democrats grew weary.

Clinton’s packed Bethlehem gathering, on the heels of a rally drawing

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