Campaign Desk

Shrill-ary

Is Clinton’s problem as basic as her voice?

• Print
• Email
• Comments
• Single page

It was perhaps the most memorable line of perhaps the most memorable moment of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president. The night she won New Hampshire, in an upset that seemed as much a surprise to her as to everyone else, the candidate strode out before a sea of supporters in the cavernous gym of Manchester’s Southern New Hampshire University. After being silenced for several minutes by roaring applause, she began her victory speech. Her words thundered over the supporters gathered around her: “Over the last week, I listened to you,” Clinton boomed, “and, in the process, I found my own voice.”

Well, as Clinton herself is fond of saying on the stump, as if her speech were a yearbook and her audience were, collectively, a classmate she only kinda knows: What a long, strange trip it’s been. Since that unusually warm January day in New Hampshire, we’ve seen Clinton’s momentum go from “speed” to “stall.” And, along the way, that powerful voice of New Hampshire’s primary night—metaphorical, even metaphysical—has shed its transcendent quality to become, in pundits’ minds, the embodiment of the Clinton campaign’s weakness. “Her public voice in the month since winning New Hampshire was all over the range: from thoughtful and classy to biting and harsh, all in a day’s work,” Jamie Stiehm wrote in the Huffington Post. And of course, as it careened it ceased to be a source of empowerment; Clinton’s voice itself is now a liability. “After saying she found her ‘voice’ in New Hampshire, she has turned into Sybil,” Maureen Dowd declared in yesterday’s column:

We’ve had Experienced Hillary, Soft Hillary, Hard Hillary, Misty Hillary, Sarcastic Hillary, Joined-at-the-Hip-to-Bill Hillary, Her-Own-Person-Who-Just-Happens-to-Be-Married-to-a-Former-President Hillary, It’s-My-Turn Hillary, Cuddly Hillary, Let’s-Get-Down-in-the-Dirt-and-Fight-Like-Dogs Hillary.

Dowd’s litany is unfair—she would do well to point out that we’ve also had Liberal Barack, Post-Partisan Barack, African-American Barack, Post-Racial Barack, etc. (and that those varying labels aren’t just ascribed by pundits; they’re assigned by the Obama campaign itself). It’s part of the game for politicians to present varying facets of themselves to voters, both actual and potential, at a given moment in the campaign; indeed, what divides shape-shifting from flip-flopping in politics is little more than savvy. Everyone shifts; the “flip-floppers” are merely the ones who get called on it.

In Clinton’s case, though, the “schizophrenic” label sticks. (It would stick to anyone whose personality has multiple dimensions—in other words, it would stick to anyone.) And it does so, in part, through pundits’ somewhat odd fixation on Clinton’s voice. Take the candidate’s (attempted) mockery of Obama this weekend, the rather unfortunate speech now shorthanded as her “celestial choirs” takedown. (“Let’s just get everybody together. Let’s get unified. The sky will open. The lights will come down. Celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.”) Clinton’s Sarcastic Turn wasn’t derided merely as “unattractive”; pundits also went out of their way to single out her voice as the specific agent of all the ugliness. It was “terrifyingly shrill,” New York magazine wrote. As Joe Scarborough put it during an appearance on Hardball, “there is a shrillness in Hillary that comes out on TV whenever she gets excited about something….Every time her voice goes up, she gets very shrill, very un-Clinton-like, if you’re talking about Bill Clinton.” Tucker Carlson agreed. “It raises the question,” he declared, “Could you actually live in this country for eight years having to listen to her voice?”

He doesn’t further explain what, exactly, is so inhospitable about Clinton’s voice. But it likely has at least something to do with what Stanley Fish observed in a recent New York Times column:

If she answers questions aggressively, she is shrill. If she moderates her tone, she’s just play-acting. If she cries, she’s faking. If she doesn’t, she’s too masculine. If she dresses conservatively, she’s dowdy. If she doesn’t, she’s inappropriately provocative.

In other words, Clinton seems caught in a web of Catch-22s, and she becomes more and more entangled as her campaign grows, it seems, increasingly desperate in its moods and methods. And that desperation seems to have led to her transforming the empowered New Hampshire Voice, capital V, to a voice of victimization—lower-case. Take the “get Barack a pillow” moment in Tuesday’s Ohio debate—a low point, to be sure: it rarely behooves a candidate, male or female, to complain about maltreatment, however valid the complaints may be. And the press pounced. “Hillary Clinton plays the victim card,” the Politico announced, managing, in a mere six words, to convey a sense of both disapproval and inevitability. And here’s The New York Times’s take:

Mrs. Clinton decided to fight back by playing herself as victim, referring to an “S.N.L.” skit that viewers are more likely to have seen than anything else, that Mr. Obama is being coddled while she is being throttled. She pressed her point by complaining that she is usually asked to answer first. But had she gone second, she could just as easily have used that as evidence that her younger opponent gets preferential treatment—or an extra pillow—from the press.

Perhaps Clinton was espousing the idea—popular, but impossible to prove—that she won New Hampshire because of her “misty moment.” Perhaps, she figured, the victim card just works for her: it makes her an empathetic figure, and rallies her troops to her aid. If so, however, she figured wrong. There are few things less presidential than victimhood. But—and here’s the rub—there are even fewer things less presidential than complaining about that victimhood. (As Dowd put it, “Beating on the press is the lamest thing you can do.”) That’s where Clinton is really stumbling; the word “voice,” as applied to Clinton, has taken the timbre of ‘whining.’ When she asserts herself, the liability isn’t (just) being seen as a bitch; it’s also, and more so, being seen as a grouch.

 1  |  2 

Comments

dwinner

Thu 28 Feb 2008 12:51 PM

Re: Hillary's voice
As for Tucker Carlson worrying about listening to 8 years of Hillary's voice, I find it hard to imagine listening to 8 years or even 8 more days of John McCain saying "My friends" at least once a minute. Maybe CBS's sports announcer Jim Nantz, who opens all of his broadcasts with "Hello, friends" can apply to be the running mate.
In general however, I find criticism of Hillary's voice to be not only sexist but another example of how the media trivializes our politics. Has anyone mentioned Darfur, the Supreme Court, or had an intelligent/honest debate about Iraq? (Forget that: watch the Senate on C-Span and you quickly realize that honest debate on Iraq is impossible.) Sigh.