WP: For Hillary's Campaign, It's Been a Class Struggle
By Linda Hirshman
Sunday, March 2, 2008; B01
....why is she trailing as the contest heads to Ohio and Texas?
The answer is class. As of Feb. 19, the day of the Wisconsin primary, ABC pollster Gary Langer found that white women with a college degree had favored Clinton in the primaries by 13 percent up to that point. Among less educated women, meanwhile, she commanded a robust 38-point lead. But each passing week since Super Tuesday has seen a further erosion in support for the senator from New York among the educated classes....This isn't the class divide I would have predicted a year ago. Among women, the obvious thing would be for lower-income, non-college-educated white and black women to line up behind the candidate with the more generous social platform. Both Clinton and Obama have generous platforms, but Clinton's health-care plan is more ambitious, and she was the first to propose mandatory paid family leave (which mostly women take). But women, black and white, stubbornly refuse to behave according to a strict model of economic self-interest. Black women of all income levels have gone for Obama....
Ominously for Clinton, the feminist movement split, generating a large number of "scribbling women" all over the blogosphere describing the gender-trumping call of the Obama candidacy. Before Super Tuesday, the group New York Feminists for Peace and Barack Obama! published a letter endorsing the senator from Illinois. Most of the signatories were educated elites -- including Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, women's rights historians Alice Kessler-Harris and Linda Gordon and actress Susan Sarandon....So many feminists' turn to solidarity with their own class is a surprise. For decades, they've been loudly proclaiming their loyalty to working-class women and criticizing reporters for writing chiefly about elite women who resemble themselves....
Just look at Internet millionaire Joan Blades, co-founder of the political Web site MoveOn.org and the women's Internet group MomsRising.org, whose signature issue is paid family leave. Clinton was the first candidate to propose such leave, but MoveOn endorsed Obama. The working-class members of the Service Employees International Union are 56 percent female. But even after working-class women in California ignored the local SEIU recommendation to back Obama, the national executive board endorsed him, again splitting the leadership from the workers.
Female governors, lifelong feminists, union leaders, moms rising -- all rushing into the Obama camp. What's going on?
Maybe Obama is the best candidate, and these highly educated women, with their greater political savvy, have recognized his value. A less charitable explanation is that college-educated women don't need the social safety net as much as their less fortunate sisters do, so Clinton's early stand on family leave or her slightly more generous health-care plan aren't as important to them. Or maybe it has to do with what Pollitt expressed in a recent blog posting: "On foreign policy Obama seems more enlightened, as in less bellicose."...Or it could just be that women with more education (and more money) relate on a subconscious level to the young and handsome Barack and Michelle Obama, with their white-porticoed mansion in one of the cooler Chicago neighborhoods and her Jimmy Choo shoes.
Or it's something less analyzable. When faced with a "movement," resistance is costly....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022902991_pf.html
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