Erica Jong Sticks with Hillary

Erica Jong is upset.

She doesn't like the way Hillary Clinton is being treated and she seems to take it very personally. That's probably because she identifies "with her so strongly."

I never thought about it before, but I'm actually quite relieved that I don't strongly identify with Hillary.

Hillary vs. the Patriarchy

"Look, the only people for Hillary Clinton are the Democratic establishment and white women," said Bill Kristol yesterday on Fox News Sunday, one of the many "news" outlets to expose Kristol's reliable sexism. "The Democratic establishment would be crazy to follow an establishment that led it to defeat year after year," Kristol continued in his woolly, repetitive style. "White women are a problem, you know. We all live with that."

Bill Kristol has been much criticized for his war mongering, arrogance, poor writing and lack of fact checking. But at least the guy is honest. He considers women a problem -- especially white women. And he feels confident enough as an alpha male to be open about it. "I shouldn't have said that," he demurred. But he can say anything he likes and still fall eternally upward. He's a white man, lord of all he surveys -- including Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Those opening paragraphs of Jong's column caught me off guard.

She seems to be stuck in the 1970s.

"He's a white man, lord of all he surveys."

Good grief.

I don't interpret Kristol's remarks to mean that white women are really a problem in society, an annoyance. I believe he's speaking about them in terms of voting patterns.

I'm a white woman. I'm not offended.

I, too, have been watching Hillary Clinton with admiration, love, hate, annoyance and empathy since she appeared on the national scene 16 years ago. (Can it be only16 years?) I've had a hard time making up my mind about her. Perhaps that's because I identify with her so strongly.

I'm hardly the only woman who sees my life mirrored in hers. She's always worked twice as hard to get half as far as the men around her. She endured a demanding Republican father she could seldom please and a brilliant, straying husband who played around with bimbos. She was clearly his intellectual soul mate, but the women he chased were dumb and dumber.

That's not me at all. That's not my experience.

Nothing she did was ever enough to stop her detractors. Supporting a politician husband by being a successful lawyer, raising a terrific daughter, saving her marriage when the love of her life publicly humiliated her -- these are things that would be considered enormously admirable in most politicians and public figures. But because she's a white woman, she's been pilloried for them.

Hillary is not pilloried because she's a white woman.

What is Jong talking about?

She's had to endure nutcrackers made in her image, insults about the shape of her ankles and nasty cracks from mediocrities in the media like Rush Limbaugh, Chris Matthews and Kristol.

Public figures, politicians and celebrities, endure all sorts of insults and nasty cracks.

Rush Limbaugh is constantly under attack. Senator Tom Harkin made horrible comments about him and mocked his struggle with his addiction. "Maybe he was just high on his drugs again."

Limbaugh isn't a white woman.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been mercilessly ridiculed for years.

Does Jong know that they're white men?

When she decided to run for the Senate she was called a carpetbagger. When she won the hearts of her most conservative constituents by supporting their actual needs, the same poisonous pundits who said it couldn't be done attacked her.

If Hillary ran to be a senator from Arkansas or Illinois, she would not been called a carpetbagger. Simple.

Nor are poisonous women pundits any more kind. Maureen Dowd regularly gives her a drubbing. And "progressives" from Susan Brownmiller to Oprah Winfrey sport Obama buttons.

Dowd has the right to criticize Hillary.

And Brownmiller and Winfrey have the right to support Obama. They aren't obligated to support Hillary.

Jong really seems to be going off the deep end here.

I, too, was a bluestocking from a woman's college, straight-A student, Phi Betta Kappa, who found my voice as a writer while exiled to the boonies with a husband who cheated. With every book I published, I saw more clearly how uneven was the playing field for women. We were let into the literary world on sufferance. Unless we wrote unreadable academic tracts that nobody bought, or mysteries or romances or something called "chick lit" (whatever that is), or biographies of Great Men, we were booed off the stage.

(Note: It's Phi BETA Kappa.)

It's clear that Jong has a number of unresolved issues. She seems to have a lot of pent-up rage.

I chanced to get famous for my work. Hillary got famous in the unspeakable role of "First Lady," which Jackie Kennedy Onassis thought sounded like the name of racehorse. If she seemed uncomfortable in her skin, if she kept changing her hair, her image, her style, her way of speaking, how could we blame her? She was trying to be self-protective. Who wouldn't be if constantly attacked by a beastly press?

The "beastly press" isn't just beastly when it comes to Hillary.

Jong is so blind.

...In the 1990s, when they became "Billary" as president, she gave her all. When the White House beckoned, she was true blue. When he took the hardest job in the world, she helped. And when he rewarded her by letting some tootsie do whatever it was they did in the Oval Office, she got really mad.

But she was wise enough to know what it did and did not mean. She did what smart European and Asian women have done through the ages: She kept her marriage but changed her focus to her own ambitions.

This is ridiculous!

It's "smart" to let a philandering husband treat you like a doormat?

Sure, just forget about marital infidelity and focus on your own ambitions.

There's good advice!

As a senator she has learned compromise and negotiation. She has gotten to know red America as well as blue. If she could win over the rednecks in upstate New York, she can win over any American. She knows this country is full of "security" moms as well as soccer moms. Since she is a woman, she has to show she's ready to be commander in chief. Hence her "triangulation" on Iraq and her signing the absurd Lieberman-Kyl resolution, which calls on our government to use "military instruments" to "combat, contain and [stop]" Iran's meddling in Iraq.

"REDNECKS IN UPSTATE NEW YORK"???

Jong is not doing Hillary any favors.

I hope Hillary distances herself from Jong's bigoted remarks.

By the time it came up she must have known the Cheney-Bush war profiteers would never embrace even partial peace. She had to win over her America and theirs.

Who ever got elected in the United States without moving to the center? Not Ralph Nader the narcissist, nor Ross Perot the spoiler, nor certainly Adlai Stevenson the "egghead," nor Ronnie Reagan the red-baiter from Hollywoodland. Dubya presented himself as a "compassionate conservative" and our dopey press bought it. They inflicted him on us because they thought Al Gore was a nerd. The right-wing media barons happily smeared the better man for no good reason. Noam Chomsky predicted all this 25 years ago, when he said that the concentration of the media would rob us of real news.

Jong is overflowing with hate.

Unfortunately, she's letting it spill out and into the Washington Post.

What an embarrassment!

...[Barack Obama] was lucky enough not to be in the Senate when the Iraq war resolution was floated after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell lied about WMDs. That was the true tragedy of race: a black man lying for a corrupt white administration that was using him as a token, much as they use Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice now.

Obama is also a token -- of our incomplete progress toward an interracial society. I have nothing against him except his inexperience. Many black voters agree. They understand tokenism and condescension.

Unbelievable.

How dare she refer to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as tokens!

How dare she refer to Obama as a token!

Teddy and Caroline Kennedy, Maria Shriver, and Oprah are supporting a token.

That doesn't reflect very well on them, now does it?

I understand my hopeful friends who think an Obama button will change America. But I'm sticking with Hillary. I trust her because all her life, her pro bono work has been for mothers and children. And mothers and children -- of all colors -- are the most oppressed group in our country. I trust her to speak for our children and grandchildren -- and for us. She always has.

I'm surprised the Post printed this.

It really exposes Jong. She humiliates herself throughout the column.

It certainly doesn't help Hillary.

Maybe the Washington Post plans to endorse Obama.