And Another Thing: The Hillary Thing

By Carole Taylor

I just thought I’d weigh in on this Hillary thing. This Obama thing. My weighing in will amount to about the tilt of a snowflake in hell, but the owner of this site nags me gently to submit something. (“Submit!!!”she says. “But I don’t KNOW anything!” I say. She used to be in the Army. It’s a dominance thing.)
[Editor's Note: As a former Staff Sergeant and a vet of Blood for Oil Gulf War One, do you honestly think we WANT to be political pawns? Now drop, give us 20 and buy a hybrid as soon as you can afford one! Thanks, dear!]

So here. This is at last what I know.

I know I’m a middle aged (well, more than middle aged) white woman. A lesbian, by all evidence. And probably not all that white, but I haven’t had the DNA thing done yet. I will, though. I’d like to know. I think each person ought to know for good and all who their foremothers were. And so here is another thing I know. Obama is a black man. But he is also a white man. If he’s half black, and half white, he and we can as easily say he’s a white man as a black man. Yes? No? Maybe?

I KNOW we need a black person as the president of this country. I know. The arguments are many. Chief among them hinges on the very obvious fact that slavery was a horrible, horrible thing, and Obama would heal the country. (Slavery’s not over, you know. It still goes on, even in this country, but certainly all over the world. Still.) But if that’s the argument for Obama, that it’s time—and that’s the most frequent argument I hear, that it’s time —- then let me make the same argument for Hillary. It’s time.

Women have been the property of men, white and black and every other color, since possessions have been written down in ledgers or in law books or in hearts. Women are still owned by men in most parts of the world. Only in the last 150 years or so have we not been owned by a father, a husband or a son in the United States. By law. Love doesn’t count when the law says otherwise. Love doesn’t last an instant when the law says otherwise. Recall, if you will, all those stories about how white slave owners really loved their black slaves. Right. Recall, if you will, our own experiences with the power of law over love. So if it’s about healing the scars that slavery caused, let’s start with the oldest slaves ever. Let’s go back 5,000 years or more.

And the other thing I know is that votes are rarely, if ever, cast because of facts.

You may consider issues and policies and promises, but all those things bring about a gut reaction, if you consider them at all. Elections in this country are all about feelings. Hardly anyone but wonks like me even looks at the issues with a critical eye. Nearly everyone votes on gut reaction alone. My gut tells me that all politicians lie. But my gut also tells me that the lies that Democrats tell are ones I can live with. Republicans lie and steal your money for their rich friends, and they con vast numbers of people into voting against their own economic self-interest by lying about Iraq, and lying about gay people, lying about poor people, lying about wars and rumors of war, fear and rumors of fear, let me count the ways. No, don’t.

Let me not count the ways. I’ve already counted them, and since you’re reading this, so have you. So I’ll vote for Obama if he’s the nominee, and I’ll try to convert as many rednecks as I can grab hold of.

But I hope and pray that Ohio and Texas and Vermont and Rhode Island give Hillary her due, give her back her lead. It’s her turn, damn it. It’s her time. If it’s not now, it’s never. Never for my generation, and never for me. She probably didn’t grow up as much a slave of gender politics as I did, because she went to a college that had no men in it to muddy the water. And she wasn’t raised in the South like I was, where gender politics IS the water.

But she stands for a whole generation, the generation that finally said I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. Women younger than 40, even 50, can’t remember that there were no rights till our generation just went damnation and took them. So I’m taking this thing personally.

Obama may be the nicest man on earth, but he’s still a man, and a young man, and he has plenty of time. I don’t. Hillary doesn’t. And the plain fact is that if Obama were a black WOMAN, or a white woman, or half and half, with the same resume, the same pedigree, the same oratory skills, Ms. Obama would not be in the race at all. You know that, as well as I do.

So this IS about gender. More than it is about race. No one would have given Ms. Obama a second glance. And yes, Hillary might not have been given a glance either had it not been for Bill. But Hillary, along with Bill’s talent, GOT Bill to where they both landed. Even he credits her with his successes. She knows her stuff. She can do the job. She has the resume. She has the grit. She’s had every scrap of paper she ever touched for the past 30 years scrutinized by Ken Starr or somebody just like him, and she survived. She can DO this. Islamofascists, my ass. Hillary has survived the Republican Reich Wing, for God’s sake.

But I’ll bite my tongue and love Obama if he’s the choice. I already had my say at the Tennessee primary, and even took my 93-year-old mother and talked her into a vote for Hillary, too, though she’s always claimed to be a Republican. My mother loves me, and usually does what I ask her to do when it’s really important. And at heart, my mother is a feminist. She just won’t say so out loud, because she’s a good and tested Southern woman. But my mother laid claim to her membership in the company of women, quietly, when as her only experience with a computer in her entire life, she touched Hillary’s name.

I hope she gets to touch Hillary’s name one more time. I hope my mother gets to live long enough to see one of her own sworn in as president of this country. But they’d better hurry. It had better be now. It’s time.

Carole Taylor holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called
"A Third Story". You can email her here.