Identification, Please

Thank you Ann Friedman:

It's high time we acknowledge that every candidate has an identity: a race, a gender, a cultural background. It may not make or break every voter's decision, but a candidate's identity is always an electoral factor -- even when that identity is white and male. Clinton's female supporters and Obama's black supporters don't get enough credit. They are making tough decisions on how to reconcile their political beliefs with their gut reactions upon seeing someone who looks like them up on the dais. In fact, all Democratic voters are wrestling with this. Very few Americans have ever had the opportunity to vote for anyone other than a white man for national office. After so many years with "white male" as the default political identity, we're all suddenly forced to think about how much a candidate's race, gender, and background should matter.

Let's make this election about the issues, everyone says -- and rightfully so. Our presidential nominee should be chosen primarily on the issues. But most of us don't separate issues from identity as cleanly as we'd like to believe. When it comes down to it, everyone is an "identity politics" voter. The problem is that phrase, as commonly used by right-wingers and some on the left who are tone-deaf on issues of race and gender, has the effect of cutting down the political choices and involvement of women, people of color, and gays and lesbians.

After all, Clinton and Obama and their supporters aren't playing "identity politics" any more than John Kerry's supporters did in 2004, or George W. Bush's did in 2000. It's absurd to suggest that the Andover-Yale-Harvard-bred Bush adopting a swagger and thickening his Texas accent, or John Kerry riding a borrowed Harley onto The Tonight Show set, was anything other than identity politics. And after several early primaries, as it became clear that white men most strongly supported John Edwards, nobody accused them of playing identity politics. Nope, that distinction is reserved for people who have historically not been in positions of political power. In short, you can't be a white guy voting for another white guy and still play the identity game.

See also me, back in November, on this same issue.

You Throw Your Cards Down First

Ann and Jessica of Feministing issue an ultimatum to male politicians: Stop playing the gender card already!

It's tongue-in-cheek, but quite good. See my further thoughts on the topic here.

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The Man Card

Garance Franke-Ruta is starting a visual archive of political advertisements that "play the gender card" to appeal to male voters, starting with this McCain mail piece. The project arose after a brief media flurry over whether Hillary Clinton was "playing the gender card" in trying to appeal to female voters. The coverage took on a vague sneering tone, as if this was some sort of distasteful identity politics that she should be tsk'd at for. Pushing back, some astute bloggers have noted that politicians play this game appealing to male voters all the time. Cf. 2004, sayeth Matt Yglesias:

As long as we're all worried about Hillary Clinton and the 'gender card' we do realize that about 75 percent of the 2004 race between John "I've killed people" Kerry and George "no you're a windsurfing frenchman" Bush was a series of efforts to play the gender card, right?

It's actually stunning how much of thr erstwhile foreign policy debate is primarily an argument about the size of the debaters' dicks.

A bit overwrought, but, actually, not really.

Perhaps what makes this all the more crazy is that, as Ezra Klein noted, the comments Clinton made that provoked this "feeding frenzy" were really quite mild -- just a remark to a gathering of Wellesley alumni that the all-women school really helped prepare her for the "all-boys club" of politics. But, switching back to GFR, she raises the point that Clinton's statement can be seen as part of the "secondary conversation" women have with each other in private -- the one they are actively discouraged from articulating in public circles, lest they damage their professional careers.

So really, there are two lanes of response to this controversy. The first is that Clinton isn't playing the gender card at all, and her critics are just looking to draw blood at any opportunity. The second is that she is playing the gender card, but no more explicitly or distastefully than male candidates do for their fellow men in every race.

While normally I'd segue here into how appeals to men are "invisible" because they are the dominant caste in the American political sphere, in a sense, that doesn't really apply here, the reason being that there is at least a partial awareness among the political class that there are, in fact, specific appeals to men qua men during elections (the way we don't recognize it for, say, Whites). From union men to "NASCAR dads", there are plenty of male blocs that get appealed to. Nonetheless, the Clinton controversy has illustrated the limits to this insight -- even though we all know that male politicians play the "man card" all the time, we still are acting shocked when a female politician tries to swing it for women. That's bogus, but as Atrios says, "this conversation just serves to reinforce the obvious state of things in this country: white males are the most aggressive practitioners of so-called "identity politics" and always have been."

See also: Digby, Shakesville, Matt Stoller

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