The Identity Politics Election: We began this election with a female candidate who didn't want to seem too feminine, and a black candidate who avoided talking about race. Almost two years later, it is almost as if we are living in a different America. Obama's speech on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, race, and class was widely hailed as the most meaningful of the campaign season. Hillary Clinton has emerged as a feminist icon beloved by the same women who crinkled their nose at her awkward missteps as first lady. Rachel Maddow and Campbell Brown are the hottest pundits on TV, not because they're blonde or big-breasted, but because they've spoken honestly about the politics of identity. Black voters, initially thought to be skeptical of Obama's presidential ambitions, turned out to vote in record numbers, embracing the biracial candidate as a successor to the heroes of the civil-rights movement. Not everything has changed -- but a lot has.
The Sunday evening before Election Day, Hillary Clinton spoke to an overflow crowd of almost 1,000 at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Obama wasn't there, but the crowd, predominantly female, was still rabidly excited. Leslie Zenna did a brisk business in unofficial campaign buttons. His biggest seller? "Another middle-aged white woman for Obama." Also for sale was "Another working stiff for Obama" and "Elitists for Obama." A second vendor sold buttons depicting Obama and Martin Luther King Jr., ringed by the words, "A legacy of hope." Also popular was the sparse "Barack Obama: First Black President."...
[I]n 2008, the conservative movement upturned its habit of ignoring race and gender inequalities and, instead, embraced identity-politics farce. Sarah Palin's entry onto the scene was the tipping point. Palin, after all, is practically a liberal parody of Christian conservatism. She spiels family values but has a high school drop-out son and pregnant teenage daughter. She decries "socialism," but her popularity in Alaska is due... to her success at increasing the annual payment each Alaskan receives for the sale of the state's natural resources.... She hails "Joe the Plumber" and refers to her own family as "middle class," though the Palins' assets top $1 million. The entire clan was clothed by the McCain campaign in designer fashions worth several times most people's annual salary. Palin even implied regions that support Barack Obama are un-American. Yet her own husband once belonged to a separatist political party hostile to the very idea of a federal government.
With such naked hypocrisy on display, perhaps liberals feel, at long last, ready to come out of the cultural closet.... [W]e have Palin and Plumber Joe to thank for the reinsertion of satire into our politics....
With Obama's ascension to the White House, there will be not a single African American serving in the Senate. (Blacks are 13 percent of the American population.) Latinos are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States, expected to account for one-third of all Americans by 2050. But they have just three representatives in the Senate, all of them male (Mel Martinez, Robert Menendez, and Ken Salazar). The picture isn't any rosier when it comes to gender. Congress is currently just 16.3 percent female. There are eight female governors out of 50. Vermont's state legislature is the most gender-balanced in the nation, but is only 38.3 percent female.... John McCain, after all... didn't tap Sarah Palin for the vice-presidential slot because he was committed to getting more women involved in politics. Palin was a cynical choice, a symbol of anti-intellectual femininity who appealed most to those voters with little commitment to gender equity. Sixty percent of women, the group McCain hoped Plain would reach, came to view her unfavorably....
What are we left with, then, as the identity-politics election of 2008 comes to a close? We have a Republican Party more committed than ever to a fetishized picture of working-class white maleness and unthreatening womanhood. We have a Democratic Party freshly aware of how difficult it is to look honestly at the history and reality of race and gender -- but also aware of how powerful those forces are. We've elected our first African American president, but we've done more than that. We've opened up a rawer, more meaningful national conversation about identity than we've had since the heyday of the civil-rights and women's lib movements. Race, gender, and their discontents haven't gone away. The fact that we're talking about them again? That's progress.
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