Inside the DNC with Jerry Brady

After Hillary’s Speech, Recognition of a Loss

By Jerry Brady, 8-27-08

	File photo. Emily Haas/NewWest.Net

Attending the convention with my wife, Rickie, adds to the experience, I’ll tell you that.  For one thing, it means dancing in the aisles at all times possible.

But to see it through her eyes, at least a little, is to trace a personal history entwined with Democratic conventions, political history and the role of women in America.

Rickie marched with the Mississippi Freedom Party in l964 Convention when the party had refused to seat blacks.  She worked with Martin Luther King in the year before he was assassinated.

Her daughter was baptized with Ted Kennedy’s son and they attended the same parenting classes.

She was a delegate at the Miami, Atlanta and New York City conventions years ago.

When Michelle Obama spoke in Tuscon before the Arizona Primary, she was part of the organizing committee and stood in the rain as a human billboard, wearing an Obama T-shirt and flagging passers-by to come in.

When Caroline Kennedy spoke in Toledo, she was among the workers preparing that event as well, staying with her brother while we campaigned in the last l0 days of the Ohio Primary.

Her connection to this convention is deep and visceral.  She gathers her energy by day to expend it all in the late afternoon and evening.  She chats up her neighbors.  She prods me to talk to former Kennedy speechwriter Ted Soreson Monday night, who came to sit beside us and is nearly blind.  (I did so to bring greetings from Bethine Church, and old friend of his and the widow of former Senator Frank Church). 

And Rickie has been an ardent advocate for women for 50 years. 

In Tuesday’s New York Times was a long essay by Susan Faludi about the history of women’s sufferage and advancement—or the lack thereof—since women gained the vote by Constitutional Amendment 88 years yesterday. 

Those who say Hillary Clinton supporters should gracefully exit stage right do so at their peril, she wrote, quoting the founder of a pro-Clinton clearinghouse.  Their gloom is rooted in the failure of women to achieve what sufferage promised so long ago.

The United States ranks 23rd out of 30 developed nations in its proportion of female federal legislators.  The proportion of state legislators is stuck at around 20 percent.

The 20 top occupations of women last year were the same as 50 years ago.  Women’s real annual earnings have fallen for the last four years and still noticeably below those of men.

Faludi quotes sufferagette Anne Martin in the l920’s saying “women were exactly where men political leaders wanted them: bound, gagged, divided and delivered to the Republican and Democratic Parties.” If that perspective is still worth quoting, one party’s as bad as another.

And so on. All of this from Faludi.

Women “…still have all the abiding inequities that Hillary Clinton, especially in defeat, symbolized,” she wrote.

This was, frankly, an eye-opener for me.  It explains those startling poll numbers.  Where once Hispanics were thought to be the swing voters in this election, I think we know what was at stake last night.

Monday night, for example, I overheard a delegate from Guam trying to persuade a woman at the other end of a phone that Hillary’s time will come and that “she wants us to follow her lead” tonight.  It sounded like a hard sell.

Rickie’s view yesterday morning was that the “Clinton voter problem” was mostly about one faction winning and the other losing.  She had pushed aside racism early in her life while becoming a committed feminist but hasn’t seen Clinton’s candidacy as the sisterhood’s call to action. 

She’s been emphatically for Obama since December, campaigned for him in five states and made hundreds of calls into Pennsylvania notwithstanding that many were discouraging. 

“Women who would vote for McCain are voting against their own best interests.  They’re thinking with their ovaries and not their brains,” she told me.

As I said, it’s a different experience being with her.

That was yesterday morning.

Last night as we listened to Clinton deliver that pitch-perfect speech, Rickie began to cry.  She was completely surprised.  Overwhelmed.  I asked her why.

“I’m 70 years old and I will never see a woman president of my country,” she said through her tears.

This mood stayed with her as we watched the hall slowly empty. 

Heading for an exit, we ran into a wall of security and an entourage of some sort pressing through the hallway ahead.  It was the Clintons.

“You were terrific!” Rick yelled repeatedly at Hillary as she slowly passed by.  “You are great!” she said to Chelsea. 

It was sinking in that something momentous had happened with Clinton’s victories in 23 states.  Yet a woman was not going to be president.  At least not yet.

Her parents lived well into their 90’s. Rickie might live to see a woman president.  But I find myself touched by the force of my wife’s emotions.  I feel something of her loss as well.

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