Ethan Moore

A cliche rant for a dude to have

By Ethan Moore ⋅ and published January 26, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

* When I wrote the following I was pretty darn frustrated at all the circumstances surrounding Obama’s close second in NH. I’m still uncertain about some of the assumptions embedded below, but It felt good to get it out. So here it is …

A lady ‘found her voice’ and got emotional.

But she wasn’t just any lady, she was a political candidate lady. The common - and arguably masculinist - punditry of the moment cast the event as the closing breakdown of a candidacy that had fallen from forgone to forlorn. The spectre of Iowa, tongue of Obama, and vapor of NH indie voters whirled in the centrifuge of the national press. We all felt pretty certain it would create a cocktail too toxic for Clinton.

Her tears were…I’m sorry…. Her welling-up was at the time simply Hillary reacting sincerely to her campaigns encroaching silence. Or, alternately was a desperate manipulation of the press and public in her final hour.

A week later, Hillary’s found her voice and that teary moment is now an instance of game-changing Hillary-humanity, or, alternately again, a inspired tactical play for the female vote. Discussion of her response to that question is ubiquitous still, and will live on in political science courses for decades.

Regardless of that particular episode of interest, Clinton’s win clearly had more to do with the strength of organization and argument she had marshaled over the past year in New Hampshire. The folks that act like her’s was this crazy out-of-left-field win need to take a deep breath and remember that a.) she was 15-points up two months ago, b) New Hampshire voters tend to decide late and, to do so contrarily. There is a lot neglected in focusing so on her answer to ‘how do you do it?’

What’s also neglected, however, is inquiry into the question itself. I speak not to whether it was planted, but to whether it’s a legitimate enough question to take at all seriously as more than idle chatter. To publicly ask Curt Shilling at the tail end of a playoff run ‘how he does it’ in such a way would be ridiculous. It is what he does as an ace pitcher. We, and he, expects nothing less.

To ask Janet Robinson, CEO of the New York Times, or Indra K. Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo, ‘how they do it’ is at least just as absurd. Imagine either of them being asked such a question at earnings conference call, or even at a less formal Harvard Business School speaking gig. How about Ginsberg? I find it impossible to mistake the gendered subtext in a female presidential candidate being asked just that.

In order to take the question seriously, we have to be a little bit surprised that Hillary can ‘do it’ in the first place.