Kamala is Doing Everything They’re Asking Her To Do Except One: She’s Not a Man.

“Why isn’t she doing more ‘hard-hitting’ interviews?” “Why isn’t she coming harder at Trump?” OK, I’ll “take my gloves off” and tell you why…

During the Hillary Clinton pneumonia hysteria, in which Hillary was accused of hiding every malady from a stroke to Parkinson’s, Stephen Colbert, addressing Clinton’s critics, said, “You’re just tiptoeing around the medical condition you’re really upset about, one that she has that no other president in history has faced. Hillary Clinton has Chronic No-Penis. It’s congenital . . . every woman in her family has had the same thing.”

1. I have something to confess. Don’t pile on me until you’ve read the whole thing.

My first reaction, after watching Barack Obama’s speech last night was anger. My husband had turned to me, excited. He loved it. “That’s a whole new kind of speech, isn’t it?”

I glowered at him. “Yeah, sure. But where was she? Where was the final movement of the speech? You know, the one in which he pivots from Trump to talk about Kamala?

And I went on and on for awhile, gathering steam. Among the things I love about my husband is that he doesn’t get all riled up himself when I do that. He’s a gentlemanly WASP and I’m a fierce Jewess, and so long as we’re not talking about our own problems, he’s wonderfully non-defensive.

“And by the way,” I went on, “his speech had pretty much the same themes, even sometimes the same wording— that she’s been emphasizing in all her speeches. Leaving aside Obama’s magic, I’ve seen some version of this ‘We have to vote for her because he’s so bad’ over and over, from Bernie Sander’s so-called “endorsement” of Hillary Clinton to the New York Times editorial that I’d written “fuck you, too” a few weeks ago.”

Here I have to pause and make sure you all know that I adore Obama, and I’d looked forward to this speech since it was announced. And I actually loved the speech. It wasn’t anything he did, but what he didn’t do that triggered me.

And then I realized how much I’ve been carrying with me the apparently still-raw wounds from 2016 (and to some degree, 2020, when Kamala—my way favorite among the very talented primary candidates—got shredded by the media.) I was prepped for that realization because earlier in the day my sister Binnie had reminded me that the Kamala/Susan relationship was like a second marriage for me, and one I couldn’t bear to see end as the first one had. I’d followed every turn in 2016–eventually dissected in my book The Destruction of Hillary Clinton: Untangling the Political Forces, Media Culture, and Assault on Fact that Decided the 2016 Election—and then the unthinkable happened. My brain and body were on alert for any sign that it was happening again,

“But Obama was fighting FOR her!” I could hear people saying to me. Yes, he was, and in a very important way that she couldn’t fight for herself (more on that in a bit.) And as I dove a little deeper into my initial reaction, I realized what I was most upset by wasn’t Obama’s speech itself, but what I feared the media would do with it. “This is what we’ve been missing,” they’d say, “Why hasn’t she ripped into Trump the way he did?” And indeed, the first words I heard as I stumbled with my first cup of coffee into the room with the big television, was some guy on Morning Joe saying that Kamala had to be “more aggressive,” should “let it rip!”

Oh really? Can’t you just imagine the reaction if she had “let it rip” the way Obama did? If she had accused Trump of never having changed a tire in his life, and chuckled over the image? (Emasculating!) Of never having changed a diaper in his life? (There she goes again, with her woman-centered campaign!) Of offering such forceful instruction in what “character” is? (We want policies, not a schoolmarm lecture on values!)

One area in which Obama, as a man, had the privilege of “letting it rip” was in addressing the messed-up notions about being “strong” that have been attracting so many young men to Trump. His lead-up included citing the various important role models in his life. Did any of you notice that except for his wife he only mentioned men? At the time, I was puzzled. I now realize this was a moment of shifting gears from remarks for a “general” audience to a riff specifically designed for men.

It was masterful; you might say subversive. When he segued into his redefining of strength, he began with qualities that would resonate especially with men whose gender-values are pretty traditional: “working hard and carrying a heavy load without complaining,” and “taking responsibility for your actions.” But then, he ended in a powerful crescendo of what traditionally has been identified with “women’s work”: caring.

Strength as caring is something Kamala has been emphasizing for weeks, using virtually every rally and interview to criticize Trump’s bullying and insisting that “the true measure of the strength of a leader is not based on who you beat down, it's based on who you lift up.” And actually, despite the media complaints that she should “go at Trump” more forcefully, I’d say she’s been plenty forceful already. Just have a look again at that debate, which I wrote about here:

Can a Woman Be Too Presidential?

In that stack, I argued that Kamala “defies that zero-sum-game, that necessity to choose between being all the things women have been associated with (nurturance, flirtatiousness, tenderness) and the power and authority associated with men as leaders”:

“Kamala Harris blasts through that classic double-bind. It delights those who adore her, but confounds those who don’t know what to make of her, who have never seen anything like it (“I like her. But I still don’t know.”) Many are relieved when they are provided with an excuse to return to their comfort zones (“I need to know more about her policies.”) “Policy,” I suggest—which Kamala has in fact provided plenty of—is imagined to be what a serious male contender would prioritize. (Unless, of course, he’s Trump, who gets away with an unspecified “concept of a plan” to be detailed “in the not too distant future.”) And others were outraged that Kamala dared, throughout the debate, to employ both playfulness and power to cut the size-obsessed Trump down to size. And she accomplished that even if you turned the sound off.

What Kamala couldn’t do, however, was speak directly to men about Trump’s debasement of masculinity. That was for Obama to do. Thank you, Barack. I hope it gets through to the Bros.

2. Don’t you just love (by that I mean hate) those journalists who keep kvetching about how important it is for Kamala to “put herself out there more” and “introduce herself” to the American people—and in the next breath complain if she does “friendly” interviews?

The “mainstream”/corporate/legacy media notion of “introducing” oneself seems to be: let some grim-faced, headline-seeking inquisitor “expose” every vulnerability, every trivial mistake, every “pivot,” every “dodge,” every “flip-flop” (also known, by regular people, as changing ones mind.)

Look at these faces. I ask you, who would you rather be interviewed by? The guy who offers you a beer or the woman who, as one of my substack friends put it, looks like the batteries on her vibrator just died?

(For a more sober critique of the Dana Bash interview, see:

Election Watch Week 6: Kamala and Tim Give Georgia Love and CNN Gives Us a Pseudo-Event.

This past week, Kamala did a one-day media blitz that provided her with spaces to show voters what SHE HAS TO OFFER. Isn’t that what “getting to know” a candidate should be about?

The blitz actually started on Sunday with “Sixty Minutes” and Bill Whitaker (as grim as Dana—do they need a “permission structure”¹ to smile?) That one was edited for consumption by viewers with an impoverished attention-span (as the show now always is—by the network, not Kamala Harris’ campaign) and provided Trump with grounds for yet another conspiracy theory:

“A FAKE NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal,” he said. “TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE. Election Interference. She is a Moron, and the Fake News Media wants to hide that fact. An UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL!!! The Dems got them to do this and should be forced to concede the Election? WOW!”

In fact, Kamala’s unedited answer (on Netanyahu) was better, although overly-wordy, than the snippet CBS chose. But I’m not going to get into that in this piece. What I want to say instead is that you’ll get a lot more out of Howard Stern’s “friendly” (for the corporate media that means “non-rigorous”) interview with her, in which Kamala starts out kinda formal and ends up, due to the relaxed atmosphere provided by Stern, to get more personal than she has in any other interview.

Maybe you don’t care that Kamala ate a family sized bag of Doritos after Trump beat Hillary Clinton, that she works out on an elliptical every day, doesn’t sleep much, or that she got fired from her first job cleaning test tubes at her mother’s laboratory because she didn’t wanna clean test tubes. The specificity of the personal details aren’t that important. What’s important is that by the end of the show she’s laughing and bantering with Stern without fear of a “gotcha.” And that gives her permission (no “structure” needed) to show how she feels rather than concentrate on being careful about what she’s saying (more about that in my next stack.)

Here’s what you’ll learn from the interview with Stern (but not from the interviews with Bash or Whitaker): Kamala Harris means everything she says. She cares about everything she is fighting for. What some may think are campaign promises are lifelong passions of hers. She’s the real deal.

I always knew that, having supported her and followed her closely when running in the 2019 primary. But there are too many, apparently, who don’t know it yet. These relaxed interviews with people who are not looking to catch her up or expose her (or get some “breaking news” out of her) show the value of conversation. Those stilted and inquisition-like interviews the press is still clamoring for may serve their own interests, but not those of the voter. And although these people think they are “hard-hitting” journalists, in reality they are performing as shills for Donald Trump, who from 2015 on, they’ve allowed to get away with the worst con-job in American electoral history.

3. “Hard,” “Soft,” and Masculinity

Since Obama made it ok to talk about masculinity, think for a moment about the words we use to contrast those dreadful “sit-downs” with “hard-hitting” journalists with “hardball” questions, and the media blitz that Jason Johnson, subbing for Joy Reid, described as “soft.” Those terms are “gendered,” aren’t they? And in the non-neutral, male-privileging way that so many of our gendered dualities are: To be “hard-hitting” is masculine/admired; to be “soft” is fine for a teddy bear or a mama’s embrace, but not for the leader of a nation—or a “rigorous” interviewer.

In my book on The Male Body I do a fancy deconstruction of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ as metaphors for the two possibilities for the penis, “soft” signifying vulnerability and “hard” signifying phallic mastery. I’m not going to do the penis/phallus thing here, but I do want to note the implications the “hard”/“soft” metaphors that journalists constantly engage in have, in a broader context, for our notions about leadership.

Selectively quoting from the book here:

To be exposed as "soft" at the core is one of the worst things a man can suffer in this culture…If a man is seen as soft at the core-as, for example, Bill Clinton was [this was written in 1998]—he is permitted much less latitude, and constantly has to prove that he can "play hardball," "take a firm stand," and so on. During the campaign and his first year in office, the press would seize mercilessly on Clinton's doughy physique, as though his soft, undisciplined body and taste for French fries-immortalized in a Saturday Night Live skit which had him jogging from one fast-food stop to another— exposed just how "unpresidential" he was…showed he was not a "real man"—like the mean, lean, skydiving George Bush or the horseback-riding Ronald Reagan. Those guys didn't have to run every day, like some wimpy yuppie; their regular "manly" activities kept them hard…

Little boys, as psychologist William Pollack writes, will do almost anything they can to avoid being seen as soft…[And] too often, parents will encourage their sons to "harden” up. Pollack recounts the story of how Olympic gold medal winner Oscar De La Hoya became a boxer:

"During his third birthday party, Oscar became frightened by the violence of the traditional piñata game. This is the game in which he and each of his friends were blindfolded and then, using a long wooden cane, were asked to take turns whacking the multi-colored toy-stuffed doll that was suspended above them by a cord. 'I got scared,' Oscar re-membered. 'I started to cry hysterically and ran away in panic. Oscar's parents threatened him and then punished him, but nothing could get him back to that fearsome scene. Later his father saw Oscar fleeing from other boys when they threatened to punch him. His father felt that Oscar's lack of manliness was a 'disgrace, a shame upon the family. The "best medicine' for his son, he felt, was to teach him. After all, that's what Oscar's grandfather had done one generation earlier with Oscar's father, when he too had seemed 'unmanly!'

The first time La Hoya boxed, he was punched badly smack on the nose, and ran home in tears. But, as he reports, he soon "learned to manage" his fears. Since he went on to become a prize-winning boxer, this initiation could be read as the prelude to a success story. But a price is paid for the "hardening" of boys (as Pollack calls it): they learn to become anesthetized to both physical and emotional pain and to keep it to themselves. He cites studies which show that by the time a boy reaches junior high school, one in ten of them has been kicked in the groin—yet the majority never tell an adult about it. They are ashamed to tell others because the simple act of telling is an admission that they are not bearing their pain silently, stoically, "like a man."

This is one context in which to understand the appeal of the version of masculinity that Obama argued against in his speech the other night. Trump certainly doesn’t have a hard body. But, especially during this last month as he grows more and more desperate about the “gender gap,” the fixation he has always had about manliness-as-toughness has become a tool for gaining support from men, especially young men. It’s not only a strategy for getting votes, but is pretty transparent as a defense against the vulnerability he must surely feel over the possibility of defeat—and jail.

The version of masculinity that they are selling could be called comic-book if it wasn’t so promoting of real misogyny and violence. Hulk Hogan tearing off his shirt at the RNC is embarrassing, a comic-book version of the strong man. This video, created by The Nelk Boys, hosts of something called the “Full Send” podcast which is apparently a huge hit among young men, is something else:

nelkboys

A post shared by @nelkboys

“What The Fuck?”

Or, as Kamala told Stephen Colbert when he asked what she was thinking at this moment (below) during the debate: “It’s a family show, right? Well, It begins with ‘What,’ there’s a T in the middle, and an F at the end.”

4. Maybe “hard-hitting” isn’t such a great metaphor for interviews that seek truth rather than headlines. In second part of my gendered exploration of interviews and the media, I’ll be looking at how, in the light of 2016 as well as the present, we should be re-framing concepts such as “dodging hardball questions.” There’s a reason why Kamala is not giving the answers to the questions that “hard-hitting” interviewers love to ask.

   For now, the beginning of Yom Kippur is approaching, and I have to get some food and trashy entertainment in me before sundown. So stay tuned.

1. If it isn’t clear, I’m mocking this phrase, which has become so weirdly popular among broadcasters lately. I’m still trying to figure out what “structure” adds to “permission” besides the veneer of social science expertise—also known as academic jargon.