[FoRK] Crying your way to victory

[Sat N]

Good Op-ed from NYT.

I remember a scientific study from a year ago that basically said
Democrats are touchy feely idiots, while Republicans are cold blooded
morons ( oh, and the libertarians are confused zombies )...... So its
not surprising that a crying woman appeals to democrats more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/09/opinion/08dowd.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?
By MAUREEN DOWD

DERRY, N.H.

When I walked into the office Monday, people were clustering around a
computer to watch what they thought they would never see: Hillary
Clinton with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes.

A woman gazing at the screen was grimacing, saying it was bad. Three
guys watched it over and over, drawn to the "humanized" Hillary. One
reporter who covers security issues cringed. "We are at war," he said.
"Is this how she'll talk to Kim Jong-il?"

Another reporter joked: "That crying really seemed genuine. I'll bet
she spent hours thinking about it beforehand." He added dryly: "Crying
doesn't usually work in campaigns. Only in relationships."

Bill Clinton was known for biting his lip, but here was Hillary doing
the Muskie. Certainly it was impressive that she could choke up and
stay on message.

She won her Senate seat after being embarrassed by a man. She pulled
out New Hampshire and saved her presidential campaign after being
embarrassed by another man. She was seen as so controlling when she
ran for the Senate that she had to be seen as losing control, as she
did during the Monica scandal, before she seemed soft enough to
attract many New York voters.

Getting brushed back by Barack Obama in Iowa, her emotional moment
here in a cafe and her chagrin at a debate question suggesting she was
not likable served the same purpose, making her more appealing,
especially to women, particularly to women over 45.

The Obama campaign calculated that they had the women's vote over the
weekend but watched it slip away in the track of her tears.

At the Portsmouth cafe on Monday, talking to a group of mostly women,
she blinked back her misty dread of where Obama's "false hopes" will
lead us — "I just don't want to see us fall backwards," she said
tremulously — in time to smack her rival: "But some of us are right
and some of us are wrong. Some of us are ready and some of us are
not."

There was a poignancy about the moment, seeing Hillary crack with
exhaustion from decades of yearning to be the principal rather than
the plus-one. But there was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her
choking up. What was moving her so deeply was her recognition that the
country was failing to grasp how much it needs her. In a weirdly
narcissistic way, she was crying for us. But it was grimly typical of
her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing.

As Spencer Tracy said to Katharine Hepburn in "Adam's Rib," "Here we
go again, the old juice. Guaranteed heart melter. A few female tears,
stronger than any acid."

The Clintons once more wriggled out of a tight spot at the last
minute. Bill churlishly dismissed the Obama phenom as "the biggest
fairy tale I've ever seen," but for the last few days, it was Hillary
who seemed in danger of being Cinderella. She became emotional because
she feared that she had reached her political midnight, when she would
suddenly revert to the school girl with geeky glasses and frizzy hair,
smart but not the favorite. All those years in the shadow of one
Natural, only to face the prospect of being eclipsed by another
Natural?

How humiliating to have a moderator of the New Hampshire debate ask
her to explain why she was not as popular as the handsome young prince
from Chicago. How demeaning to have Obama rather ungraciously chime
in: "You're likable enough." And how exasperating to be pushed into an
angry rebuttal when John Edwards played wingman, attacking her on
Obama's behalf.

"I actually have emotions," she told CNN's John Roberts on a
damage-control tour. "I know that there are some people who doubt
that." She went on "Access Hollywood" to talk about, as the show put
it, "the double standards that a woman running for president faces."
"If you get too emotional, that undercuts you," Hillary said. "A man
can cry; we know that. Lots of our leaders have cried. But a woman,
it's a different kind of dynamic."

It was a peculiar tactic. Here she was attacking Obama for spreading
gauzy emotion by spreading gauzy emotion. When Hillary hecklers yelled
"Iron my shirt!" at her in Salem on Monday, it stirred sisterhood.

At Hillary's victory party in Manchester, Carolyn Marwick, 65, said
Hillary showed she was human at the cafe. "I think she's really tired.
She's been under a lot more scrutiny than the other candidates — how
she dresses, how she laughs."

Her son, David, 35, an actor, said he also "got choked up" when he saw
Hillary get choked up. He echoed Hillary's talking points on the
likability issue. "It's not 'American Idol.' You have to vote smart."

Olivia Cooper, 41, of Concord said, "When you think you're not going
to make it, it's heart-wrenching when you want something so much."

Gloria Steinem wrote in The Times yesterday that one of the reasons
she is supporting Hillary is that she had "no masculinity to prove."
But Hillary did feel she needed to prove her masculinity. That was why
she voted to enable W. to invade Iraq without even reading the
National Intelligence Estimate and backed the White House's
bellicosity on Iran.

Yet, in the end, she had to fend off calamity by playing the female
victim, both of Obama and of the press. Hillary has barely talked to
the press throughout her race even though the Clintons this week
whined mightily that the press prefers Obama.

Bill Clinton, campaigning in Henniker on Monday, also played the
poor-little-woman card in a less-than-flattering way. "I can't make
her younger, taller or change her gender," he said. He was so
low-energy at events that it sometimes seemed he was distancing
himself from her. Now that she is done with New Hampshire, she may
distance herself from him, realizing that seeing Bill so often reminds
voters that they don't want to go back to that whole megillah again.

Hillary sounded silly trying to paint Obama as a poetic dreamer and
herself as a prodigious doer. "Dr. King's dream began to be realized
when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act," she said. Did any
living Democrat ever imagine that any other living Democrat would try
to win a presidential primary in New Hampshire by comparing herself to
L.B.J.? (Who was driven out of politics by Gene McCarthy in New
Hampshire.)

Her argument against Obama now boils down to an argument against
idealism, which is probably the lowest and most unlikely point to
which any Clinton could sink. The people from Hope are arguing against
hope.

At her victory party, Hillary was like the heroine of a Lifetime
movie, a woman in peril who manages to triumph. Saying that her heart
was full, she sounded the feminist anthem: "I found my own voice."