She trounced Obama by 17 points -- but in an outlaw primary whose delegates won't count. Or will they? It all depends on Feb. 5 -- and Democratic Party rules
We can only imagine how glorious the Parthenon must have appeared in the middle of the fifth century B.C., with worshippers gathered in its towering central sanctuary paying tribute to a 40-foot, gold-and-ivory statue of the goddess Athena. But classical scholar Jeffrey Hurwit, a professor of art history at the University of Oregon and expert on the architecture of the Acropolis, can at least help fuel our visions. In the following interview, he also dispels some long-held notions about ancient Greece's most legendary building.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/parthenon/hurwit.html (click)
Originally posted 01/27/2008 10:45PM
While accepting his award as outstanding male actor in a leading role – for There Will Be Blood – Daniel Day-Lewis gave a moving tribute to Heath Ledger, who was also honored in the annual "In Memoriam" montage.
Recalling several of Ledger's most iconic roles, Day-Lewis called the late actor an inspiration and "unique," before dedicating the trophy to Ledger.
"Of course, in Brokeback Mountain he was unique," Day-Lewis said. "He was perfect. And that scene in the trailer at the end of the film is as moving as anything I have ever seen."
Asked backstage why he'd decided to dedicate the award to Ledger, he said, "I suppose that's all I've been thinking about for the last few days. I never met him. I thought he was beautiful. I just have a very strong feeling that I would have liked him very much as a man. ...I admired him very much."
– Brian Orloff and Marla Lehner
Beat Roots, Places, Topics, Influences and Other References
And along the Beat Lines, this political discussion from the Nation:
[posted online on January 22, 2008]
With all the talk about how to stimulate it, you'd think that the economy is a giant clitoris.Peace.
 |  | Top: Bayard Rustin (right) with Martin Luther King Jr. (center) and Ralph Abernathy in 1956. Bottom: Bayard Rustin in 1969. (Photos by AP) |
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| Remembering Rustin Surviving partner returns to ATL to honor King's gay advisor | ||
Patricia J. Williams | At this historic moment, don't let pundits and political spinmeisters reduce our first serious black and female presidential candidates to false narratives and stereotypes.
Diary of a Mad Law Professor by Patricia J. Williams
[from the January 28, 2008 issue of the Nation]
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 01/11/08
Did Hillary Clinton cry, tear up or just get something in her eye during a meet-and-greet with voters in a New Hampshire cafe?
There's been more discussion this week about whether Clinton cried than about her health care plan or her strategy for Iraq. According to the post-mortems of her unexpected New Hampshire victory, Clinton's misty eyes humanized her and caused hundreds of women in New Hampshire to cast their vote for her rather than Barack Obama.
Debate still rages over whether a teardrop actually fell. But if a tear had fallen, does that mean Clinton is unfit for the White House? Given the looming recession, the collapse of the real estate market and the war in Iraq, it's a wonder more Americans aren't weeping.
In writing off Clinton and then crediting her resurgence to tears, pundits underestimated the candidate as well as the voters. It's ridiculous to proclaim that legions of female voters could be swayed by that hint of a tear. After all, Mitt Romney has choked up during the campaign — to no avail.
Perhaps the New Hampshire women who were forecast as Obama voters switched to Clinton after watching her debate the other candidates or answer questions at campaign events. Pundits drubbed most of Clinton's public appearances in New Hampshire, saying she was wonkish and bogged down in detail, while Obama was inspirational.
But many women appreciate the details. It's helpful to recall another smart, driven politician whose public crying also sparked questions about her electability. Twenty years ago, the tears that accompanied Rep. Pat Schroeder's decision not to run for president led to national debate on whether women were "tough" enough for the job.
"In the best of all possible worlds, I did not intend to cry," said Schroeder a week later while visiting Georgia. "But the bottom line is that if you don't have tears, you don't have a heart, and I don't think you want people in government who don't have hearts."
Or who, as the women of New Hampshire indicated, don't relish the details.
— Maureen Downey, for the editorial board
DERRY, N.H.
Maureen Dowd
When I walked into the office Monday, people were clustering around a computer to watch what they thought they would never see: Hillary Clinton with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes.
A woman gazing at the screen was grimacing, saying it was bad. Three guys watched it over and over, drawn to the “humanized” Hillary. One reporter who covers security issues cringed. “We are at war,” he said. “Is this how she’ll talk to Kim Jong-il?”
Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.” He added dryly: “Crying doesn’t usually work in campaigns. Only in relationships.”
Bill Clinton was known for biting his lip, but here was Hillary doing the Muskie. Certainly it was impressive that she could choke up and stay on message.
She won her Senate seat after being embarrassed by a man. She pulled out New Hampshire and saved her presidential campaign after being embarrassed by another man. She was seen as so controlling when she ran for the Senate that she had to be seen as losing control, as she did during the Monica scandal, before she seemed soft enough to attract many New York voters.
Getting brushed back by Barack Obama in Iowa, her emotional moment here in a cafe and her chagrin at a debate question suggesting she was not likable served the same purpose, making her more appealing, especially to women, particularly to women over 45.
The Obama campaign calculated that they had the women’s vote over the weekend but watched it slip away in the track of her tears.
At the Portsmouth cafe on Monday, talking to a group of mostly women, she blinked back her misty dread of where Obama’s “false hopes” will lead us — “I just don’t want to see us fall backwards,” she said tremulously — in time to smack her rival: “But some of us are right and some of us are wrong. Some of us are ready and some of us are not.”
There was a poignancy about the moment, seeing Hillary crack with exhaustion from decades of yearning to be the principal rather than the plus-one. But there was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking up. What was moving her so deeply was her recognition that the country was failing to grasp how much it needs her. In a weirdly narcissistic way, she was crying for us. But it was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing.
As Spencer Tracy said to Katharine Hepburn in “Adam’s Rib,” “Here we go again, the old juice. Guaranteed heart melter. A few female tears, stronger than any acid.”
The Clintons once more wriggled out of a tight spot at the last minute. Bill churlishly dismissed the Obama phenom as “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen,” but for the last few days, it was Hillary who seemed in danger of being Cinderella. She became emotional because she feared that she had reached her political midnight, when she would suddenly revert to the school girl with geeky glasses and frizzy hair, smart but not the favorite. All those years in the shadow of one Natural, only to face the prospect of being eclipsed by another Natural?
How humiliating to have a moderator of the New Hampshire debate ask her to explain why she was not as popular as the handsome young prince from Chicago. How demeaning to have Obama rather ungraciously chime in: “You’re likable enough.” And how exasperating to be pushed into an angry rebuttal when John Edwards played wingman, attacking her on Obama’s behalf.
“I actually have emotions,” she told CNN’s John Roberts on a damage-control tour. “I know that there are some people who doubt that.” She went on “Access Hollywood” to talk about, as the show put it, “the double standards that a woman running for president faces.” “If you get too emotional, that undercuts you,” Hillary said. “A man can cry; we know that. Lots of our leaders have cried. But a woman, it’s a different kind of dynamic.”
It was a peculiar tactic. Here she was attacking Obama for spreading gauzy emotion by spreading gauzy emotion. When Hillary hecklers yelled “Iron my shirt!” at her in Salem on Monday, it stirred sisterhood.
At Hillary’s victory party in Manchester, Carolyn Marwick, 65, said Hillary showed she was human at the cafe. “I think she’s really tired. She’s been under a lot more scrutiny than the other candidates — how she dresses, how she laughs.”
Her son, David, 35, an actor, said he also “got choked up” when he saw Hillary get choked up. He echoed Hillary’s talking points on the likability issue. “It’s not ‘American Idol.’ You have to vote smart.”
Olivia Cooper, 41, of Concord said, “When you think you’re not going to make it, it’s heart-wrenching when you want something so much.”
Gloria Steinem wrote in The Times yesterday that one of the reasons she is supporting Hillary is that she had “no masculinity to prove.” But Hillary did feel she needed to prove her masculinity. That was why she voted to enable W. to invade Iraq without even reading the National Intelligence Estimate and backed the White House’s bellicosity on Iran.
Yet, in the end, she had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim, both of Obama and of the press. Hillary has barely talked to the press throughout her race even though the Clintons this week whined mightily that the press prefers Obama.
Bill Clinton, campaigning in Henniker on Monday, also played the poor-little-woman card in a less-than-flattering way. “I can’t make her younger, taller or change her gender,” he said. He was so low-energy at events that it sometimes seemed he was distancing himself from her. Now that she is done with New Hampshire, she may distance herself from him, realizing that seeing Bill so often reminds voters that they don’t want to go back to that whole megillah again.
Hillary sounded silly trying to paint Obama as a poetic dreamer and herself as a prodigious doer. “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act,” she said. Did any living Democrat ever imagine that any other living Democrat would try to win a presidential primary in New Hampshire by comparing herself to L.B.J.? (Who was driven out of politics by Gene McCarthy in New Hampshire.)
Her argument against Obama now boils down to an argument against idealism, which is probably the lowest and most unlikely point to which any Clinton could sink. The people from Hope are arguing against hope.
At her victory party, Hillary was like the heroine of a Lifetime movie, a woman in peril who manages to triumph. Saying that her heart was full, she sounded the feminist anthem: “I found my own voice.”
How gratified I am that the people heeded my blog, rethought their vote, and gave Hillary Clinton the victory she deserves.
THE woman in question became a lawyer after some years as a community organizer, married a corporate lawyer and is the mother of two little girls, ages 9 and 6. Herself the daughter of a white American mother and a black African father — in this race-conscious country, she is considered black — she served as a state legislator for eight years, and became an inspirational voice for national unity.
Be honest: Do you think this is the biography of someone who could be elected to the United States Senate? After less than one term there, do you believe she could be a viable candidate to head the most powerful nation on earth?
If you answered no to either question, you’re not alone. Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House. This country is way down the list of countries electing women and, according to one study, it polarizes gender roles more than the average democracy.
That’s why the Iowa primary was following our historical pattern of making change. Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter).
If the lawyer described above had been just as charismatic but named, say, Achola Obama instead of Barack Obama, her goose would have been cooked long ago. Indeed, neither she nor Hillary Clinton could have used Mr. Obama’s public style — or Bill Clinton’s either — without being considered too emotional by Washington pundits.
So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.
I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. That’s why Senators Clinton and Obama have to be careful not to let a healthy debate turn into the kind of hostility that the news media love. Both will need a coalition of outsiders to win a general election. The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.
I’m supporting Senator Clinton because like Senator Obama she has community organizing experience, but she also has more years in the Senate, an unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training in the White House, no masculinity to prove, the potential to tap a huge reservoir of this country’s talent by her example, and now even the courage to break the no-tears rule. I’m not opposing Mr. Obama; if he’s the nominee, I’ll volunteer. Indeed, if you look at votes during their two-year overlap in the Senate, they were the same more than 90 percent of the time. Besides, to clean up the mess left by President Bush, we may need two terms of President Clinton and two of President Obama.
But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.
What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.
What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.
What worries me is that reporters ignore Mr. Obama’s dependence on the old — for instance, the frequent campaign comparisons to John F. Kennedy, though Senator Edward Kennedy is supporting Senator Clinton — while not challenging the slander that her progressive policies are part of the Washington status quo.
What worries me is that some women, perhaps especially younger ones, hope to deny or escape the sexual caste system; thus Iowa women over 50 and 60, who disproportionately supported Senator Clinton, proved once again that women are the one group that grows more radical with age.
This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers. We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.”
