The Only One

Oddly enough in 2009, we have only one woman on the United States Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. While that is likely to change within the next few months as Judge Sonia Sotomayor moves through the Senate confirmation process, it's still completely odd that 51% of the U.S. population has only 11% representation on our nation's highest court.

There's a nice interview with Justice Ginsburg in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, including this exchange regarding historical barriers to entry for women:

Q: Do you think if there were more women on the court with you that other dynamics would change?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: I think back to the days when — I don’t know who it was — when I think Truman suggested the possibility of a woman as a justice. Someone said we have these conferences and men are talking to men and sometimes we loosen our ties, sometimes even take off our shoes. The notion was that they would be inhibited from doing that if women were around. I don’t know how many times I’ve kicked off my shoes. Including the time some reporter said something like, it took me a long time to get up from the bench. They worried, was I frail? To be truthful I had kicked off my shoes, and I couldn’t find my right shoe; it traveled way underneath.

There's some good stuff on Sandra Day O'Connor as well as Ginsburg's warm feelings towards deceased Chief Justice Renquist. Towards the end she lays out her very clear views on a woman's right to control her own body over the state's right to make decisions for her. She sure doesn't seem like an old lady.

Here's to her having Sonia on the bench with her as well.

Mad and Not-So Mad Women

Since every episode of Mad Men is so crammed with plot nuance and character information, and this week's penultimate Season 2 episode "The Mountain King" more than usual, and since I'm crunched for time I just want to touch on the striking (SPOILERS AHEAD) pre-feminism female characters.

Peggy's the easiest this time out -- she's learned her lessons from Don Draper well and has ascended to the office next to his, thanks to her hard work, grasp of creative advertising values, and increasing sense of self-worth. What a change from Season 1.

While Peggy is sitting in her darkened late-afternoon office with drink in hand contemplating her next moves, Joan is suffering from her pre-consciousness choice of fiance, a handsome but horrific doctor who handles his gripping feelings of sexual inadequacy by raping Joan in Don's office, violating everything she's all about in that workspace. Joan deals with it the same way she deals with him rejecting her mounting him (can't handle not having the dominant position, fearful that she wasn't a 31-year-old virgin when they met) the night before, by staring off and focusing on something else. In the bedroom it's the late night movie on TV, and in the office it's the end of Don's coffee table. Out of mind = out of sight.

One hopes that Joan will realize her consciousness long before the 1960's are over, and her respectful showing towards Peggy's ascension (while the guys in the office are furiously jealous) bodes well for their potential future partnership. Maybe Peggy will give back to Joan, as Joan helped her understand Cooper Sterling when she first joined.

Betty is a whole other case, learning consciousness by necessity, endorsing Don's paycheck and trying to raise her kids without him. She softens towards her daughter, doing the classic divorced parents move of buying her off while delivering bad marital news. Betty is a witch to the friend she set up for an affair, but maybe the verbal slap she received for it has awakened her a tad. What to make of her sudden bleeding -- miscarriage? Sudden illness? Breakthrough bleeding? The latter two would, with Don absent, put her in the jackpot situation, either threatening to leave her kids as orphans or forcing her into a backalley abortion. That would be quite the feminist capper on the season.

And then there's Anna Draper, wife/widow of the real Don Draper, seen in the present and flashback as Don/Dick returns to San Pedro for rebooting. Anna is the platonic ideal for Dick, the one with whom he can be himself, sharer of his secret and enabler of his better self. She tells him that the only thinking standing between himself and his happiness is the belief that he is alone. He says "People don't change," but as is the rule with characters talking about themselves, I don't believe it true of him. He just needs a partner (an underlying theme of the episode).

Am I the only viewer who found a certain parallel between Anna and Barack Obama's mother? Both are/were women ahead of their times, living with their own strong sense of morality, making their own bold choices at a time when (per the rest of the episode) women weren't encouraged to do so. I'm sure I'm mythologizing Obama's Kansan mom, but she was a contemporary of the fictional Anna, clearly an intellectual (who doesn't wear it on her sleeve) with an open mind and strong sense of self. Even through the pain.

My prediction for next week is that Don makes it home by the time the season tails out, prompted by the Cuban Missile Crisis, his heart open to Betty in a way it wasn't before (and her to him due to the bleeding), maybe helping to scuttle the Sterling Cooper buy-out in alliance with a relieved Bert, screwing Roger financially thanks to his impending divorce. Somewhere along the way he'll be the guy who popularizes hot-rodding to the masses, maybe going to a race or picking up a wrench before the international crisis sends him home, the conquering hero, the artist reborn.

Vroooooom!

And then: The long, hellish wait for Season Three to begin.

Surrender

I've been moved twice in the past 24 hours by women on TV surrendering to something larger than themselves and, in doing so, achieving an evident state of grace. Both women are closely associated with the word "President."

Last night's episode of Battlestar Gallactica (SPOILERS COMING FAST) had the most moving ending to any episode I've seen, and there have been some very powerful ones. President Laura Roslin, cancer-stricken but on a life-or-death mission for all of humanity, has visions of her own death that lead her to finally, in the last minute of the episode, admit her love for Admiral Bill Adama.

While that may sound all space opera on the surface, Roslin and Adama are played by master thespians Mary McDonnell and Edward James Olmos. Thrown together then the Cylons wiped out all but 40,000 human beings in the known universe, they started out fighting for governance over the remaining humanity, appeared to become intimate sometime last season (as Adama became able to admit to Roslin's wisdom), and seemed to fracture recently as Roslin's cancer drove her to a coldness about her decisions, a lack of regard for anything but her own rightness.

So McDonnell gave a shattering performance last night, culminating with those three most dangerous words to say in a movie or TV show, "I love you." And it was Adama's response that brought it home: "It's about time." Considering everything they're up against, the stakes and the cost, it was quite the rewarding moment for show followers. Roslin gives herself over to the truth, and it wouldn't be surprising if the writers have her cancer going into remission.

Then today another woman, who did not achieve the Presidency this go-round but appears to have taken Third place (actually Second since she out polled McCain in the Primaries) gives what is easily the best speech of her career, as she surrenders to Barack Obama, as I did the night he won Iowa in January.

While I've already heard the narcissism charge leveled at this speech, I agree with Matthew Yglesias that:

Far from an egocentric outburst, the talking about herself and her supporters made the speech the great speech that it was and helped a lot, I think, to break down the mutual barriers of bitterness that had built up. Something nominally more focused on Obama might well have come off as half-hearted. What she delivered was perfectly sincere and utterly in keeping with the main themes of her campaign, but also led to the desired conclusion. I think it was very skillfully put together.

And the visuals were the best -- entirely epic -- of her campaign.

What I think we saw as well, and which could not have been possible Tuesday night, or before her private meeting with Senator Obama, was that same post-acceptance rejuvenation that Al Gore started glowing with during his concession speech in 2000. She's free to take non-consultant risks now (like they did such a great job for her), free to seek her bliss elsewhere (won't be VP), free to support a guy she actually seems to like off-trail. She already looks like a new woman, to me much more appealing, in photos like this.

At a certain point, whether her supporters come aboard or not is their problem. Some may stay home, a smattering may vote McCain out of spite or white, but I honestly think the guy below has what it takes to win this election:



Towards the end, when he's telling the staff about the burden on them to not let down all the Americans now looking to them for help, for a better deal at such a dark time, that's when his gravitas comes through.

And I don't think McCain's comes close.

Unity Time

Two big jumps this past day: unemployment goes up suddenly 1/2 a percentage point to 5.5% and the price of oil posts a record one-day leap $11/barrel to $138/barrel.

So much for the Bush and Republican Party legacy.

Saturday is the day that Hillary Clinton will formally concede the Democratic Presidential race to Barack Obama. Now the Party must unify against flip-floppin', now wiretap lovin' John McSame, McInsane, McTired, McYawn.

The New York Times has a video which seems to me the fairest recap of Senator Clinton's campaign, the highs and lows. While the Iraq War vote may have been the critical misstep at the heart of Obama's victory, I really think the moment when she lost the race was when her husband, the former President, made the comment about Jesse Jackson winning South Carolina. When I watched the video, it just stood out, the shark jump if there ever was one.

As I've said in the past, I've been looking forward to this nomination battle to end so I could start liking the Clinton's again. Tomorrow is a one-time only opportunity to show her unquestionable support of Senator Obama against Senator McCain. One wonders what she will do, what combination of rhetoric, stagecraft and sincerity, will she deploy if she truly wants to seal the deal.

Here's one suggestion, and if they take it you can call me prescient: invite the Obama daughters onstage at the end of her speech.

Imagine that -- Obama and his family with Clinton and her family. Chelsea and Malia and Natasha gathered 'round Hillary, the very image of female nurturing, the setting up of generations of women who won't have to worry about the ceiling Sen. Clinton cracked.

Pure power, female style, a statement for the ages, and the image Democrats need to bring Hillary's most hardcore supporters aboard.

Now, supposedly it's family time this weekend for the Obama's, a slumber party for 8 girls and a date for mom and dad, so maybe I'm just dreaming. Or maybe it's a moment at the Convention. But it would work

And scare the pants off the McCain campaign.

What's Happening

See? I told you not to worry.

The two best articles I've read today about Senator Hillary Clinton's apparent failure to secure the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination are as follows.

Peter Keating in New York magazine explains, as one suspected, that Clinton's gas tax pander actually was her fatal overreach error, giving Senator Barack Obama the opening he needed to get the media off the Rev. Wright scandal by articulating a firm, tangible position and sealing her loss:

Opposing Clinton on a matter of substance got Obama off the defensive in the final days of the campaign and let him draw a new and sharp contrast without seeming negative. Opposing Clinton on this particular matter of substance finally gave Obama a chance to connect his “broken politics” theme to the concrete issue of energy independence, where he is on much firmer ground against the Clintons than on other economic issues, while simultaneously questioning Hillary’s honesty.

And he took full advantage. Six days ago, Obama introduced the single most brilliant ad of the Indiana campaign, called “Truth.” And, palpably relieved at the partial change of subject, he incorporated a detailed denunciation of the gas-tax suspension into his stump speech, in which he hit full stride again on Monday night.

And in response, Hillary doubled down, cranking out ads that said, “Barack Obama wants you to keep paying that tax.” Her campaign must have thought the issue was a winner. But it’s also true that her campaign just hasn’t been able to overcome its instinct for overkill. And voters noticed.

Betsy Reed, writing the cover story for The Nation is even more brutal in her surgically accurate analysis of how the Clinton campaign has attracted feminism but courted racism in "Race to the Bottom". She starts off listing all the horrific misogynist epithets cable news posers have slammed on her, but continues to build her argument through when Barack Obama became the first political figure to discuss race like an adult in years:

Obama initially responded to that challenge with his speech in Philadelphia on March 18. While condemning Wright's words, he placed them in a historical context of racial oppression and said, "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community." (More recently, of course, Obama did renounce him.) But in the Philadelphia speech, called "A More Perfect Union," Obama also outlined a racially universal definition of American citizenship and affirmed his commitment to represent all Americans as President. "I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together--unless we perfect our union by understanding that we have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction."

A mere three days after Obama spoke those words, Bill Clinton made this statement in North Carolina about a potential Clinton-McCain general election matchup: "I think it'd be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country. And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics." Whether or not this statement constituted McCarthyism, as one Obama surrogate alleged and as Clinton supporters vigorously denied, the timing of the remark made its meaning quite clear: controversies relating to Obama's race render him less fit than either Hillary or McCain to run for president as a patriotic American. A couple of weeks later, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen went so far as to call on Obama to make another speech, modeled after John F. Kennedy's declaration in 1960 that, despite his Catholicism, he would respect the separation of church and state as President--as though Obama's blackness were a sign of allegiance to some entity, like the Vatican, other than the United States of America.

Reed goes on to make the result of Clinton's nomination to be a defining moment for feminism -- old guard vs. new guard, the younger feminists with a more diverse political orientation -- and that Obama's appeal goes well beyond the issues:

Feminist Obama supporters of all ages and hues, meanwhile, are hoping that he comes out of this bruising primary with his style of politics intact. While he calls it "a new kind of politics," Clinton and Obama are actually very similar in their records and agendas (which is perhaps why this contest has fixated so obsessively on their gender and race). But in his rhetoric and his stance toward the world outside our borders, Obama does appear to offer a way out of the testosterone-addled GOP framework. As he said after losing Pennsylvania, "We can be a party that thinks the only way to look tough on national security is to talk, and act, and vote like George Bush and John McCain. We can use fear as a tactic and the threat of terrorism to scare up votes. Or we can decide that real strength is asking the tough questions before we send our troops to fight."

Here's the facts as they now stand for Hillary. She's crazy deep in the hole like she thinks she's a Rockefeller with her own money soaked into the campaign, still not paying all the outstanding vendor bills. Her peer supporters are starting to question her reason to keep running. Democrats are eager for change, and Barack Obama is proving himself, community organizer that he is, to be the real deal change agent. Per Matt Stoller in the prescient, "Obama's Consolidation of the Party," the five big things he is bringing to the party right on time:

1. Voter Registration
2. Obama Organizing Fellows
3. Money
4. Field
5. Message & Politics

It's all about the vision. It's all it's ever been. Like too many Democratic Presidential candidates before her, Hillary Clinton did not think to come into the election with a defined and resonant vision for where our country has to be in four or eight years. Any vision she's stitched together since "finding her voice" in New Hampshire has had something borrowed about it -- it's slogan. Yes She Can. Yes We Will. Si, sa puede.

Here's how Barack is doing in the mainstream media.

If I were able to buy stock in a sitting Governor, it would be Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas.