Celebrating a Non-Event
As Hillary does her victory lap around the Clinton-friendly major media touting her “historic achievement on behalf of all of us women” (or sentiments to that effect), we, who like to think of ourselves as gatekeepers of reason and sanity, call for a time-out. In the piece below we look at the “historic” elements of her victory. Not in her ascension to the presidential nomination so much as what her win does not portend—righting the enormous imbalance between the elites and the rest of us, striving to make both healthcare and higher education a right of citizenship, providing full time employment for those who want it, including a living wage and pension benefits, inaugurating a campaign for environmental justice for mother earth, and unwrapping the cocoon of militarization and incarceration that has all of us, particularly our non-white brothers and sisters in its sticky clutches—that’s for openers.
Remember back to 2008, Barack Obama thrilled us with his mesmeric rhetoric. He didn’t so much lie to us as count on our not really listening to the specifics, concentrating instead on that handsome, young politician who seemed to have it all—brains, looks, and the right pedigree (Columbia, Harvard Law). To make matters better (or worse if you think about it), the hoodwinking was complete when the last item on his resume (usually accompanied by a virtual drum roll) was “community organizer.” So we heard him say Iraq was a “dumb” war, but didn’t listen when he said Afghanistan was the war we should be fighting. We tuned out when in the midst of yet another Israeli lawn mowing in Gaza (Operation Cast Lead), he was mute and his spokesman piously told us “there is only one president at a time.” We may not have seen the handwriting on the wall, but the Israelis instantly perceived which way the wind was blowing with this newbie president. Executing a brilliant tactical move, they stopped the massacre days before his inauguration.
The true believers among us were so excited about this multi-talented man (talents reminiscent of another president—Reagan) that we ignored the implications of his oft-repeated crusade to make a “grand bargain” with the republicans. What came out of that marriage of convenience was two more years of exorbitant tax giveaways to the very, very, very wealthy in exchange for—crumbs i.e. one year of unemployment benefits, barely enough to pay the rent. He promised us the world: job creation, the employee free choice act (making it easier to unionize workplaces), healthcare reform with a public option… The official mouthpiece of the advertising industry, Advertising Age was the first to realize how badly we had been duped. They immediately awarded the 2008 Obama campaign their Marketer of the Year prize for selling dreams that wouldn’t come true, promising value where none existed and gulling a credulous public with the delusion of a reborn America.
Along comes Hillary singing from the same hymnal. This time we’re listening. On Israel: “the victim,” Palestinians “the oppressors.” On foreign policy, history tells us all we need to know. From her full-throated support for her husband’s war in Serbia, her vote as senator to support the Iraq War, her successful campaign for regime change in Libya, her tough talk on Iran sanctions that nearly scuttled the nuclear arms treaty, and her endorsement of the latest free trade giveaway, the TPP, even the unduly optimistic must cry “No Mas.” Her social reform inclinations (assuming she once had any) drowned in a sea of support to and from banks, hedge funds, insurance companies and large corporations.
In the piece ”Will the First Woman Presidential Candidate Please Stand Up,” we look at the first two women (separated by 144 years) vying for the penultimate seat of male power and privilege. Victoria Woodhull was the first in 1872 (one of our Suspicious Angels). She ran on a platform that proposed to do “the peoples’ business” fulfilling the promise (to this day unrealized) of the American Constitution. Contrast that with the “bride of Obama” (in the conceptual sense), her vague promises run the gamut from making college “affordable” to building on the “”achievements” of Obamacare, “regulating” the banks, fighting the empire’s wars, blah, blah, blah.
To err is human —one time. “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” In the article that follows you will read about the worldviews of these two remarkable women. Victoria whose lexicon didn’t include compromise, whose beliefs never wavered, who advocated real programs for real people; and then there’s Hillary who never held a conviction she couldn’t change, never advocated for a program she couldn’t disavow, never saw an elite she couldn’t cosy up to. In Hillary, the person and the campaign, we find the true meaning of “sound and fury signifying nothing [for us].”
Will the First Woman Presidential Candidate Please Stand Up
Hillary Clinton may be the first woman of the two-party duopoly to be a presidential nominee but she is almost a century and a half too late to claim that honor for real. In 1872, almost 50 years before American women were allowed to vote, a progressive activist, Victoria Woodhull, threw her hat in the ring as the standard bearer of the Equal Rights Party. Being a progressive in the latter half of the 19th century and female required supreme confidence, a wide range of skills, burning political ambition and a gift for self-promotion.
Sound familiar?
The difference lies in the contrasting political and social philosophy at the heart of their belief systems. The present candidate bade farewell to a robust social reform agenda around the time of her husband’s triple follies (of which she heartily approved)— the misnamed Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the disastrous 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (“End of Welfare As We Know It”) and job-killing 1994 NAFTA. Victoria Woodhull chose a different path. Her platform and the causes she remained faithful to for the rest of her life revolved around equal rights. More Sanders than Clinton, she campaigned for a raft of social reforms, equal rights for women being the centerpiece of her social activism [“let women issue a declaration of independent sexuality and absolutely refuse to cohabit with men until they are acknowledged as equal in everything and the victory will be won in a single week.”]. Political, economic, and labor reforms and equal justice issues were central to her platform and her life – tackling such issues as regulation of monopolies, an 8-hour work day, abolition of the death penalty, nationalization of the railroads, and welfare for the poor. She never forgot her working class roots and championed working class causes against capitalist elites.
She abounded in firsts, first woman presidential nominee the most notable, and gender-busting occupations. The first woman stockbroker on Wall Street (although the NYSE refused to give her a seat holding fast to male privilege until 1967), ditto for newspaper publisher, alternative medicine practitioner, clairvoyant and philanthropist, Woodhull wore as many different hats as Clinton and scored even more “firsts.” Her newspaper published the first English translation of The Communist Manifesto. In 1871, she became the first woman to testify before a congressional committee – the House Judiciary committee – where she presented the case for woman suffrage “the citizens [including women] who are taxed should also have a voice on the subject matter of taxation.” Although the House of Representatives, then as now the center of mostly male power and privilege, rejected her arguments, that appearance catapulted her to the top of the suffrage movement. A position she was not destined to keep for long. In 1872, she published an article in her newspaper (Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly) branding Rev. Henry Ward Beecher an “adulterous hypocrite.” [which in truth he was] Not a believer in criminalizing private social conduct like adultery, her rage at Beecher was directed at his hypocrisy, the advantage he took of a defenseless woman. None other than suffrage icon and sister of the accused, Harriet Beecher Stowe labeled Woodhull an “impudent witch” and summarily excommunicated her from the movement. Proving once again that for some, blood is thicker than principle. Worse was yet to come. A decade later Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage erased her name and her contributions from their history of the suffrage movement.
Victoria Woodhull’s groundbreaking feminism occurred more than a century before feminism became ubiquitous. Ironic that a woman who battled for so many progressive causes, including suffrage, and wrapped them into a presidential run should have come of historical age as its best kept secret. The heroine many prefer to lionize treads the well-worn hawkish, Israel-centric, neo-liberal, corporate welfare path into the democratic presidential nomination and possibly right into the Oval Office.
