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Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
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Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review August 15, 2008 14 Menachem-Av 5768

The Lady Dithered

By Suzanne Fields


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | There's nothing mellow about Hillary Clinton. She's the greatest polarizer since Richard Nixon. Her defenders are fierce, her detractors ferocious. It's not because she's a woman that she's "the might have been" as Democrats gather this week for their convention in Denver, it's because of the kind of woman she is.


Golda Meir, Indira Ghandi, Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel never inspired such polarities. None played the "gender" card because the rest of the world is not afflicted with the sexual politics we suffer in America. The so-called "Mommy Wars" — with stay-at-home mothers and working moms flinging psychological, economic and political polemics at each other — are not unknown abroad, but women elsewhere are rarely as confrontational as they are here.


Thatcher and Merkel, for two recent examples, came up "naturally" through the political process. Hillary, on the other hand, is an interloper, having used marriage and inherited connections to get where she is. Thatcher and Merkel look comfortable in their skins, at home in their intellects, secure in the values they represent as leaders and only incidentally as women. There's no bifurcation between what they believe and who they are. Husbands were incidental to the process. No one would have appreciated tears if they accompanied their talk of the stresses of a campaign, merely to show how sensitive they are.


Hillary, by contrast, has gotten as far as she has through the public reaction to her stormy relationship with Bill. When he treated her badly, women rallied around her with empathy and sympathy. When he campaigned for her, it was only right that she use whatever worked. Now that he's an albatross around her neck, it only illustrates the paradoxes of Hillary's rise to power.


Much is made over Hillary's having broken new ground for women in politics, but what her candidacy actually demonstrated was that she failed because of her flaws and shortcomings as a candidate, not as a woman candidate. The e-mails from her campaign, published in Atlantic magazine, revealed her as exploiting the most damning female stereotype, that of a woman who could not make up her mind. It wasn't the stereotype, however, that doomed her pursuit of the nomination.


"What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton's loss derived not from any specific decision she made but from the preponderance of the many she did not make," writes Joshua Green in Atlantic magazine. "Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency."


"Isn't that just like a woman?" the misogynists will surely mock. But that's off the mark. That she couldn't make up her mind to make tough decisions had nothing to do with her being a woman, but with what kind of manager she would make. She was a vacillator, perhaps too smart for her own good, always dawdling over the merits of both sides of the question. Isn't that just like an intellectual?


Adlai Stevenson, defeated twice by Dwight D. Eisenhower, never overcame the taunt that he was "too intellectual," the egghead so open-minded that his brains were likely to fall out. Voters were afraid he wouldn't make up his mind because he saw too many reasonable options. They wanted someone like Harry S. Truman, who having heard his economic advisers talk of "on the one hand this, and on the other hand that," exploded, "Get me some one-armed economists!"


Hillary, like Stevenson, showed herself to be less the pragmatist than the intellectual, waiting like Hamlet for more arguments, more evidence, more reasons why not, until the issue was moot.


She couldn't make up her mind whether to address "the gender issue" after Barack Obama's March 18 speech on race. She was afraid her speech would inevitably equate sexism with racism, which radical feminists have done for years, but perceived by many, particularly blacks, as unacceptable moral equivalence. She dithered until it was too late to exploit the opportunity Obama gave her, demonstrating a fatal weakness of her own.


She will speak at the Democratic Convention in Denver on the 88th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote. That's no coincidence. We've come a long way, baby — to the happy point that a woman in politics is judged on many things, and being a woman is the least of it. That may not be gender politics, but it's gender progress.

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