Big Girls Don't Cry by Rebecca Traister

From The Week of December 12, 2010

\ We all harbor prejudices. Some of us do all we can to eliminate them while others of us wear them proudly, but all of us possess them because it's impossible not to. Prejudice is the result of judging what we don't understand, what we have no experience with. And as we can't have experience with everything, prejudice, ranging from the inoffensively mild to the viciously strong, is the natural result. Most of the time, these prejudices, when encountered, are annoying and disappointing, but they are handled, absorbed, disposed of. But when prejudice plays a role in electing, or not electing, someone to the presidency of the United States, widely considered to be the most powerful position humanity has ever created, then prejudice can't just be shrugged off. It must be acknowledged, put up to societal scrutiny, and then dealt with. With regard to the role sexism played in the 2008 Presidential Election, this is what Ms. Traister has set out to do.

Using her own voting vacillations in 2008 as the backbone of her tale, Ms. Traister fills out Big Girls Don't Cry with an examination into the sexism that plagued, primarily, the Democratic nomination and, secondarily, the wider contest for the presidency. Though she touches on other political women, Ms. Traister concerns herself mostly with Hillary Rodham Clinton, chronicling not only the treacherous ground she was forced to walk by dint of being the first female candidate for the office with a serious chance of victory, but the extent to which the news media seemed eager to write her off once it was clear Barack Obama was going to be a major force in the election. Ms. Traister's argument is no more powerful, here, than when she asks, in the wake of Ms. Clinton being told by media members to quit the race to spare Mr. Obama the bloody fight, if a man in Ms. Clinton's position would have been told to make the same sacrifice. Wouldn't he be heralded for fighting bravely on for what he believed in rather than, as Ms. Clinton was, being blamed for making the nomination gorier than it ought to have been?

By Ms. Traister's reckoning, the media was not alone in doing a disservice to female candidates in 2008; female voters too have some responsibility to bear. Hillary Clinton, the first woman in U.S. history with a clear shot at the top job and women sided more with Mr. Obama than with Ms. Clinton? Ms. Traister believes that Ms. Clinton's transformation from a staunch progressive into a pragmatic centrist alienated women. But more over, the expectations women had for Ms. Clinton made her impossible for them to like: too dainty, too strong; too cold, too emotive; too nasty, too weak. So many excuses generated to explain away the fact that they were throwing away an opportunity to make history.

Ms. Traister presents a clear and convincing case for the sexism that helped derail Ms. Clinton's candidacy, but I'm not so sure that Ms. Clinton's difficulties, with women, with her messaging, and with the media weren't more the result of her being a first. Mr. Obama dealt with similar difficulties. He had to win over African Americans who thought he was too white, whites who thought he was too black, all while avoiding any talk of racism which, if broached, would surely swallow the campaign whole. I sympathize with ms. Clinton. Ms. Traister makes eminently clear the extent to which Ms. Clinton had the deck cruelly and unfairly stacked against her. But I doubt it will be this way the next time a serious female candidate runs. We evolve, particularly when we are forced to witness inequities. We evolve and we better appreciate what we've taken for granted. I suspect, however, this is cold comfort to Ms. Clinton who, though she made her fair share of errors, deserved a fairer fate. Delightfully written and excellently argued. (3/5 Stars)

Game Change by John Heilemann And Mark Halperin

From The Week of February 07, 2010

Politics is such an ugly business, populated as it is with labyrinthine agendas and ideological entrenchment. If it weren't for the obscene amount of public power wielded by the victors of the various elections, no sane person would bother with it.

Yet, somehow, politics has become a spectator sport, particularly in the United States where the polarization of the two major parties establishes a kind of red-team versus blue-team mentality that fits the sports analogy perfectly. Who's up? Who's down? Who's about to rally and whose about to take their ball and go home? This is the talk of bars and coffee shops.

So it should not surprise, in the least, that the fortunes of politicians are covered with the same zeal and the same loose, ethical standards found in sportswriting. For make no mistake, Game Change cannot pretend to have any journalistic credibility. It is an eminently entertaining recount of the 2008 Presidential race which draws wonderfully acidic portraits of all the major participants from Barack Obama to Sarah Palin, but there's hardly any attribution anywhere, especially in the most juicy moments. Compare this to the book by Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson which covered the same topic but kept itself from the kind of backroom speculation Game Change devolves to.

There's room in our culture for Game Change. After all, there's room in our culture for gossip pages at magazines, but we should not assume that this has any more credibility than that. Perhaps Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann nail every point, properly paint every character portrait, but without attribution we can't know that. Without attribution, this is just particularly well-researched gossip.

That said, it is a delightful read. The portrait of Elizabeth Edwards is devastating and memorable, as is the extent to which the McCain/Palin campaign seemed doomed from the start. But enjoyable isn't credible and so I must walk away from Game Change unsure of what's true and what's old-fashioned score-settling. (3/5 Stars)

A Woman In Charge by Carl Bernstein

From The Week of August 30, 2009

Written prior to 2008's Democratic nomination fight with Barak Obama, this is Carl Bernstein's stab at a definitive biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton, from her work as a lawyer on the Watergate case, to her introduction and marriage to Bill Clinton, to her glass-ceiling-busting presence in a leading Arkansan law firm in the 1970s, to the sex scandals, to Mr. Clinton's election to the presidency, to Healthcare in 1994, to Vincent Foster, to Monica Lewinsky, and finally to her own political career, first as senator and then as the Democratic party's presumptive nominee for the American presidency. Ms. Clinton has had a long and remarkable life and Mr. Bernstein leaves few stones unturned as he unsparingly recounts her successes and her failures.

I imagine that Ms. Clinton's supporters will find Mr. Bernstein too harsh and her detractors find him too soft, but I find this to be a sign of a good biography. Mr. Bernstein forsakes much of the muckraking and gossipping that soils most works of this type, producing instead an unflinching portrayal of one of America's most outstanding women. (4/5 Stars)