A friend of mine is a well-known author with a decidedly liberal bent who, like me, was for John Edwards all year. She's been floundering around in the days since he split the race, looking for someone to support. Her sympathies veer between Hillary because she is a feminist and Obama because she respects and enjoys watching the great Youth Awakening to the possibilities of politics.
Just now she called me and said she is firmly back in the Hillary camp. (She knew this would make me happy, 'cause so am I.) A friend emailed her an essay by the pioneering feminist Robin Morgan entitled "Goodbye To All That #2," which was published on February 2.
In a sequel to her famous essay "Goodbye to All That," Morgan makes a strong, striking, and controversial case for Hillary Clinton -- and against Barack Obama. You can read the whole essay here.....
I've done a search and haven't found any diaries specifically about Morgan's essay, although there was a diary attempting to rebut its major tenets. If there was a diary summarizing this article already, I apologize.
Among the more incisive things Morgan says:
Goodbye, goodbye to . . .
—blaming anything Bill Clinton does on Hillary (even including his womanizing like the Kennedy guys—though unlike them, he got reported on). Let’s get real. If he hadn’t campaigned strongly for her everyone would cluck over what that meant. Enough of Bill and Teddy Kennedy locking their alpha male horns while Hillary pays for it.
—an era when parts of the populace feel so disaffected by politics that a comparative lack of knowledge, experience, and skill is actually seen as attractive, when celebrity-culture mania now infects our elections so that it’s "cooler" to glow with marquee charisma than to understand the vast global complexities of power on a nuclear, wounded planet.
—the notion that it’s fun to elect a handsome, cocky president who feels he can learn on the job, goodbye to George W. Bush and the destruction brought by his inexperience, ignorance, and arrogance. Goodbye to the accusation that HRC acts "entitled" when she’s worked intensely at everything she’s done—including being a nose-to-the-grindstone, first-rate senator from my state.
Goodbye to her being exploited as a Rorschach test by women who reduce her to a blank screen on which they project their own fears, failures, fantasies.
Goodbye to the phrase "polarizing figure" to describe someone who embodies the transitions women have made in the last century and are poised to make in this one. It was the women’s movement that quipped, "We are becoming the men we wanted to marry." She heard us, and she has.
Goodbye to some women letting history pass by while wringing their hands, because Hillary isn’t as "likeable" as they’ve been warned they must be, or because she didn’t leave him, couldn’t "control" him, kept her family together and raised a smart, sane daughter. (Think of the blame if Chelsea had ever acted in the alcoholic, neurotic manner of the Bush twins!) Goodbye to some women pouting because she didn’t bake cookies or she did, sniping because she learned the rules and then bent or broke them. Grow the hell up. She is not running for Ms.-perfect-pure-queen-icon of the feminist movement. She’s running to be president of the United States.