Taking time out from prep for next week’s bridaldom, I will be on Pacifica Radio tonight (in Houston, KPFT, 90.1 FM ) at 9pm ET tonight discussing media sexism and the election, particularly in light of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. If in Houston, tune in! If not, I’ll post the web link (which stays live for 60 days) here soon. The program is the Progressive Forum, with host Lillian Care. Joining me will be Isabelle McDonald of FAIR.
political campaigns
Oh nooo – is it true? I don’t want to believe it’s true. Say it’s not. Anyone?
Obama Botches the Abortion Conversation
7/8/08 Alternet.org: One thing is certain: Obama has backhandedly given credibility to the right-wing narrative that women who have abortions — even those who go through the physically and mentally wrenching experience of a late-term abortion — are frivolous and selfish creatures who might perhaps undergo this ordeal because they are “feeling blue.”
And this next one too–Stepford v. Angry Black Woman? Oy. Make it stop!
Rocky Journey To Being First Lady
7/8/08 Baltimore Sun: In the way we have of boiling human beings down to a handful of adjectives and then forming a caricature from those adjectives, Obama has become the angry black woman and McCain, a Stepford wife.
Lastly, just in case you haven’t had enough bad news for one morning, here’s this:
Women at Work Find Reinforced Glass Ceiling
7/8/08 Women’s eNews: Promotion barriers, harassment, pregnancy and motherhood bias, unequal pay. Women in the paid work force say these are all pillars propping up a glass ceiling. Fourth in “The Memo” series on the status of U.S. women.
Kudos for the tips on all this cheeriness today go to Rebekah at the WMC.
So I’m finishing up a report this week on media coverage of race, gender, class, and age in the 2008 primaries. And I’m so jazzed by Gina McCauley’s Michelle Obama Watch and what I’ve learned about it so far that it merits another post. And another, and another to be sure.
I corresponded with Gina yesterday and learned that there have been over 90,000 page views in the 20 days since the site’s been up. A recent piece about MOW in The Baltimore Sun tentatively asks “Michele Obama Ties Black, White Women?” and notes, “Gina McCauley’s blog on African-American women in pop culture has never attracted this kind of attention. But she launched a new Michelle Obama Watch blog in June to monitor and critique media coverage of the potential first lady, and since then, feminists of all colors have been linking and commenting.”
The solidarity is key, and Gina knows it’s about something more. As she wrote to me in an email:
“[T]his ultimately isn’t about Michelle Obama, it is an exercise in how the nation, the news media and entertainment industry in particular, an deal or not deal with an African American women who defies the dominant stereotypes perpetuated about us. If we let them get away with their chicanery with a Harvard-educated attorney, then the next Black woman to walk in her footsteps would have to to trod a more difficult path.”
Hells yes.
The site currently has 13 volunteer contributors who have contributed 88 posts. Got a news tip for the site? Direct your concerns, complaints, or praise about the media’s treatment of Michele Obama to michelleobamawatch@gmail.com. And watch for more from Gina over at What about Our Daughters, which has received credentials to cover the 2008 Democratic National Convention in August.
For a very thorough post on last week’s forum on gender, race, class, age, and the media’s coverage of the 2008 elections, sponsored by the White House Project, the Women’s Media Center, and the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, check out Marcia Yemen’s latest in HuffPo. A report based on the findings and recommendations from that forum–drafted by yours truly–is coming soon! I’ll post more details when it’s ready, later in the summer.
Meanwhile, Carol Jenkins offered a great turn of phrase at that forum when she noted that members of the media have embedded themselves in the war room of this election, turning themselves into “embedded pundits.” Case in point: I’m sitting here watching MSNBC and on flashes the headline “Does Obama Need Clinton as Much as the Media Thinks?” I’m screaming back at my tv: “Who the BLEEP cares what the media thinks?” Talk about simulacrum, I tell ya.
In an article in yesterday’s Newsday, Lisa Witter issues a rousing plea to the media to unfetter our potential first ladies’ intellect on the campaign trail. Excerpts:
The new focus on Obama’s hair and hemlines comes right on the heels of the gender-biased way the media covered Clinton’s campaign. If we let this go on, we risk losing an important opportunity to have a national dialogue about sexism. We should be holding the media accountable for perpetuating stereotypes. If a white woman is strong, she’s considered cold – as the coverage of Cindy McCain has shown. If a black woman is strong, she’s obviously angry – so go the accusations about Michelle Obama….
While America’s women and girls lost the opportunity to see themselves reflected in the top job this round, what we can’t do is lose the opportunity to change the way women – and first ladies – are portrayed. It’s a tough line, no doubt. For the most part, we want to feel and look beautiful. We love our families and feel proud about our personal and professional accomplishments. But if we let the conversation about the first ladies focus mostly on the role and status of the conventional “Mrs.,” we’ve lost a huge opportunity to reframe gender and marriage dynamics in our country. We all need to take it upon ourselves to strike up a conversation about how we can end sexism in America. Contact the press when they get it right – and not so right. And I’m going to write Michelle Obama to let her know that when she portrays herself as strong, I feel strong, too.
Well said, Lisa. For more from Lisa, do check out the just-released book she coauthored, titled The She Spot: Why Women Are the Secret to Changing the World and How to Reach Them. Lisa is chief operating officer of Fenton Communications, and an inspiration to many. I definitely recommend her book!
For those obsessed, like me, with how the media is and will cover Michelle Obama, do check out the new blog Michelle Obama Watch. The site is designed to be “a repository of all of the criticism, praise, and general chicanery thrown at Michelle Obama between now and November.” And for any who missed Michelle Obama on The View, here’s the clip:
On Wednesday, June 25 (tomorrow), New York Women in Communications is hosting a panel discussion that looks at how media has effected this historic presidential election. The event has a great title: “2008 ELECTION: THE ULTIMATE COMMUNICATIONS CASE STUDY.†From the press release:
How has the 2008 election changed the way information is received, discussed and processed? How has the media created buzz and changed the way the younger generation feeds on it? What has the 2008 election taught us about communicating?….The panel will include: moderator Jere Hester, director, NYCity News Service and former city editor, New York Daily News; Amanda Michel, project director, Off the Bus: Huffington Post; Keli Goff, author, Partycrashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence; Liz Nord, senior producer, MTV News; and Jodi Kantor, political journalist, The New York Times.
Where: CUNY Journalism School (219 West 40th Street, New York, NY 10018)
Time: 6:00 – 6:30pm: Networking and Refreshments
6:30 – 8:00pm: Panel Discussion
8:00 – 8:30pm: Networking Raffle
Fee: Members – $15
Non-members – $20
Registration: For more information and to register, visit www.nywici.org
So here’s to the latest women about to be demonized in the media: Michelle Obama. My heart goes out to her, and so will my pen (or keyboard, whatevs). Meanwhile, check out this piece in Women’s eNews by Sandra Kobrin, “Michelle: Hold Your Head High; We Got Your Back.”
And by the way, for an expanded version of Courtney’s comments from yesterday’s forum on media coverage of the 2008 elections, do check out “Generation Y Refuses Race-Gender Dichotomy” in AlterNet today. An excerpt:
The million-dollar question: How, with a generation bent on individuality and multiplicity, do we confront racism, sexism and all the other insipid -isms that have been brought to light by this unprecedented campaign? To my mind, we must continue to use novel interventions — like the Women’s Media Center’s great montage “Sexism Sells, but We’re Not Buying It,” the brand-new blog Michelle Obama Watch, and the evergreen experts at Racialicious — to educate people. We must use humor — as my group blog Feministing often does, as the brilliant Sarah Haskins does on Current TV, as Ann Telnaes does through cartooning over at Women’s eNews. (Note: It’s not just the boys — John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and the Onion crew — that know the power of a laugh.)
We must take our roles as media consumers dead seriously, calling television executives and newspaper editors on their misguided choices and celebrating them when they get it right. In an increasingly corporatized media landscape, it is your dollar, not your disgust, that will most readily get big-wig attention. Don’t buy sexist magazines, don’t tune into to racist radio, and don’t watch reductive, recycled infotainment being pawned off as news.
But most of all, it seems to me, we must continue to push for a deeper, more authentic conversation overall. We must let the mainstream media know that we don’t want to debate “reject” or “denounce” for 24 hours or go on witch hunts for Geraldine Ferraro or Samantha Power. We want to understand what these women were trying to say. We want to explore the real issues. We want to, as my co-panelist Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now so brilliantly put it, call into question the whole idea of empire. The debate shouldn’t center on the quandary: How can we make our empire more effective? But, do we want to be an empire in the first place?
And we must demand that our candidates rise to the occasion, as I believe Obama did so beautifully with his speech on race following the Reverend Wright controversy. He brought that conversation to a new level, and we are all better off for it. We need to continue to push for that kind of brazen truth-telling — about gender, certainly, about class, for sure. That’s what politics is supposed to be about — not partisanship or strategic spinning, but honesty and uplift. Call me naïve, but that’s what the young are supposed to be, right?
From Soundbites to Solutions: Bias, Punditry, and the Press in the 2008 Elections, jointly sponsored by the WMC, The White House Project, and the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education
Panel II – How the Media Influence and Reflect Political Realities, moderated by Geneva Overholser, Director of the School of Journalism at the U of Southern California
Overheard, here at the Paley Center:
William Douglas, White House Correspondent: “I look at this campaign season so far and I’m both encouraged and discouraged about how we’ve covered it. It’s because we’ve had two such historic candidates. Speaking from the mainstream print journalism world, I think we’ve done ok. We’ve actually written about issues that we haven’t had the opportunity to look at durnig previous campaigns, in large part because the candidates have been traditional candidates. We’ve looked at race and gender somewhat differently than we have in the past, because we’ve had to.â€
Juan Gonzalez, Columnist, New York Daily News: “I’ve been extremely disappointed by the shallowness of the approach to all these issues. It’s been seen as conflicts between campaigns, between individuals. There’s been far less focus on the institutional, and on what these two candidates are actually going to do….In the foreign policy arena, for instance, the media has failed to differentiate between the candidates’ different attitudes toward American empire. Do the candidates urge the American people to have a smarter empire, or to end this domination over people of the world? I look forward to seeing how we improve our coverage during the general election.”
Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director, Annenberg Public Policy Center: “‘It was a charming speech. There was no stridency to it. Maybe she has a new speech writer.’ We need some consciousness raising here if a commentator feels it’s ok to deliver those three sentences!”
Chrisitane Anamapour, Chief International Correspondent, CNN: “To think that in this country, this supposed beacon of democracy, you can be sexist in reporting without accountability, is astonishing to me. Even in places like Iran, where there’s an Islamic fundamentalist revolution, the number of times people have said to me ‘Well, we have more women in our Parliament than you in America have in your Senate.’ And in Europe, people say to me the same. Women have been breaking those barriers outside the US for a long, long time in some countries that you in the US have believed to be benighted and backward….”
Pamela Newkirk, Associate Professor of Journalism, New York University: “When I left the daily media 15 years ago, I wrote about the impact African Americans have had on mainstream American media. I found that race matters, and what we learned on this campaign is that gender matters for sure, but let us not forget that race still matters. With the nomination of Barack Obama, there’s a perception out there that we’ve overcome race. But both of these areas still have a long way to go. Bill O’Reilly called for a lynching party for Michelle Obama, but last I checked, he still has a show.”
The first panel, “Candidates, Campaigns, and the Politics of Bias,†is underway. Overheard here at The Paley Center:
Celinda Lake, Political Strategist and President of Lake Research Partners: “Polling shows the voters feel 2 to 1 that the media has been unfair to Obama in terms of race, and that the media has been hardest on age, vis a vis McCain. There’s not as much sense of unfairness around gender.â€
Dr. Susan Carroll, Senior Scholar at the Center for American Women in Politics: “The media failed to educate the public about ways that gender considerations affected HRC’s campaign. For instance, research shows that women are seen to be less qualified to hold public office than men, even when they have more credentials and experience. So HRC made experience central to her campaign. But by emphasizing this, she ceded the issue of change to Obama. But it was something she had to do to counter negative ingrained stereotypes. The media didn’t acknowledge this.â€
Dr. Ron Walters, Professor of Government and Politics, University of Maryland: “The race comments from Bill Clinton, HRC, and Geraldine Ferraro—I don’t believe all that was an accident. It was a strategy by Obama’s opponents. Obama’s campaign hoped it would go away, but it didn’t. Fox news made sure it wouldn’t, by bringing Rev. Wright into the picture. And other networks jumped right in.â€
Courtney Martin, author and columnist for The American Prospect, and feministing.com blogger: “There’s been a 109% increase in youth voters in this election. That’s profound. Youth are excited about this election, but they are not excited about partisanship. Chalk it up to Facebook, chalk it up to our tendency to see ourselves as individual projects, but we just aren’t into party politics.â€
Patricia Williams, Columnist, The Nation, and Professor of Law, Columbia University: “Again, we see in this election, all the women are white, all the men are black. Race was gendered and gender was raced in this primary. Michelle Obama, Asian men, and others were left out of this conversation entirely.â€
Up next: Panel II…
Oh nooo – is it true? I don’t want to believe it’s true. Say it’s not. Anyone?
Obama Botches the Abortion Conversation
7/8/08 Alternet.org: One thing is certain: Obama has backhandedly given credibility to the right-wing narrative that women who have abortions — even those who go through the physically and mentally wrenching experience of a late-term abortion — are frivolous and selfish creatures who might perhaps undergo this ordeal because they are “feeling blue.”
And this next one too–Stepford v. Angry Black Woman? Oy. Make it stop!
Rocky Journey To Being First Lady
7/8/08 Baltimore Sun: In the way we have of boiling human beings down to a handful of adjectives and then forming a caricature from those adjectives, Obama has become the angry black woman and McCain, a Stepford wife.
Lastly, just in case you haven’t had enough bad news for one morning, here’s this:
Women at Work Find Reinforced Glass Ceiling
7/8/08 Women’s eNews: Promotion barriers, harassment, pregnancy and motherhood bias, unequal pay. Women in the paid work force say these are all pillars propping up a glass ceiling. Fourth in “The Memo” series on the status of U.S. women.
Kudos for the tips on all this cheeriness today go to Rebekah at the WMC.
So I’m finishing up a report this week on media coverage of race, gender, class, and age in the 2008 primaries. And I’m so jazzed by Gina McCauley’s Michelle Obama Watch and what I’ve learned about it so far that it merits another post. And another, and another to be sure.
I corresponded with Gina yesterday and learned that there have been over 90,000 page views in the 20 days since the site’s been up. A recent piece about MOW in The Baltimore Sun tentatively asks “Michele Obama Ties Black, White Women?” and notes, “Gina McCauley’s blog on African-American women in pop culture has never attracted this kind of attention. But she launched a new Michelle Obama Watch blog in June to monitor and critique media coverage of the potential first lady, and since then, feminists of all colors have been linking and commenting.”
The solidarity is key, and Gina knows it’s about something more. As she wrote to me in an email:
“[T]his ultimately isn’t about Michelle Obama, it is an exercise in how the nation, the news media and entertainment industry in particular, an deal or not deal with an African American women who defies the dominant stereotypes perpetuated about us. If we let them get away with their chicanery with a Harvard-educated attorney, then the next Black woman to walk in her footsteps would have to to trod a more difficult path.”
Hells yes.
The site currently has 13 volunteer contributors who have contributed 88 posts. Got a news tip for the site? Direct your concerns, complaints, or praise about the media’s treatment of Michele Obama to michelleobamawatch@gmail.com. And watch for more from Gina over at What about Our Daughters, which has received credentials to cover the 2008 Democratic National Convention in August.
For a very thorough post on last week’s forum on gender, race, class, age, and the media’s coverage of the 2008 elections, sponsored by the White House Project, the Women’s Media Center, and the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, check out Marcia Yemen’s latest in HuffPo. A report based on the findings and recommendations from that forum–drafted by yours truly–is coming soon! I’ll post more details when it’s ready, later in the summer.
Meanwhile, Carol Jenkins offered a great turn of phrase at that forum when she noted that members of the media have embedded themselves in the war room of this election, turning themselves into “embedded pundits.” Case in point: I’m sitting here watching MSNBC and on flashes the headline “Does Obama Need Clinton as Much as the Media Thinks?” I’m screaming back at my tv: “Who the BLEEP cares what the media thinks?” Talk about simulacrum, I tell ya.
In an article in yesterday’s Newsday, Lisa Witter issues a rousing plea to the media to unfetter our potential first ladies’ intellect on the campaign trail. Excerpts:
The new focus on Obama’s hair and hemlines comes right on the heels of the gender-biased way the media covered Clinton’s campaign. If we let this go on, we risk losing an important opportunity to have a national dialogue about sexism. We should be holding the media accountable for perpetuating stereotypes. If a white woman is strong, she’s considered cold – as the coverage of Cindy McCain has shown. If a black woman is strong, she’s obviously angry – so go the accusations about Michelle Obama….
While America’s women and girls lost the opportunity to see themselves reflected in the top job this round, what we can’t do is lose the opportunity to change the way women – and first ladies – are portrayed. It’s a tough line, no doubt. For the most part, we want to feel and look beautiful. We love our families and feel proud about our personal and professional accomplishments. But if we let the conversation about the first ladies focus mostly on the role and status of the conventional “Mrs.,” we’ve lost a huge opportunity to reframe gender and marriage dynamics in our country. We all need to take it upon ourselves to strike up a conversation about how we can end sexism in America. Contact the press when they get it right – and not so right. And I’m going to write Michelle Obama to let her know that when she portrays herself as strong, I feel strong, too.
Well said, Lisa. For more from Lisa, do check out the just-released book she coauthored, titled The She Spot: Why Women Are the Secret to Changing the World and How to Reach Them. Lisa is chief operating officer of Fenton Communications, and an inspiration to many. I definitely recommend her book!
For those obsessed, like me, with how the media is and will cover Michelle Obama, do check out the new blog Michelle Obama Watch. The site is designed to be “a repository of all of the criticism, praise, and general chicanery thrown at Michelle Obama between now and November.” And for any who missed Michelle Obama on The View, here’s the clip:
On Wednesday, June 25 (tomorrow), New York Women in Communications is hosting a panel discussion that looks at how media has effected this historic presidential election. The event has a great title: “2008 ELECTION: THE ULTIMATE COMMUNICATIONS CASE STUDY.†From the press release:
How has the 2008 election changed the way information is received, discussed and processed? How has the media created buzz and changed the way the younger generation feeds on it? What has the 2008 election taught us about communicating?….The panel will include: moderator Jere Hester, director, NYCity News Service and former city editor, New York Daily News; Amanda Michel, project director, Off the Bus: Huffington Post; Keli Goff, author, Partycrashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence; Liz Nord, senior producer, MTV News; and Jodi Kantor, political journalist, The New York Times.
Where: CUNY Journalism School (219 West 40th Street, New York, NY 10018)
Time: 6:00 – 6:30pm: Networking and Refreshments
6:30 – 8:00pm: Panel Discussion
8:00 – 8:30pm: Networking Raffle
Fee: Members – $15
Non-members – $20
Registration: For more information and to register, visit www.nywici.org
So here’s to the latest women about to be demonized in the media: Michelle Obama. My heart goes out to her, and so will my pen (or keyboard, whatevs). Meanwhile, check out this piece in Women’s eNews by Sandra Kobrin, “Michelle: Hold Your Head High; We Got Your Back.”
And by the way, for an expanded version of Courtney’s comments from yesterday’s forum on media coverage of the 2008 elections, do check out “Generation Y Refuses Race-Gender Dichotomy” in AlterNet today. An excerpt:
The million-dollar question: How, with a generation bent on individuality and multiplicity, do we confront racism, sexism and all the other insipid -isms that have been brought to light by this unprecedented campaign? To my mind, we must continue to use novel interventions — like the Women’s Media Center’s great montage “Sexism Sells, but We’re Not Buying It,” the brand-new blog Michelle Obama Watch, and the evergreen experts at Racialicious — to educate people. We must use humor — as my group blog Feministing often does, as the brilliant Sarah Haskins does on Current TV, as Ann Telnaes does through cartooning over at Women’s eNews. (Note: It’s not just the boys — John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and the Onion crew — that know the power of a laugh.)
We must take our roles as media consumers dead seriously, calling television executives and newspaper editors on their misguided choices and celebrating them when they get it right. In an increasingly corporatized media landscape, it is your dollar, not your disgust, that will most readily get big-wig attention. Don’t buy sexist magazines, don’t tune into to racist radio, and don’t watch reductive, recycled infotainment being pawned off as news.
But most of all, it seems to me, we must continue to push for a deeper, more authentic conversation overall. We must let the mainstream media know that we don’t want to debate “reject” or “denounce” for 24 hours or go on witch hunts for Geraldine Ferraro or Samantha Power. We want to understand what these women were trying to say. We want to explore the real issues. We want to, as my co-panelist Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now so brilliantly put it, call into question the whole idea of empire. The debate shouldn’t center on the quandary: How can we make our empire more effective? But, do we want to be an empire in the first place?
And we must demand that our candidates rise to the occasion, as I believe Obama did so beautifully with his speech on race following the Reverend Wright controversy. He brought that conversation to a new level, and we are all better off for it. We need to continue to push for that kind of brazen truth-telling — about gender, certainly, about class, for sure. That’s what politics is supposed to be about — not partisanship or strategic spinning, but honesty and uplift. Call me naïve, but that’s what the young are supposed to be, right?
From Soundbites to Solutions: Bias, Punditry, and the Press in the 2008 Elections, jointly sponsored by the WMC, The White House Project, and the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education
Panel II – How the Media Influence and Reflect Political Realities, moderated by Geneva Overholser, Director of the School of Journalism at the U of Southern California
Overheard, here at the Paley Center:
William Douglas, White House Correspondent: “I look at this campaign season so far and I’m both encouraged and discouraged about how we’ve covered it. It’s because we’ve had two such historic candidates. Speaking from the mainstream print journalism world, I think we’ve done ok. We’ve actually written about issues that we haven’t had the opportunity to look at durnig previous campaigns, in large part because the candidates have been traditional candidates. We’ve looked at race and gender somewhat differently than we have in the past, because we’ve had to.â€
Juan Gonzalez, Columnist, New York Daily News: “I’ve been extremely disappointed by the shallowness of the approach to all these issues. It’s been seen as conflicts between campaigns, between individuals. There’s been far less focus on the institutional, and on what these two candidates are actually going to do….In the foreign policy arena, for instance, the media has failed to differentiate between the candidates’ different attitudes toward American empire. Do the candidates urge the American people to have a smarter empire, or to end this domination over people of the world? I look forward to seeing how we improve our coverage during the general election.”
Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director, Annenberg Public Policy Center: “‘It was a charming speech. There was no stridency to it. Maybe she has a new speech writer.’ We need some consciousness raising here if a commentator feels it’s ok to deliver those three sentences!”
Chrisitane Anamapour, Chief International Correspondent, CNN: “To think that in this country, this supposed beacon of democracy, you can be sexist in reporting without accountability, is astonishing to me. Even in places like Iran, where there’s an Islamic fundamentalist revolution, the number of times people have said to me ‘Well, we have more women in our Parliament than you in America have in your Senate.’ And in Europe, people say to me the same. Women have been breaking those barriers outside the US for a long, long time in some countries that you in the US have believed to be benighted and backward….”
Pamela Newkirk, Associate Professor of Journalism, New York University: “When I left the daily media 15 years ago, I wrote about the impact African Americans have had on mainstream American media. I found that race matters, and what we learned on this campaign is that gender matters for sure, but let us not forget that race still matters. With the nomination of Barack Obama, there’s a perception out there that we’ve overcome race. But both of these areas still have a long way to go. Bill O’Reilly called for a lynching party for Michelle Obama, but last I checked, he still has a show.”
The first panel, “Candidates, Campaigns, and the Politics of Bias,†is underway. Overheard here at The Paley Center:
Celinda Lake, Political Strategist and President of Lake Research Partners: “Polling shows the voters feel 2 to 1 that the media has been unfair to Obama in terms of race, and that the media has been hardest on age, vis a vis McCain. There’s not as much sense of unfairness around gender.â€
Dr. Susan Carroll, Senior Scholar at the Center for American Women in Politics: “The media failed to educate the public about ways that gender considerations affected HRC’s campaign. For instance, research shows that women are seen to be less qualified to hold public office than men, even when they have more credentials and experience. So HRC made experience central to her campaign. But by emphasizing this, she ceded the issue of change to Obama. But it was something she had to do to counter negative ingrained stereotypes. The media didn’t acknowledge this.â€
Dr. Ron Walters, Professor of Government and Politics, University of Maryland: “The race comments from Bill Clinton, HRC, and Geraldine Ferraro—I don’t believe all that was an accident. It was a strategy by Obama’s opponents. Obama’s campaign hoped it would go away, but it didn’t. Fox news made sure it wouldn’t, by bringing Rev. Wright into the picture. And other networks jumped right in.â€
Courtney Martin, author and columnist for The American Prospect, and feministing.com blogger: “There’s been a 109% increase in youth voters in this election. That’s profound. Youth are excited about this election, but they are not excited about partisanship. Chalk it up to Facebook, chalk it up to our tendency to see ourselves as individual projects, but we just aren’t into party politics.â€
Patricia Williams, Columnist, The Nation, and Professor of Law, Columbia University: “Again, we see in this election, all the women are white, all the men are black. Race was gendered and gender was raced in this primary. Michelle Obama, Asian men, and others were left out of this conversation entirely.â€
Up next: Panel II…
