Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture

3 Presidential Campaign Oratory

3 Presidential Campaign Oratory Two Faces of Feminism I ’m in. And I’m in to win.” On January 20, 2007—two years to the day before the next president would be inaugurated—Senator Hillary Clinton took to the Internet to announce her bid for the US presidency. With money in the bank, a respected record in the US Senate, and the advantage of the Clinton political machine, she was the first woman frontrunner for a major party nomination. Being in that position required Clinton to buck more than two hundred years of American tradition, but to succeed she would also have to recast the face of US presidentiality. Conversely, when Alaska governor Sarah Palin became the first woman to accept the Republican Party’s vice presidential nomination, her equally historic oratorical performance complemented the masculine visage of presidentiality. The 2008 campaign oratory of Clinton and Palin was important, not only because of the symbolic significance of each of their campaigns but also because, as they introduced themselves to US voters, they embodied two competing feminist identities. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy represented the liberal feminist promise of women’s political equality. Sarah Palin’s candidacy embodied the persistence of patriarchy in postfeminist political culture. In this chapter we examine the ways in which Clinton and Palin introduced themselves to voters oratorically, and we note how each candidate’s performances deployed competing notions of “feminist” identity in order to negotiate the hegemonic masculinity of US presidentiality. We begin by reviewing key oratorical moments that have instantiated the heroic masculinity of presidentiality. Although this rhetoric poses challenges for all candidates with diverse identities, women presidential hopefuls are particularly constrained. Masculinity as Oratorical Strategy in Demonstrating Presidentiality Presidential candidates routinely employ political oratory that capitalizes on strategies of hegemonic masculinity to demonstrate presidential fitness. 90 chapter 3 As we argue in the introduction, cultural understandings of the US presidency as rhetorical performance, synecdochical symbol, and normative paradigm reinscribe expectations of hegemonic masculinity, making it difficult to imagine a woman as commander in chief. Candidates also routinely feminize their opponents of either gender in an effort to demonstrate their rivals’ lack of fitness for the office, further widening the gap between notions of presidentiality and the ability of a female body to perform presidentiality. Even in instances when women are involved in presidential performances, such as convention introductions by political spouses, the strength and patriarchal character of the candidate come through in stark contrast to the female speaker. In fact, political spouses routinely are used to help male presidential candidates perform their heterosexual masculinity. In this section, we briefly review the literature on presidential oratory, noting the central role masculinity plays as a strategy in the performance of presidentiality. In Suzanne Daughton’s examination of the convention discourse of the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions between 1972 and 1992, she notes that there exists a “predisposition to link the role of president to some primitive concept of machismo.” This trend intensified in 1980, when Ronald Reagan not only relied on masculinity to prove his fitness but also condemned his rivals for their “impotence.” Daughton’s analysis demonstrates the ways in which masculinity is a strategic asset when demonstrating presidential fitness while femininity typically is cast as unpresidential. After Reagan’s presidential tenure, George H. W. Bush became the “apprentice ” who claimed “his master’s visual and verbal language during his own tenure in the White House, . . . [and tried] to fashion himself first and foremost as the decisive and forceful commander-in-chief who fathers and protects his country through the exertion of his masculine powers.” Karin Wahl Jorgensen explains that during the 1992 campaign, “competing visions of the American male” emerged. An accomplished athlete and military hero, Bush had a biography that bolstered his masculine fitness for the of- fice. Unfortunately for him, during his first term he was characterized as a “wimp,” and his appeal to make America a “kinder, gentler nation” reinforced that characterization. Additionally, George H. W. Bush’s blueblood image excluded him from the cowboy persona that aligns with the frontier narrative and served Reagan, and later George W. Bush, so well. Bush’s opponent, Bill Clinton, also faced challenges to his masculinity. He was not a war hero or sports champion, and he did not have a traditional family background. Additionally, some viewed his politically active, career-oriented spouse as a liability who undercut his presidential manliness . However, even Clinton was able to...