The witch ain't dead, and Chris Matthews is a ding-dong

The glee with which Matthews and other angry male pundits prematurely danced on Hillary's grave made me -- for one night only -- a Clinton supporter.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Feminism, MSNBC, New Hampshire, John Edwards, Rebecca Traister, Barack Obama, 2008 election, Life

Illustration by Zach Trenholm

Jan. 9, 2008 | "I'm not a Hillary supporter, but ..." has been an oft-heard preamble in the five days since the New York senator's Iowa defeat, usually followed by a description of how aghast the speaker is at the treatment Clinton received from a media anxious to throw a hoedown on her political coffin. To my surprise, it's a phrase I've heard myself uttering, before launching a tirade about the premature death certificate signed by pundits for a candidate I have never really wanted to win.

As it turns out, my sudden, almost primal defensiveness about Hillary Clinton may not have been unique, but part of a larger wave of sentiment that swept her to a surprise victory in New Hampshire on Tuesday night. Others like me, who were "not Hillary supporters, but ...," were downright mortified by the eagerness with which cable news networks, the New York Times, the Boston Globe and even her opponents felt free to declare Clinton yesterday's news. Their dismay and disgust may have been just the boost she needed to pole-vault to today's triumphant headlines, as not liking Hillary took a back seat to hating those who would summarily eject her from a race even more. On Tuesday, New Hampshire voters served up a major "Fuck you" -- not to Barack Obama, whose numbers were terrific, and who gave a great concession speech, but to those who revealed their pent-up resentment of Hillary and showed her the door way, way too soon.

Unlike its sister gem, "I'm not a feminist, but ..." (an utterance that nearly always gives away the fact that its speaker is in fact a feminist), the Hillary disavowal, in my case, has been true: I really am not a Hillary Clinton supporter. A feminist by trade, I have wished that I could get behind Clinton, a woman I admired when she first arrived in the White House 15 years ago. But there has been nothing in her steady, ineluctable move to the center that I could embrace; I understood why she did it, but it cost her my support. (I'm sure that Clinton would not have considered this a worrisome loss until, perhaps, this week; my support has not historically been a leading indicator of presidential success.) While I'm not the kind of journalist for whom true objectivity is a realistic goal, I am one who aims to report fairly on the election, and so it has been comfortable not to have been sure of my horse this time around, even as I've been beguiled by the variety of competitors circling the track.

But if I'd had a horse, it would have been named John, or Dennis, or Barack, before it was named Hillary, a fact that caused consternation in more than a few of my acquaintances, especially those second-wave baby boomers who saw my lack of Clinton support as a youthful shrugging off of a shared feminist, or perhaps female, responsibility. Sure, I know it's long past time for a female president, but my hubris has been in believing that Clinton is not the one I have to devote myself to -- my careless presumption being that there will be loads more satisfactory models to choose from in the near future.

So no, I have not been a Hillary Clinton supporter. But the torrent of ill-disguised hatred and resentment unleashed toward a briefly weakened Clinton this week shook that breezy naiveté right out of me, and made me feel something that all the hectoring from feminist elders could not: guilt for not having stood up for Hillary. I can't believe I'm saying this, but had I been a New Hampshire voter on Tuesday, I would have pulled a lever for the former first lady with a song in my heart and a bird flipped at MSNBC's Chris Matthews, a man whose interest in bringing Clinton down hovers on the pathological, and whose drooling excitement at the prospect of her humiliation began to pulse from the television last week before most Iowa precincts had even begun to report results.

Before any tallies were in, Matthews was observing, based on early projections, that if Clinton received the expected 30 percent, it would mean that seven of 10 Iowa voters did not like her, a mean little metric that he did not apply to the other candidates. "It's hard to call yourself the people's choice if two-thirds of the Democrats are voting against you!" he burbled.

He was not alone in his glee. There was the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson, announcing before the caucuses had concluded that if Clinton lost Iowa, she would likely lose New Hampshire too! And South Carolina! She'd be lucky to scrape by with small states like Nevada, Matthews crowed. Newsweek's Howard Fineman was also excited. "If [Obama] wins this thing, even by one vote in Iowa, then that five-point lead of Hillary's [in New Hampshire] is going to disappear in a second," he said. Pat Buchanan recommended that in her still purely imagined concession speech, Clinton "be very, very gracious." It wasn't just the guys. Andrea Mitchell might as well have had canary feathers hanging from her mouth as she reported from Clinton's Iowa campaign headquarters on the "manufactured" crowd gathered for Clinton's concession speech.

Ding-dong, the witch is dead! Which old witch? The Clinton witch!

Why were so few of them mentioning that less than a year ago, Camp Clinton was considering giving Iowa a pass altogether, as her husband had in 1992? That even when she was the "inevitable" front-runner, it seemed a real possibility that John Edwards would trounce her there? In the midst of excitement over the huge turnout, the youth of the Iowa participants and the history-making Obama victory, it seemed irrational to hear the talking heads commenting not on the strength of a Democratic field in which three candidates carved up votes fairly evenly, but instead falling all over themselves to throw mama from the presidential train.

But the Iowa commentary was just a warm-up for the post-Iowa free-for-all, in which everyone from the New York Times to Keith Olbermann speculated giddily, practically drunkenly, about when, exactly, Clinton would pack it in. After just one caucus, in which she had garnered almost a third of votes that were split among three candidates. Here was Matthews on "Hardball," the night after Iowa, proclaiming, "For Clinton, what was once considered inevitable is now barely likely." "Could New Hampshire end the Democratic primary race?" leered Olbermann on Monday.

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