Hillary and the Invisible Women
Tina Brown
NEWSWEEK
Mar 8, 2008
....The grueling, brutal pace Hillary maintains (14 cities in four days) even sets a pace for the younger Senator Obama. Perhaps she deserves to prevail simply because she's tougher—tougher than the media following ashen-faced in her wake, and clearly tougher than the other Democratic and Republican candidates who've already gone down in flames. Let no one dispute the grit of a woman willing to get up at 4 a.m. on a Monday in time to deliver doughnuts to workers on a shift change at the Chrysler plant in Toledo....
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Here's the good part about the meta-madness of living in the campaign bubble. Sitting on the press bus learning nothing makes you especially receptive, when you get off at a pit stop, to learning everything—to feeling with heightened keenness the raw charge of churning humanity, unfiltered through polls and belligerent media noise. It allows you, finally, to see the candidate through the voters' eyes, and to realize how resolutely effective, how inspiringly pedestrian Hillary Clinton is. Campaigning in places like Cleveland, Akron, Dayton and Toledo—communities that have some of the highest foreclosure rates in the country—Hillary manages to fuse her own political survival with her audience's own struggles to get by. NAFTA-gate works wonders for her in places where so many jobs have disappeared.
On Sunday morning there's a "canvas kickoff" in a high-school gym in the predominantly white, small suburban town of Westerville, Ohio, which has FOR SALE signs on every block. She stands with her hardy brown ankle boots planted firmly center stage—the indomitable image of a seasoned, capable 60-year-old woman, handsomely groomed as always in her imperturbable (blue, this time) pantsuit, belting out bread-and-butter positions on health care, No Child Left Behind and college loans. "Yes!" she crescendos. "I've been around for a while, doing this work for 35 years, and I know it's important to have a president in the White House who gets up every single day and worries about your fears, your needs! … We need a fighter, a doer and a champion in the White House!"
If you dialed into the campaign conference call later that day, a platoon of generals told you why they were ready to salute her as commander in chief—so many of them that by the time she walked out on the stage of a school auditorium in Akron, you half expected her to be wearing a Kevlar top. Still, her best role will always be Hillary, the indefatigable student-body president, demanding, insisting that voters grade her for the specifics of her campaign promises: "I want to be in the White House and have you say, 'Well, we heard you in Akron but when are you going to produce those jobs you talked about?' " The scary part is that she means it....
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It's a revolt that has been overdue for a while and has now found its focus in Clinton's candidacy. In 1952, Ralph Ellison's revelatory novel, "Invisible Man," nailed the experience of being black in America. In the relentless youth culture of the early 21st century, if you are 50 and female, the novel that's being written on your forehead every day is "Invisible Woman."...
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It was hard not to be caught up in the euphoria at the Columbus Athenaeum when her primary results started to come in. I found myself jammed between two exultant Columbus ladies, a high-fiving yoga-studio owner in her 50s and a human resources director of a software company roughly the same age. They were raising the roof along with the band to the old 1965 McCoys hit "Hang on Sloopy."
For all the invisible women, it's the only anthem they've got. And for their sake alone, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton should not give up the fight.
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