Watching the death match between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has been riveting but severely draining, because, in addition to having to witness what has become a very unsporting and drawn-out spectacle, we’ve had to do some wrestling of our own—with our identities, our loyalties, our consciences. That internal struggle ought to have been exciting— it’s been a long time since we had such an opportunity— and it has been exciting, but I know hardly anyone who hasn’t also been made a little crazy by it, observes Nancy Franklin.Crazy, depressed, tense, furious, and sometimes hopeful, though using that word is itself nervous-making; “hope” has become a hot-button word, as has “change.” This political season, these are words that can start arguments. We’re now in a situation that seems like the punch line of a joke told by a self-satisfied Republican on his way to the 2009 Inauguration. If you’re for Clinton, a friend or relative will tell you that she’s been nasty, ruthless, untruthful. If you’re for Obama, a friend or relative will tell you that he seems smug, and has shown some troubling judgement. Well, some people say, that sense of entitlement she has—it’s repulsive. To which the counter is: Yeah? Well, he obviously feels entitled, too— why else is he running? And on and on it goes, regarding differences both trivial and significant, among people who are basically on the same side. It’s agony, especially if you’re one of the damned souls who want Clinton to win but think that maybe she shouldn’t and don’t want Obama to win but think that maybe he should.
I was dreading the Philadelphia debate; with the Republican side of things long since wrapped up neatly, the focus has been on the Democratic duo’s every sock hole and loose button. Only one good thing has come out of that, and, in a very unlikely climate, it happened to be a great thing: Obama’s profound speech about the truths of race and history. Now here we all were again, in the same building where he gave that speech. Like almost everyone who saw the debate, I was incredulous at the pointlessness and lack of substance of most of the questions that were asked, but I finished watching with a sense of relief. I thought it had gone pretty well, I thought it was civilized, and the first headline I saw about it, later that night on the Web, in the Times, didn’t make sense to me: “Clinton Uses Sharp Attacks in Tense Debate.” I saw the whole thing, and I wouldn’t use the words “sharp” or “attacks,” and I might not even say “tense.”
Sitting through a worrisome intro that mimicked the frenzy of reality shows—kinetic graphics, loud percussive beats, canned audience hubbub, and a male voice practically shouting “Twenty debates . . . forty-six states . . . twenty-nine million votes . . . three thousand delegates awarded, but still no nominee and the sparks are flying”— I expected a kind of “Debating with the Stars” atmosphere. But what we got was all wrong in a different way—a sort of “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” Charles Gibson, ABC’s nightly-news anchor, moderated, and was greasily avuncular and patronizing; if ever Gibson was in danger of raising the questioning to a level that might actually yield something useful for viewers, George Stephanopoulos, ABC’s Sunday-morning political quarterback, was by his side to make sure that didn’t happen. Clinton and Obama were trapped by questions that were unworthy of them, and trapped by not getting a chance to answer good questions that never came. ABC, Gibson, and Stephanopoulos actively trashed an important opportunity— two hours in prime time on network TV, six days before a momentous primary— and were immediately called on it, on blogs, on TV, in the papers, starting with the Washington Post’s TV critic Tom Shales’s saying that the two men’s performances were “despicable.” It doesn’t get any plainer, or truer, than that.
None of this is to say that the evening wasn’t completely absorbing. But, unfortunately for me, the two hours couldn’t take the contest out of the realm of the personal. No real differences between the candidates surfaced, and so we’re still left having to think about whom we “like.” I’m uncomfortably aware of feeling more invested in Clinton than I probably should; I object to her resorting to dirty verbal tricks in parsing some of Obama’s statements, and I keep waiting for her to be a little bigger than she is. I was hoping to see that happen in the Philadelphia debate, and, of course, fearing that it wouldn’t. It’s been my conviction for more than a year that all Clinton needed was a non-political person in her camp who would talk to her for five minutes a day and hammer her with the importance of being authentic. I’ve daydreamed about being that person myself— when you’ve been a feminist all your life, and hoping since kindergarten that a woman would be President in your lifetime, and you’re now a certain age, and now, Oh, my God, here is that woman, it’s easy to get a little grandiose.
Obama, even after being in the thick of a campaign and rubbing up against thousands of people, is still superciliously tilting his head back and to the side and delivering pronouncements instead of talking, and still starting too many sentences with the order to “Look,” and to “Understand this,” and using, cagily, the cadences and open-vowel intonations of the church when he criticizes Clinton, as if to imply that in putting her down he has religion on his side. Clinton, for her part, seems to have a hard time letting go of that half-smile she wears so often. When she’s just looking serious or being outright funny, she’s magnetic; it’s painful to see her resort to an expression whose purpose is to strip a person’s face of subtlety and complexity, and reassure others, in a simplistically graphic way, that you’re not in some way poisonous to them. Obama has had burdens that I’ll never grasp, but having to always be prepared not to be taken seriously isn’t one of them. In last week’s debate, Obama was brought down to earth, and Clinton had the discipline to remain down to earth. I’m more confused than ever about which of them is the better candidate, but I also feel more hopeful, having seen them withstand the combination of laziness, calculation, and small-minded aggressiveness that they were confronted with. They were flawed and they were impressive, and to me they both looked like winners
