PV Sindhu’s caste highly searched on Google, reveals ingrained biases of India

Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Haryana are the top three states where the phrase was searched for.

Written by Tarishi Verma | New Delhi | Published:August 20, 2016 3:38 pm

The phrase ‘pv sindhu caste’ promptly appears as a search suggestion as soon as one types PV Sindhu in the Google search bar. (Source: PTI)

As PV Sindhu prepared to take on world number one Carolina Marin in the gold medal match of women’s Badminton singles at Rio Olympics, Indians poured in wishes for her in thousands. There was, however, a completely different concern that plagued the people of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana which likely prompted a Google search for Sindhu’s caste.

The Hindu, on Saturday, reported that both states claimed Sindhu was their daughter or ‘ammayi’. The paper went on to say that people looked up her caste also because her parents had a love marriage, a situation where caste differences are often ignored.

The phrase ‘pv sindhu caste’ promptly appears as a search suggestion as soon as one types PV Sindhu in the Google search bar. Digging deeper through Google Trends, I found that ‘pv sindhu caste’ was a highly-searched term, peaking on August 20, 2016, after she won the silver medal in the finals. Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Haryana are the top three states where the phrase was searched for.

Sindhu was not the only target of this bias. The phrase ‘Sakshi Malik caste’ was also a highly searched term on the day of Malik’s victory and is still an active search term, with the maximum searches from Rajasthan, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. Related queries are, Google tells me, ‘pv sindhu caste’, ‘malik caste,’ ‘pusarala caste’ and so on.

The spike of these search terms make the question of caste extremely relevant, quite opposite to what one would like to believe. The manifestations of our biases can be seen on a daily basis when we give the sweeper an exact change for his salary so we don’t have to take the money they are carrying or when we don’t want to use an elevator when a housemaid is travelling in it.

It doesn’t quite come as a surprise then that achievements come only after caste is established, because superiority of one’s caste is over and above skill, years of hard-work and years of dedication.

For both Sindhu and Sakshi, the laurels that they brought to the country by achieving first-time feats at a very young age at an international platform are sub-par until their caste identities are established. These women faced the world’s best in their respective games and emerged victorious. But in a country where undercurrents of such discrimination are prevalent, achievements are deemed second to a caste identity. This in turn is believed to bring glory to the particular caste, elevating their status in its abject hierarchy.

But we don’t need the bigger incidents to be aware of this glorious bias. On Friday, a Twitter handle meant to ask for blood groups for patients put this out: “#Hyderabad ONLY Kamma Caste Donors, O+ ve blood needed at Max Cure Hospital. 3 yr old CHILD. Pls call 8063266677. Aug 19. Via ShekarNews”. While the handle apologised later, it does serve to show how matters of life and death can be put at stake because of a socially constructed menace.

For both Sindhu and Malik, their struggles are evident in the fantastic games they play. To reduce them to their caste identities is debilitating their life’s resolve, their perseverance and everything that they put in to reach that stage which got them accolades from the country and the world.

© The Indian Express Online Media Pvt Ltd

Source: indianexpress

The Hole in Obama’s Legacy

 By Eric Alterman , August 12, 2016

Before becoming President, Barack Obama raised a question he hasn’t come close to answering: What to say to the white working-class people whose way of life was being destroyed? 
Photograph by STEFAN ZAKLIN / EPA / Redux   

n the spring of 2005, I received an invitation to a small dinner in Washington, D.C., with the new junior senator from Illinois. The other invitees all turned out to be leaders of national progressive organizations. We introduced ourselves, and John Podesta—then the president of the Center for American Progress, now Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief—thanked Barack Obama, on the group’s behalf, for an invitation to a meal that was not accompanied by a demand for at least a thousand-dollar donation. We all chuckled, in those innocent, pre-Citizens United days, about our corrupt electoral system.

Obama, who had entered the Senate with sky-high expectations, began his brief remarks by noting that, at his very first press conference, he had been asked to describe his legacy. Then he got serious. He talked about campaign stops that he made in former factory towns and manufacturing centers across Illinois. These were places that, until recently, had kept generations of working-class men gainfully employed. He worried that he had nothing to say to them that would be both honest and hopeful. He had gathered us, he explained, to find out if the members of the progressive community had some good ideas to help these people that he might be able to champion as senator. He was not saying that he considered himself to be on our team. Rather, he was looking for a mutually beneficial relationship.

No doubt many sensible ideas were proposed by the wonks present. Perhaps some of them have even been implemented; my memory fails on these details. I can say with some certainty, however, that no one present was able to offer the kind of overarching political framework that could be deployed to counter the conservative mantra of small government, low taxes, and reduced regulation. What I do remember—indeed, what I will never forget—is the feeling of both awe and relief at meeting a successful national politician who was so damn normal. Obama happened to be seated next to me, and our talk felt not in the least forced or staged, as it had with virtually every other politician to whom I had ever spoken in semi-private. The authenticity he communicated struck me as even more impressive when I considered the fact that he was, as we all knew, just about the only glimmer of hope offered to liberals in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s 2004 victory. I left the dinner on a kind of high. I recall hoping that my daughter, who was then seven years old, might one day be able to vote for this amazing man to be President, once the country got over itself regarding race.

You know the rest. Aside from daily e-mails asking for money, I never heard from Obama again, but he did somehow win two Presidential contests. (My daughter, now eighteen, will instead get to cast her first vote for the woman we all expected to be the nominee in 2008.) Obama’s two terms have been a disappointment in many respects—mostly growing out of his need to bow to the financial forces that ever more tightly control our electoral system. Even so, his Presidency looks to have been the most consequential for progressives since Franklin Roosevelt was in office; Obama not only saved the economy in 2009 but also moved the country toward universal health care, tamed some financial market abuses, and significantly improved America’s standing on the global stage. That he has done this without starting any wars or creating any major scandals, and in the face of ridiculous Republican recalcitrance, while remaining basically the same cool dude I met eleven years ago—and a great dad—in the bargain, leaves me breathless with admiration.

And yet Obama never even came close to solving the problem he raised at that dinner: What to say to the white working-class people whose way of life was being destroyed by the vagaries of global capitalism coupled with a political system that responded first and foremost to the wealthy? This, too, is part of his legacy. And it has helped to give rise to a billionaire demagogue, who has answered Obama’s question with a combination of racism, xenophobia, false promises, and threats of violent reprisals.

Most progressives I know would say that Obama barely even tried to fix the problem he raised that night. By picking an economic team from the pro-corporate wing of the Democratic Party, embracing an insufficiently robust stimulus package in a failed attempt to secure Republican support, and then pivoting too quickly to deep deficit reduction, he insured that those left behind in the wake of the financial crisis would stay behind (if not quite as far behind as they were at its outset). And, given his support for the corporate-friendly Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, one can only conclude that he believes in this course—something few people understood when we elected him. In this respect, the seeds of dissent and dissatisfaction were sown at the moment of his inauguration.

Of course, Donald Trump’s success is not Obama’s fault, as some empty-headed, allegedly “evenhanded” pundits would have it. Republican leaders, egged on by Fox News and talk radio, encouraged the bigoted language that has defined Trump’s campaign by questioning Obama’s religion, birthplace, patriotism, and legitimacy from day one. They certainly deserve to see their party taken away from them. The journalists who looked the other way as Republican spokespeople, in the Party leadership and the media, exploited racial hatred and anti-immigrant fervor deserve a significant share of the blame as well.

But the fact remains that this year’s election hangs on the question of whether enough members of the white working class can see past the hatred and blame that Trump is stoking. Trump’s egregious flaws as a candidate might turn out to be our saving grace. The grievances that drove his success, however, are not going anywhere. Even if Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine’s convenient flip on the Trans-Pacific Partnership sticks, they will still be, as Obama was, answerable to a political system that puts campaign contributors far ahead of ordinary voters. More than merely winning the 2016 Presidential election, this will be the Democrats’ greatest challenge—assuming that Trump returns to a comparatively private life, and our political system to the level of dysfunction and distrust we have all come to take for granted.

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College, a media columnist for The Nation, and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Source: newyorker

Gujarat: Forced out, these Dalits are refugees 15 km from home

On Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that it was “our duty to protect and respect the poor and Dalit people of our country”. For the Dalit families of Sodapur, these words come as cold comfort.

Written by Leena Misra | Sodapur | Updated: August 10, 2016 7:50 am

The Dalits who have relocated to Sodapur. (Express Photo)

Priyanka Meghwa was in Class X when she was forced to give up school in her village in Ghada. At her new home 15 km away, with nothing much to do, the 15-year-old spends time watching television. Ghar Ki Lakshmi Betiyaan, a soap celebrating daughters, and Sapne Suhane Ladakpan Ke are her favourite shows, she says.

Two years ago, Priyanka’s family was among the 27 Dalit families who were forced to move to Sodapur from Ghada, both villages in the Deesa taluka of Banaskantha, the potato capital of Gujarat. All of them victims of untouchability, now refugees in their own state, which saw Dalit anger boiling over last month following the public flogging in Una of youths for skinning dead cattle.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that it was “our duty to protect and respect the poor and Dalit people of our country”. For the Dalit families of Sodapur, these words come as cold comfort.

At the entrance to Deesa, near the Agriculture Produce Market Committee (APMC) building, a huge potato installation welcomes you. Deesa is also where Canadian food giant McCain sources its potatoes from. Large potato cold storages dot the way to Sodapur. On one side of the road that cuts through the village, stand rows of shacks covered with asbestos and lined with tarpaulin. This is the home of the Dalits from Ghada. Across the road, lives the rest of the village.

The practice of “extreme untouchability”, the Dalits claim, led to the murder of one of them nine years ago, forcing them to first sit in protest outside the local revenue official’s office for five years after which they came to Sodapur, leaving behind 100 bighas of land where they grew potatoes, castor, wheat, groundnut, bajra and rapeseed.

Priyanka’s sister Savita, 20, is married in Dhaneri village, which is a “happier village”, but says this is “home”, where her parents and siblings live.

Savita came home for her delivery and a week ago, gave birth to a daughter. The newborn lies on a charpoy, wrapped in a white cloth, flies hovering over. “I have to keep it completely wrapped even in this hot weather,” she says. The buffalo tied outside belongs to her grandmother Puriben who brought it from her brother’s house to source milk for Savita.

“All the girls gave up studying when we left Ghada. What do we do? Here, we have to take them across the busy road and fetch them back, which is not possible,” says Savita.

An orange cycle stands in the corner against a wall, one of the government freebies handed out to Savita’s brother, who freelances as a mason, at a Garib Kalyan Mela.

Even the boys gave up school. Dashrath, 18, dropped out in Class V, and is now a labourer, as his younger brother who dropped out in Class VII. “They didn’t let us sit together. They never played with us,” says Dashrath, about his upper-caste “darbar” (OBC) classmates in Ghada.

Talbiben weeps at the mention of Ramesh, her eldest son among five children. Her husband Devjibhai is too traumatised to put together the story of what happened.

Their 22-year-old son was “fairly educated” and worked as an insurance agent. But he had “dared” to enter a temple nine years ago, “breaking the rules” of Ghada. And paid for it. “They ran a tractor over him out of revenge. The police were also from their community and did not heed our pleas to consider it murder,” alleges Devjibhai.

Bhurabhai Parmar, the leader of this Dalit group, says, “We protested outside the mamlatdar’s office for five years. Finally, the mamlatdar and other government officials came to escort us here two years ago, but have not yet built us homes.”

Babarsinh Vaghela, sarpanch of Ghada at the time the Dalit families left, denies allegations of discrimination and describes Ramesh’s death as an accident.

“There was an accident in which the boy died. We tried hard to strike a compromise between the Dalits and the upper castes but they just did not listen. Finally, after the 12th-day ceremony of Ramesh’s death, they left the village,” he says.

“There is no untouchability in our village,” says Vaghela, who was the sarpanch till 2010.

But the Dalits allege that discrimination hit them every minute back in Ghada. “We could not go with uncovered heads before upper castes, could not wear pants, footwear or any gold. There were two buses to Deesa, at 9 am and 12 noon, from our village. If we got a seat and a darbar got on board in the packed bus, we had to vacate,” says Bhurabhai.

They had to send separate vessels for their children to have midday meals. “Our children were made to sit separately in the anganwadi, too,” he says.

The worst was when an upper-caste death occurred. “We would have to carry the body, collect the firewood and do all the rituals for 12 days for free. Ramesh opposed all these discriminatory practices. His murder was the last straw that provoked us to leave,” says Bhurabhai.

The few Ghada children who go to school in Sodapur are happier. Ashwin, who studies at the Bhakotar primary school in Class VIII, says everyone eats and studies together.

The Ghada Dalits are also grateful to the sarpanch of Sodapur, Amarsinh Dansinh Rajput, who got a resolution passed in the gram panchayat to let them stay.

“But only I know what I went through to get this done,” says Rajput, from the only Rajput family in Sodapur which has a large population of Brahmins, Patels and other OBCs.

“I needed five signatures in the sabha of nine members. I cajoled and convinced them to endorse it. But later, I got booked in two criminal cases and went to jail for 10 days. In one case, a Patel accused me of loot and I paid Rs 2.65 lakh for a compromise,” claims Rajput.

He continues to stand by the Dalits, who now total 35 families in this village. “There was a police inspector here who was a friend and he asked me if I could give some land to the Ghada Dalits and I agreed. I allotted them two bighas,” says Rajput.

All of the Sodapur resettlers have EPIC cards and all of them are registered under the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGA) since 2014, but they say none of them have got any work or wages under it. “It is all on paper. We work as labourers — masons or farmers,” says Bhurabhai.

They are upset with the government for not building them homes, and point to half-built houses on one side of the land assigned to them. “They gave us only Rs 45,000 per home of which we spent Rs 10,000 on the landfill itself,” says Kaliben, one of the Dalits who moved to Sodapur.

Banaskantha collector Jenu Devan says, “They were given homes under the Dr Ambedkar Awas Yojana covering two installments, one of which was given. They will get the rest of the installment only after completion of their homes. This is as per the guidelines of the scheme.”

According to Devan, since the exodus was the result of an “accident” to Ramesh, it was not considered as “migration”. Migration is declared by the state government when conditions in the native place are not conducive to return and there is no scope of compromise with the upper castes.

While Devan says that one of the Dalit families returned to Ghada, sarpanch Vaghela claims that five families have come back from Sodapur.

Kaliben, meanwhile, settles down with three other women to mourn the drowning of her infant grandson in a water tank, a month ago. Their wails, and the mooing of the buffalo, rise over the everyday sounds in the basti.

Source: indianexpress

Mind the gap: Why the decline of Harappan civilisation sent India's sewage system down the drain

Anything that moves

How did a country home to the world's oldest sophisticated toilets became the ground for Bezwada Wilson's battle against manual scavenging?

Image credit:  Haseeb Ur Rehman Malik/via Wikimedia Commons

Yesterday · 08:00 am 

Girish Shahane

Bezwada Wilson richly deserves the Ramon Magsaysay Award, announced on July 27, for his efforts to eliminate the removal of human excrement by hand, mostly by workers belonging to the Dalit caste.

We call the practice manual scavenging, which is rather inexplicable because scavengers rescue things that have been discarded but retain some use or resale value – and fecal sludge extracted from dry latrines possesses neither of those qualities.

It is bitterly ironic that the land where sophisticated toilets were believed to have been first invented and used is also the place where the most primitive means of defecation and waste disposal are most prevalent in the 21st Century.

Past perfect?

The sewage systems of Indus Valley cities are famous for good reason – nothing comparable has been discovered in Mesopotamia or Egypt. About 4,500 years ago, most Harappan homes were equipped with toilets that connected to waterproof drains, which conveyed waste water to cesspits or beyond city limits.

The cesspits needed to be cleaned regularly, as did the sewers, but that was a job entrusted to teams of labourers working in tandem.

Each city was a comprehensive unit laid out in a precise grid, administered by one authority overseeing the functioning of public utilities in a manner not dissimilar to modern metropolises.

One can state this with some confidence despite having no access to any records kept by the Harappan people, for the design of towns such as Harappa, Dholavira and Mohenjo-daro tell a detailed story.

Dholavira, Mohenjo-daro and habitations across the region were laid out in uniform grids, built using baked bricks of identical size and shape, and containing similarly sophisticated drainage systems. The Indus Valley civilisation declined for reasons that are not fully apparent but probably involved a combination of climate change, chronic drought and broken trade links.

Rising from the ruins

There is a yawning temporal and geographical gap between the long slide of Harappa, which lasts for 500 years from around 1800 BCE, and the rise of the kingdoms and cities of the Indo-Gangetic plain circa 600 BCE.

Strangely, this period of urban decline is also one of tremendous religious and philosophical development. Even as great cities crumbled and died and settlements shrank to the size of villages, the literary output of the subcontinent flourished, culminating in the mature Hindu, Buddhist and Jain philosophical texts and treatises that continue to fascinate us today.

It is unusual, if not unique, for degeneration and blossoming to go hand-in-hand in this fashion. Alongside the efflorescence of spiritual and ritual texts, a crucial technological step is achieved – the harnessing of iron, resulting in the start of what has come to be known as the Iron Age.

While vegetation around the Indus valley was sparse, the plains of North India were now covered with thick jungle that only a combination of iron and fire could render fit for agriculture. The new towns that were built on cleared forest land looked very different from those to the West that preceded them by over a millennium.

Homes and city walls were built of wood rather than brick, streets were rather haphazard instead of being organised in a strict grid, with no discernable plan encompassing an entire settlement.

Sewage canals with carefully calculated gradients running the length of breadth of the city were absent. Instead of being transported away by gravity, waste collected in pots dug into the ground. Vertical disposal had replaced horizontal. It required no complex planning, investment or teamwork to run this individualised system – just people tasked with cleaning out excrement.

Flushed away

A four-fold hierarchy determined the shape of the new urban agglomerations. People of the same group clustered together, wanting little to do with others. There was no question of a single overarching plan encompassing the entire settlement.

Ultimately, those who cleaned out the waste and got rid of bodies of humans and carcasses of dead cows, as well as a few others whose work was considered unclean, were excluded completely from the city’s ambit. In the greatest indignity ever invented for a group of humans by another, their touch, or even their presence was deemed to pollute the so-called high-born.

And that’s the India that is all too familiar to us even today, the India that Wilson and his ilk are trying to make slightly less inhumane.

Back to the future

What is the connection, if any, between the cities of the Indus Valley, whose careful planning we are so far from being able to emulate, and the easily recognisable India of profound philosophical speculations and dreadful social divisions first discerned in the Indo-Gangetic plain some 2,600 years ago?

Was it the same people, retaining the same belief systems, who eventually recovered from the desertification of their erstwhile habitat and established new centres in the East? Or did the system of hereditary social stratification, of caste, enter the equation in the millennium between decline and rise, along with new myths and new gods?

I’ve hinted where I stand in what has become a heated debate about the origins of Indian and Hindu beliefs. I believe that if Wilson could be placed in a time machine and transported to Lothal 4,500 years ago, he would find no reason to be an activist of the kind he is, for he would encounter a very different civilisation based on a very different set of values.

Next week, I will explain why I think so.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

Source: scrollin

A Moment Like This Used to Get a Black Man Killed

Getty Robyn Beck

 By Charles P. Pierce   Jul 28, 2016

If he has done nothing else, and he has done a great deal, Barack Obama has developed an aesthetic of cool that is his alone. It expands and extends from the way he does his job; the video prior to his appearance emphasized how he always was the calm presence in the middle of heated policy debates. It also includes the way he has carried himself in office, and the way he has carried the office itself—lightly, in its ceremonial aspects, but carefully and reverently in those parts of the job that belong most importantly to the rest of us.

He remains a graceful, cosmopolitan democrat, not unlike Thomas Jefferson, not unlike Langston Hughes, not unlike Albert Murray. His patriotism is wide and generous. It has no definite frontiers. And that's what was born in Louisiana, in the streets and the clubs and the brothels. It came from there and it fought racism to at least a draw. It came from there and it conquered the world. And that was the place he went to when he threw the jab that stung the deepest.

Read article: Esquire

Thinking About Hillary — A Plea for Reason

Michael Arnovitz

Jun 1218 min read

Photo Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Graph Credit: Nate Silver/NY Time

“In the course of a single conversation, I have been assured that Hillary is cunning and manipulative but also crass, clueless, and stunningly impolitic; that she is a hopelessly woolly-headed do-gooder and, at heart, a hardball litigator; that she is a base opportunist and a zealot convinced that God is on her side. What emerges is a cultural inventory of villainy rather than a plausible depiction of an actual person.” — Henry Louis Gates

The quote above comes from a fascinating article called “Hating Hillary”, written by Gates for the New Yorker in 1996. Even now, 20 years after it was first published, it’s a fascinating and impressive piece, and if you have a few spare moments I strongly recommend it to you.

And I’m reading pieces like this because now that Hillary has (essentially if not officially) won the Democratic Primary, I have become increasingly fascinated by the way so many people react to her. In truth, I sometimes think that I find that as interesting as Hillary herself. And I can’t help but notice that many of the reactions she receives seem to reflect what Gates referred to as “a cultural inventory of villainy” rather than any realistic assessment of who she really is and what she has really done.

To conservatives she is a radical left-wing insurgent who has on multiple occasions been compared to Mikhail Suslov, the Soviet Kremlin’s long-time Chief of Ideology. To many progressives (you know who you are), she is a Republican fox in Democratic sheep’s clothing, a shill for Wall Street who doesn’t give a damn about the working class. The fact that these views could not possibly apply to the same person does not seem to give either side pause. Hillary haters on the right and the left seem perfectly happy to maintain their mutually incompatible delusions about why she is awful. The only thing both teams seem to share is the insistence that Hillary is a Machiavellian conspirator and implacable liar, unworthy of society’s trust.

And this claim of unabated mendacity is particularly interesting, because while it is not the oldest defamation aimed at Hillary, it is the one that most effortlessly glides across partisan lines. Indeed, for a surprisingly large percentage of the electorate, the claim that Hillary is innately dishonest is simply accepted as a given. It is an accusation and conviction so ingrained in the conversation about her that any attempt to even question it is often met with shock. And yet here’s the thing: it’s not actually true. Politifact, the Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking project, determined for example that Hillary was actually the most truthful candidate (of either Party) in the 2016 election season. And in general Politifact has determined that Hillary is more honest than most (but not all) politicians they have tracked over the years.

Also instructive is Jill Abramson’s recent piece in the Guardian. Abramson, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal as well as former Executive Editor of the New York Times, had this to say about Hillary’s honesty: “As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising. Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.”

Notice how Abramson uses the word “surprising”? She’s obviously doing that for our benefit, because she knows that many readers will be astonished at the very thought of Hillary being “fundamentally honest”. But why? In my opinion we need to go back to the time of Whitewater in order to answer that question.

In January of 1996, while Whitewater investigations were underway but unfinished, conservative writer William Safire wrote a scathing and now-famous essay about Hillary Clinton entitled, “Blizzard of Lies”. In the piece he called her a “congenital liar”, and accused her of forcing her friends and subordinates into a “web of deceit”. He insisted (without any apparent evidence) that she took bribes, evaded taxes, forced her own attorneys to perjure themselves, “bamboozled” bank regulators, and was actively involved in criminal enterprises that defrauded the government of millions of dollars. He ended the piece by stating that, “She had good reasons to lie; she is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.”

I am no political historian, but as far as I can tell this short essay was the birth of the “Hillary is a Liar” meme. Now to be clear, most conservatives already strongly disliked her. They had been upset with her for some time because she had refused to play the traditional First Lady role. And they were horrified by her attempt to champion Universal Health coverage. But if you look for the actual reasons people didn’t like her back at that time, you won’t see ongoing accusations of her being “crooked” or a “liar”. Instead, the most common opinion seemed to be that she was a self-righteous leftist who considered anyone with other views to be morally inferior. In short, the prevailing anti-Hillary accusation was not that she was unrelentingly dishonest, but that she was just intolerably smug.

After the Safire piece however, this all changed. Republicans, who learned from Nixon never to let a good propaganda opportunity pass if they could help it, repeated the accusations of mendacity non-stop to anyone who would broadcast or print them. And if you doubt the staying power of Safire’s piece, type the phrase “congenital liar” into a Google search along with “Hillary Clinton” and see what happens. To this day, that exact phrase is still proudly used by many on the right. This, even though Safire was eventually proven wrong about everything he had written. And despite the fact that he stated himself that he would have to “eat crow” if she were ever cleared, Safire never apologized or even acknowledged his many errors once that happened. Because as we all know, swift-boating means never having to say you’re sorry.

But while conservative propaganda and lies are a constant in “Hillaryland”, if we look at Hillary’s career, and the negative attacks so often aimed at her, it seems clear that more than just political machinations are at play. My current conviction is that the main fuel that powers the anti-Hillary crowd is sexism. And yes I’m serious. So go ahead and roll your eyes. Get it over with. But I think the evidence supports my view, and I’ve seen no other plausible explanation. And just to be clear, I don’t think it’s ONLY sexism. But I do think that this is the primary force that has generated and maintained most of the negative narratives about Hillary.

Of course accusations of sexism always bump up against several serious impediments:
1) Almost nobody will admit to it. Conservatives decided long ago that all such accusations (sexism, racism, homophobia, etc) are standard liberal bullshit whose only real intent is to shut down debate, and liberals tend to possess a sense of moral entitlement which leads them to consider themselves automatically exempt from all such accusations. (Side note: if you did roll your eyes above, there’s a good chance I’m describing you here. Sorry.)

2) Overt sexism is significantly more likely to be tolerated in our society than overt racism. It is a low-risk form of bigotry and discrimination that rarely damages professional or political careers. Because of this, far fewer people worry about crossing that line.

3) We have formed a sort of collective blindness to sexism that allows us to pretend that we are on top of the issue while simultaneously ignoring the many ways in which it actually permeates our society. (Side note 2: There’s a reason it’s called a “glass” ceiling.)

4) Unlike men, women who make demands are still often seen as unfeminine and inappropriately aggressive, bordering on deviant. And if the people most aggressively pushing against the glass ceiling are “broken” or “deviant”, it’s easier to justify dismissing both them and their concerns.

So I’ve made a claim. Let’s look at some numbers. Take a look at the image above. On the right side you’ll see a chart. This is a chart of Hillary’s popularity over time. It was put together by Nate Silver, who based it on over 500 high-quality phone surveys dating back to the early 90’s. If we take a look at the polling data, very obvious patterns emerge.

In the early 90’s her polling was great, which was typical for an incoming First Lady. But Hillary had no interest in being a typical First Lady, and soon took charge of one of the most important policy initiatives of the Clinton Presidency: Universal Health Care. If you look at the first large red arrow I have on the graphic, you’ll see that as soon as she did that her negatives skyrocketed. And yes this was before Whitewater. In fact during the ongoing Whitewater investigations her polling improved dramatically, so she actually became significantly MORE popular during that period, not less.

Now take a look at the second arrow. This is where she declared that she was going to run for the Senate. See what happened? She was at one of the most popular periods of her life, but as soon as she declared a run for the Senate her favorables plummeted while her unfavorables rose sharply. Then once she was elected, her scores stabilized and even improved. Now look at the third arrow. Nearly exactly at the same time she withdrew from the Presidential race her favorables took off again, rising to levels that many considered remarkable. (Or are we pretending not to remember that until very recently Hillary was one of the most popular politicians in the country?) In fact the image on the left of the graph is part of the “bad-ass Hillary” meme that started during this time. And her polling stayed high right up until she decided to run for President again. Her numbers since then are not on this particular graph, but I think we all know what happened to them.

So what do we see in this data? What I see is that the public view of Hillary Clinton does not seem to be correlated to “scandals” or issues of character or whether she murdered Vince Foster. No, the one thing that seems to most negatively and consistently affect public perception of Hillary is any attempt by her to seek power. Once she actually has that power her polls go up again. But whenever she asks for it her numbers drop like a manhole cover.

And in fact I started thinking more about this after reading an article that Sady Doyle wrote for Quartz back in February. The title of the piece was, “America loves women like Hillary Clinton — as long as they’re not asking for a promotion.” In the article Ms. Doyle asserted that, “The wild difference between the way we talk about Clinton when she campaigns and the way we talk about her when she’s in office can’t be explained as ordinary political mud-slinging. Rather, the predictable swings of public opinion reveal Americans’ continued prejudice against women caught in the act of asking for power…”

And yes this is the kind of statement that many people will find reflexively annoying. But that doesn’t make it any less true, and the data certainly seems to support it. Even NBC news, looking back over decades of their own polls, stated that, “she’s struggled to stay popular when she’s on the campaign trail.” If this has nothing to do with gender, then wouldn’t the same thing happen to men when they campaign? But it doesn’t. Why not?

So let’s look at the issues people are currently using to disparage Clinton. Let’s consider the issues of dishonesty, scandals, money and Wall Street.

1) Honesty — In terms of honesty, I’ve already addressed that. Hillary is a politician, and like all politicians she is no stranger to “massaging” and/or exaggerating the truth. And yes on occasion she will let loose a whopper. But is she worse than other politicians? As I’ve already discussed, the evidence suggests that she is no worse, and actually better, than most other politicians. Internet videos like the “13 minutes of Hillary lying” appear to be mostly examples of Hillary changing her position over several decades, combined with annoying but typical political behavior. But similar videos of Donald Trump exist showing him doing an even more extreme version of the same thing. Why is he not being accused of this type of mendacity? In fact there is very little dispute that Trump has been SIGNIFICANTLY less honest on the campaign trail than Hillary. According to Politifact he is in fact the least honest candidate they’ve ever analyzed! So if the issue of honesty is really that important, why are so many people (on the right and left) holding Hillary to such an obviously different standard than Trump?

2) Scandals — Webster’s dictionary defines a scandal as, “an occurrence in which people are shocked and upset because of behavior that is morally or legally wrong.” But here’s a question: Are scandals still scandals if nobody actually did anything wrong? And I think that’s a fair question, because Hillary’s political foes love to point out all the times she has been implicated (directly or indirectly) in scandals. Not surprisingly, however, they fail to point out that she has always been cleared of any wrongdoing.

So if she’s always innocent, why then does she find herself caught up in so many scandals? For that answer, perhaps we should look at the Wikipedia definition of scandal, which states, “A scandal can be broadly defined as an accusation or accusations that receive wide exposure. Generally there is a negative effect on the credibility of the person or organization involved.” Notice the important difference? Perhaps the “negative effect on credibility” is not so much the RESULT of these scandals as it is the INTENT of those who create them.

Did you know that Republicans once spent 10 days and 140 hours investigating the Clintons’ use of the White House Christmas Card list? Because that is a real thing that actually happened. As the Atlantic recently pointed out, “No other American politicians — even ones as corrupt as Richard Nixon, or as hated by partisans as George W. Bush — have fostered the creation of a permanent multimillion-dollar cottage industry devoted to attacking them.” (And for an impressive presentation of this issue I highly recommend Hanna Rosin’s piece “Among the Hillary Haters”, also in the Atlantic.)

Compare for example the treatment Hillary is getting due to her private email “scandal” to that of General David Petraeus. Hillary has been accused of hosting a personal email server that “might” have made classified documents less secure, even though the documents in question were not classified as secret at the time she received and/or sent them. (Side note: some government documents receive secret classifications “at birth”, while other can be retroactively classified as secret.) In order for Clinton to have committed a criminal act, she would have had to knowingly and willfully mishandle material that was classified at the time she did so. After months of investigation no one has accused her of doing that, and it doesn’t appear as if anyone will.

General Petraeus on the other hand, while he was Director of the CIA, knowingly gave a writer, who was also his mistress, a series of black books which according to the Justice Department contained, “classified information regarding the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions quotes and deliberative discussions from high level National Security Council meetings and [Petraeus’] discussions with the president of the United States of America.” Petraeus followed that up by lying to numerous government officials, including FBI agents, about what he had done. And lets not forget that according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, adultery is itself a court-martial offense. And I remind you that none of this is in dispute. Petraeus admitted to all of it.

Petraeus’ violations were significantly more egregious than anything Clinton is even remotely accused of. And yet Republicans and other Hillary foes are howling about her issue, wearing “Hillary for Prison 2016” t-shirts while insisting that this disqualifies her from public office. Meanwhile even after pleading guilty to his crimes Petraeus continued to be the recipient of fawning sentiments from conservatives. Senator John McCain stated that, “All of us in life make mistakes and the situation now, I hope, can be put behind him…” Politico quoted a former military officer who worked with Petraeus as calling the entire situation “silly”. Prominent Republicans have already made it clear that they would call him back to work in the highest levels of government if they win the Presidency. And some are still attempting to convince him to seek the Presidency himself.

Why is Hillary Clinton being held to such an obviously different standard than Petraeus? Is it really only politics?

3) Money — OK let’s talk about her money. Hillary has a lot of it. And she has earned most of it through well-paid speaking fees. And the idea of getting paid $200,000 or more for a single speech seems so ludicrous to many people that they assume that it simply must be some form of bribery. But the truth is that there is a large, well-established and extremely lucrative industry for speaking and appearance fees. And within that industry many celebrities, sports stars, business leaders and former politicians get paid very well. At her most popular for example, Paris Hilton was being paid as much as $750,000 just to make an appearance. Kylie Jenner was once paid over $100,000 to go to her own birthday party, and to this day Vanilla Ice gets $15,000 simply to show up with his hat turned sideways.

And let’s talk about the more cerebral cousin of the appearance agreement, which is the speaking engagement. Is $200k really that unusual? In fact “All American Speakers”, the agency that represents Clinton, currently represents 135 people whose MINIMUM speaking fee is $200,000. Some of the luminaries that get paid this much include: Guy Fieri, Ang Lee, Cara Delevingne, Chelsea Handler, Elon Musk, Mehmet Oz, Michael Phelps, Nate Berkus, and “Larry the Cable Guy”. And no that last one is not a joke. And if you drop the speaking fee to $100k, the number of people they represent jumps to over 500. At $50,000 the number jumps to over 1,200. And All American Speakers are obviously not the only agency that represents speakers. So there are in fact thousands of people getting paid this kind of money to give a speech.

For millions of Americans struggling to pay their bills, the very idea that someone can make $100,000 or more for just giving a speech or hanging out at a Vegas nightclub is obscene. But as Richard Nixon used to say, “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” Hillary didn’t invent the speaking engagement industry, and she isn’t anywhere near the first person to make a lot of money from it. And while her fees are in the upper range of what speakers make, neither they nor the total amount of money she has made are unusual. It’s just unusual FOR A WOMAN.

And yes, I’m back on that, because I feel compelled to point out that before he ran for President in 2007, Rudy Giuliani was making about $700,000 a month in speaking fees with an average of $270k per speech. It’s estimated that in the 5 years before his run he earned as much as $40 million in speaking fees. Nobody cared, no accusations of impropriety were made, and there was almost no media interest. So why did Giuliani get a pass, while Hillary stands accused of inherent corruption for making less money doing the same thing?

And speaking of corruption, after leaving the Florida governor’s office Jeb Bush made millions of dollars in paid speeches. This includes large sums he collected from a South Korean metals company that reaped over a BILLION dollars in contracts from his brother’s presidential administration. Speaking to an Indian newspaper about this type of thing Bush said, “This is the life of being the brother of the president.” Do you remember reading all about that while Jeb was running for President? I didn’t think so. Jeb got a pass too.

So if this discussion is really about money in politics that’s fine. But I’m going to need someone to explain to me why we only seem to focus on it when the person making the money has a vagina.

4) Wall Street — First things first. No, the majority of the money Clinton has made from speaking fees did not come from Wall Street. In fact it’s not even close. She has given nearly 100 paid speeches since leaving the State Dept., and only 8 were to “Wall Street” banks. Nearly all of her speeches were to organizations like American Camping Association, Ebay, Cisco, Xerox, Cardiovascular Research Foundation, United Fresh Produce Association, International Deli-Dairy-Bakery Association, California Medical Association, A&E Television Networks, Massachusetts Conference for Women, U.S. Green Building Council, National Association of Realtors, American Society of Travel Agents, Gap, National Association of Convenience Stores, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, etc.

Corporations and Associations pay large fees for important speakers all of the time. And Hillary got booked fairly often because she is interesting and popular, and because there’s a great deal of status attached to having her speak at an event. Ignoring all of this however, a large contingent of anti-Hillary people continue to insist that all speaker’s fees from Wall Street banks were bribes, and that because of this they “own” her. But by that logic shouldn’t we all be asking what the fuck the American Camping Association is up to?

Also, with the possible exception of one speech given to Deutsche Bank, all of Hillary’s 8 speeches to Wall Street were for a speaking fee of $225,000. That does not even break the top 20 of her highest paid speeches. For example she received over $275,000 each in three speeches she gave to The Vancouver Board of Trade, the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal, and Canada 2020. So apparently Canadians also “own” her. And I don’t know what those nefarious Canadians are up to, but it probably has something to do with goddamn poutine. Which would really piss me off except I just remembered that I kind of like poutine so never mind.

Listen, does Wall Street have influence with Hillary? Grow up, of course they do. Wall Street is one of the key engines of the American economy, and as such has enormous influence with everyone. EVERYONE. Don’t kid yourself on that point. And aside from anything else, she was a 2-term Senator of New York, and this made Wall Street an important corporate member of her constituency. The issue is not influence. The issue is whether or not paid speeches and campaign donations alone are proof of corruption. And they’re not. And the last time I checked there was an important difference between association and guilt, between proof and slander.

And again: why is Hillary being held to a standard that never appears to be applied to her male counterparts? Am I not supposed to notice that a media frenzy has been aimed at Hillary Clinton for accepting speaking fees of $225,000 while Donald Trump has been paid $1.5 MILLION on numerous occasions with hardly a word said about it? Am I supposed to not notice that we are now in an election season in which Donald Trump, a proud scam artist whose involvement in “Trump University” alone is being defined by the New York Attorney General as “straight-up fraud”, is regularly calling Hillary Clinton “Crooked Hillary” and getting away with it?

What the actual fuck is going on here? What’s going on is what we all know, but mostly don’t want to admit: presidential campaigns favor men, and the men who campaign in them are rewarded for those traits perceived as being “manly” — physical size, charisma, forceful personality, assertiveness, boldness and volume. Women who evince those same traits however are usually punished rather than rewarded, and a lot of the negativity aimed at Hillary over the years, especially when she is seeking office, has been due to these underlying biases. There is simply no question that Hillary has for years been on the business end of an unrelenting double standard. And her battle with societal sexism isn’t going to stop because of her success anymore than Obama’s battle with racism stopped once he was elected. These are generational issues, and we are who we are.

And actually, this only makes her victory all the more amazing. And maybe it’s OK if we pause for a moment from the accusations and paranoia and just acknowledge her enormous accomplishments. In the entire history of our nation, only 6 Presidents have also served as Secretary of State. Only 3 have served both as Secretary of State and in Congress. By any objective measure Hillary Clinton is not just the most qualified candidate this season, she’s one of the most qualified people to ever seek the office. The New York Times in endorsing her stated that, “voters have the chance to choose one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in history.” Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg stated that, “she is probably the best qualified presidential candidate ever.” Even Marco Rubio, one-time choice of the GOP establishment (and tea-party love-child) stated in a Republican debate that, “If this is a resume contest, Hillary Clinton is going to be the new President of the United States.”

Hillary is nobody’s idea of perfect. Fine. But in my view if a man with her qualifications were running in the Democratic primary, Bernie would have been done before he even started. And if a man with her qualifications had been running for the Republicans, they’d be anointing him the next Reagan while trying to sneak his face onto Mount Rushmore.

Most of the people who hate Hillary when she’s running for office end up liking her just fine once she’s won. And I have every confidence that history will repeat itself again this November. As for myself, I have been watching Presidential elections since Nixon. And never in my life has there been an easier or more obvious choice than now. Trump is not merely a bad choice, he is (as many leading Republicans have already admitted) a catastrophic choice, unfit in every possible way for the office of the Presidency.

As such, I happily voted for Hillary in my primary. And I will proudly vote for her in November. Yes she will disappoint us all on occasion. Who doesn’t? But I think she’s also going to surprise a lot of people. She will fear neither consensus when possible nor ass-kicking when necessary. She will safeguard us from the damage a right-wing Supreme Court would inflict on the nation. She will stand for the rights of women, LGBT Americans, and minorities. She will maintain critical global relationships, and she will react to dangerous situations with the temperament of a seasoned and experienced professional. And in a nation that didn’t even allow women to vote until 1920, she will make history by shattering the very highest glass ceiling, and in doing so forever change the way a generation of young women view their place in our Republic.

She’s going to be a fine President.

I’m with her.

Source: thepolicy