Stones Cry Out

It's not just the little-woman-Tammy-Wynette-baking-cookies remarks (remarks which, in retrospect seem to have said more about her own horrified self-awareness than anything else) that has turned me – and so many like me – off. We suburban woman have become accustomed to being looked down upon by deluded white men who think they can do without us, so those same shots coming from a deluded white woman were yawn-inducing. Same disregard, different gender.

We didn't mind Hillary so much when she wore the headband over the dirty hair, although we are happy to see her lately cleaned up and looking fabulous. We didn't mind when she took on the Health Care issue; it seemed like a prime job for a policy wonk, until her secretive tactics and final proposal scared the hell out of us. We didn't even mind that she was disinterested in the traditional hostessing duties of a First Lady. Many of us would be loathe to engage in small talk and dinner parties endlessly, endlessly.

The fact is Hillary's inability to dazzle middle class women has nothing to do with any of that, regardless of how some might happily promote the idea.

Hillary Clinton lost us, seriously lost us, when she started acting like one of us, or more correctly, when she started thinking she could make us believe that she was one of us. In truth, before she ever made us roll our eyes at her empty new "centrist" rhetoric, she lost us with those pink suits.

Not that we don't like pink, mind you. We mind that she thinks we can't see past pink.

The first brazenly pastel episode we paid attention to was the Hillary-As-Princess-Diana-Talking-Cattle-Futures stunt. Wearing a bright pink suit with black piping, Hillary hosted a cozy sort of news "meeting" (it couldn't be called a press conference since everyone, including Hillary, was seated and smiling) wherein she addressed questions about her successful foray into trading cattle futures. We listened and watched as Hillary morphed. She went from being a "brilliant" woman with a "steel trap" memory and a "hands-on" manner to being an almost bubble-headed, pinkly-smiling little woman who had nothing at all to do with the transaction that bore her name. She could remember nothing, really. "You know, I don't know anything about this stuff…the nice man took my check and the next week he brought me back another check, and that's all there was to it…I am just a simple woman, please help me," was – essentially – her answer.

All any of us could think was, "sister…if I'd made $100,000 in cattle futures in a week, I'd sure as hell know how it came about. If I'd made only $10,000, I would remember every detail."

We have never been able to forgive Hillary for that coy bit of disingenuous blather. Or for the pastels. We find it grating that she wear black in Manhattan, but pastels in the suburbs, as though we hicks cannot appreciate the sophistication of basic black, or worse, that we're so intellectually deficient that we don't realize what she is trying to do, how she is attempting to soften her image. She thinks we're so stupid that a pink suit (or a sweater thrown over the shoulders of her suit…wha????) will blind us to all of her reality.

Women outside of the coastal enclaves are media-savvy. We know when we're being played to and we find it insulting to be treated like superficial twits who can be won over by a soft-color palette and a few "aw, shucks," nasal twangs.

We're smart enough to know that Hillary is a lion, that she has always been a lion. So when she puts on the lambikin soft colors and throws the sweater over the shoulders… of her suit…it offends our sense of who Hillary is, and who she thinks we are. She seemingly doesn't realize that because we know she is a lion, her silly, soft-lit photos clatter with noisy metallic bangs of condescension. And that visual racket overpowers anything she has to say verbally.

She cannot make us believe she is one of us, because she has never been one of us. Hillary has never been a woman who worked her way through college by waiting tables or ringing up sales. She has never had to mediate between two or more squabbling children as she's driven on the Long Island Expressway hoping the sound she hears beneath her is not her muffler, falling off. She has never had to put her children with virtual strangers and hope for the best as she went off to clean an (anti-Bush, pro-Hillary) house in the Hamptons, in order to earn enough money for pre-school tuition. She has never planted her own garden with a child "helping," or stood at the fence trading ripe tomatoes with a zucchini-growing elderly neighbor. She has never rushed home from work of a Wednesday evening to start cooking a Thanksgiving dinner for 17 family members, with or without help.

And that's actually fine. Hillary doesn't necessarily have to be one of us. But if she's never had the least sort of inclination to live a middle-class suburban life, in all of its mundane moments and small glories, then she really must stop telling us how we should choose to live it. Most particularly, she should stop telling us that it takes a village to raise a child. Most of us feel quite competent to do that by our own lights, and as educated women we believe our lights are at least as good as hers.

For Hillary to win our respect - if at this point such a thing is possible – she is going to have to stop pastel-pandering to us, because we frankly cannot tolerate the presumption of naivete' that such pandering betrays. Then, she is going to have to talk to us, not at us, and she's going to have to come up with something more substantial than vague feel-goodisms about supposed "common ground" on life-and-death issues, which may (or may not) exist and which mean nothing to us if her words are not followed up with action.

She's going to have to say something true to us…because so far she simply hasn't. She has said almost nothing we want to hear.

And what do we want to hear? We want to hear that there is room in Hillary's world for women who do not wish to climb corporate ladders, who find their deepest fulfillment not in boardrooms but in the garden with the kids and the ladybugs and the loving partner. We want to hear that our sons and daughters who have volunteered to serve under President Bush in a time of war are not simpletons who have been led astray but patriots who defend a nation against an enemy her own husband couldn't be bothered to engage.

We want to hear that those of us who cannot afford to send our children to private school, as she could, can have a real option to do so if we are unhappy with our local schools. We want to hear an acknowledgement that we contribute to the economy with our cottage industries and our entrepreneurial energies, and that we contribute to our communities with our civic work, our volunteer hours and our carpools.

We want to know that when the world breaks, as it broke last week in London, she has a the capacity to do something more than merely make political hay of the issue, using the deaths and injuries of innocents to promote herself and – once again criticize the only American President who has tried to do something constructive in the face of Islamofascism. We want to see something like statesmanship over partisanship. So far, again, she hasn't shown it.

As loving mothers and compassionate people, we want to hear that "reproductive freedoms" have humane boundaries, that they don't have to include a descent into the absolute savagery that is "partial-birth abortion."

Hillary seems not to realize that this is a big issue for us, that suburban moms are not comfortable with late-term abortions. She needs to surprise us and move from talking about some pretend "common ground" to actually walking on at least that portion of the road with us. It would help us believe that she has the ability to move beyond rhetoric, which we have never seen her do. It would also give suburban women their props, recognizing that our values and concerns bear consideration and promotion, that our views are both relevant and well thought-out.

It comes down to respect. Hillary does not have to be like us. In fact, she could not be like us if she tried; she is the wrong sort of animal. She is a lion and we are Mama Grizzlies. If she is as smart as the press vaunts, she will respect us. We middle class suburban women have our own good instincts. We know when we're being dissed and we know when we're being "handled," and honey…we don't like it.

Of course, even if Hillary Clinton could do all these things, we suburban women might still be inclined to distrust her…if only because the press trusts her so unquestioningly, so devotedly, so terrifyingly. While we watch the press train their cameras on President Bush only with the greatest reluctance, and all-negativity, and we don't like it, we also understand that a press which is unable to find a flaw in a potential president is a press willing to participate in a move to tyranny.

For that reason alone my suburban sisters and I may never be able to trust this woman, not for a moment.

And my Democrat sister will never understand. Because she does not wish to