Clinton Blowback

Minion of Satan, Chris Matthews:

So no, I have not been a Hillary Clinton supporter. But the torrent of ill-disguised hatred and resentment unleashed toward a briefly weakened Clinton this week shook that breezy naiveté right out of me, and made me feel something that all the hectoring from feminist elders could not: guilt for not having stood up for Hillary. I can't believe I'm saying this, but had I been a New Hampshire voter on Tuesday, I would have pulled a lever for the former first lady with a song in my heart and a bird flipped at MSNBC's Chris Matthews, a man whose interest in bringing Clinton down hovers on the pathological, and whose drooling excitement at the prospect of her humiliation began to pulse from the television last week before most Iowa precincts had even begun to report results.

...He was not alone in his glee. There was the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson, announcing before the caucuses had concluded that if Clinton lost Iowa, she would likely lose New Hampshire too! And South Carolina! She'd be lucky to scrape by with small states like Nevada, Matthews crowed. Newsweek's Howard Fineman was also excited. "If [Obama] wins this thing, even by one vote in Iowa, then that five-point lead of Hillary's [in New Hampshire] is going to disappear in a second," he said. Pat Buchanan recommended that in her still purely imagined concession speech, Clinton "be very, very gracious." It wasn't just the guys. Andrea Mitchell might as well have had canary feathers hanging from her mouth as she reported from Clinton's Iowa campaign headquarters on the "manufactured" crowd gathered for Clinton's concession speech.

Ding-dong, the witch is dead! Which old witch? The Clinton witch!

...But the Iowa commentary was just a warm-up for the post-Iowa free-for-all, in which everyone from the New York Times to Keith Olbermann speculated giddily, practically drunkenly, about when, exactly, Clinton would pack it in.

...For many of these pundits, especially those who pander to a mostly white male audience, a nearly pornographic investment in Clinton's demise is nothing new. Matthews made his career as a pundit in that heady era of Clinton-bashing, the 1990s. That Hillary Clinton's political career might not have only survived his wrath but grown more fulsome on it seems to have incited him further, and Matthews has shown hyperactive zeal in his hatred for her. That leads him, often, to imagine Clinton strategy and imaginatively discredit it before it unfolds, or to offer helpful Clinton-beating tips to her opponents. Eight years ago, when Utah financial advisor Howard Ruff began taking donations to bring down Hillary -- who was not yet even a senator -- he appeared on "Hardball," where he explained to Matthews that in a battle against Hillary's nascent political power, "It's a lot easier to kill a 12-inch snake than a 12-foot cobra." Matthews helped him sharpen his weaponry: "You want to destroy the missile in its silo, which makes sense to me."

...She was, after all that inevitability, just a girl. A nerdy girl at that, and an ugly, hysterical one, the tabloids showed us, with freeze-framed images of her caught making unflattering faces. The words thrown around about her fizzed with ill-disguised misogynistic energy: In her presumptive defeat, Clinton suddenly was shrill, panicked, desperate, emotional.

...Then, of course, she cried. Or, more precisely, allowed her voice to crack and her eyes to well up. How much girlier can you get? Here were just some of the congested headlines: "Clinton Fights Back Tears," "Clinton Gets Emotional," "Hillary Gets Leaky."

...The five days between Iowa and New Hampshire were discombobulating for anyone who had begun to get comfortable with the apparent ease with which American history had weirdly, smoothly made room for a female candidate. A woman had led the Democratic nominees for nearly a year with barely a whisper -- save for the occasional unflattering wrinkled photo -- of serious double-standard resistance from a nation that has yet to break its streak of white Christian guys sitting behind the Oval Office desk. It had all been so deceptively easy. But here were the buttoned-up white boys over at "Meet the Press" going all "Lord of the Flies" on her. Cintra Wilson called the spectacle "a little witch-burny," while Time's Michael Scherer blogged about a call he'd received from a conservative pundit who told him, "The witch is dead, and life is going to change." The pundits, Clinton's opponents, her colleagues -- they were making sport of Hillary's immolation. They were rolling in it. Exulting in it. It reeked of a particular kind of relief, relief from the guys who had thought they were going to have to hold their noses and get pushed around by some dame. They were behaving like men who had received a sudden and unexpected reprieve, and classily reacted by pulling down their pants and peeing on her.

And then ... people began to notice. In my circle, mothers in particular began to notice. My friends and colleagues told me of their despondent moms. Even my own, whose politics list far to the left of Clinton's, bowled me over by expressing her sadness about the treatment Hillary received. I think she was surprised herself as she confessed that she was "sad" about Iowa. "Whether or not it's Hillary," she said, "I just think this shows that any woman who's going to be aggressive enough to make a go of it is going to be too aggressive to be likable."

Gloria Steinem noticed. The Ms. founder wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times called "Women Are Never Front-Runners," a piece that was assertively retro in its "Our Bodies Ourselves," "Free to Be ... You and Me" rhetoric. Steinem pointed out that a woman with Obama's résumé would never have become even a U.S. senator, let alone a viable candidate for president; she reminded readers that black men got the right to vote 50 years before women did, that Obama "is seen as unifying by his race while [Clinton] is seen as divisive by her sex," that "she is accused of 'playing the gender card' when citing the old boys' club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations," that "some women, perhaps especially younger ones, hope to deny or escape the sexual caste system; thus Iowa women over 50 and 60 ... proved once again that women are the one group that grows more radical with age." God, it was so embarrassing, so 1972, so Women's Studies 101. What was more embarrassing was that it was so right on. And I wasn't the only one who thought so. From practically the moment it was published through the results of the New Hampshire primary, Steinem's Op-Ed has been the most e-mailed story in the New York Times.

...By the time the New Hampshire numbers started to roll in on Tuesday night, the pundits were beginning to notice that something, though they couldn't quite put their finger on what, was not turning out as they had so jeeringly, confidently predicted. Women, it seemed, had come to the polls in New Hampshire and voted for Hillary Clinton.

Suddenly, the choking up that had the day before been either faked or a sign of her unraveling was being credited with changing people's minds. "I never saw her like that before," said Jack Cafferty on CNN. "Sympathetic. Real." CNN's Gloria Borger informed us that "there is a lot of talk tonight about whether Hillary's tearing up made any difference," noting that a striking percentage of female Hillary voters told exit pollsters that they had decided whom to vote for on that very day, and had, for a variety of reasons, given Hillary Clinton the New Hampshire primary.

Meanwhile, Matthews was flailing. Color had begun to drain from his face as the early, close results began to trickle in. He looked like he had swallowed something much less tasty than what had been served up in Iowa. Halfway through the night he had his arms crossed defensively across his chest, a petulant and shamed schoolboy, and was proclaiming that he "was in the room" at Saturday night's debate and had thought it "a draw," but that apparently Clinton's performance had been "good enough here for women who wanted to root for her." He desperately recited the numbers of every pollster who had predicted her loss like a catechism, focusing on how it was not just he who had misfired. There must be some supernatural explanation: Could voters have been responding to Clinton's tears? Was it because the University of New Hampshire was not in session? Surely these numbers would change, and prove him right. Hillary could not simply have been winning an election.

Tom Brokaw, reduced to being a guest on Matthews' show, since he is retired and his network is reluctant to break into reality show programming to bring prospective viewers news of the presidential election, had also apparently noticed the treatment Clinton had received in the grabby hands of his colleagues, and seemed to relish his opportunity to spank Matthews. "This is one of the great triumphs of American presidential politics," Brokaw said sternly, "and the rest of us who were saying out loud that this was not going to happen, we've got a lot of explaining to do." Every time he appeared again, Brokaw seemed anxious to hammer this point home. "The people out there are going to begin to make some judgments about us if we don't begin to temper that temptation to constantly get ahead of what the voters are deciding," he told Matthews, who reflexively barked back about the commitment and quality of polling institutions. Polling "is a lot less important than letting this process go forward as it should," said Brokaw.

...An unlikely promise. But here's a message from the women of New Hampshire, and me, to Hillary Clinton's exuberant media antagonists: You have no power here. Now be gone, before somebody drops a house on you!