“Are we proud of Michelle Obama last night?” Nancy Pelosi called from a stage in the atrium of the Knight Theatre, in Charlotte. “Weren’t we proud of my women of the House?” The crowd was mostly made up of women, and they answered that they were. They had come for a town-hall meeting on women in politics, organized by EMILY’s List and co-sponsored by Marie Claire. The attendees seemed to come out of it happily united in their anger at Republicans (they would rather shut down the government than fund Planned Parenthood, Pelosi said, and added, “What more do you need to know?”) and with a sense that ambition was nothing to be ashamed of. Ellen Malcolm, the founder of EMILY’s List, which works to elect pro-choice Democratic women, was there, along with the group’s president, Stephanie Schriock, and Senator Patty Murray; they were joined onstage by about a dozen women who were in Congress or trying to be. Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, was at the event, too, wandering in an upper gallery dressed in a black party dress and wearing zebra-pattern shoes. Pelosi joked that the Secretary wasn’t listening.
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When Pelosi addressed the larger convention, a few hours later, she would say, “I stand before you as the first mother and grandmother to serve as Democratic leader.” (Soon after she spoke, all twelve Democratic women in the Senate came onstage in the convention hall.) The delegates applauded; but earlier at the town hall no one had pretended that that equation was simple. A good part of the discussion there was about what a career in politics meant for—and did to—women’s lives and those of their children. Michelle Obama’s speech, as proud as it may have made Pelosi and everyone there, had for long stretches been about her worries about what the Presidency would do to her daughters. She had also called herself the “Mom-in-Chief”—one of the few mannered phrases in an otherwise brilliant performance, and a confusing one. (Chiefly a mom? A chief among moms? Or does “in chief,” in this sense, just mean you are married to the President?)
Michelle Obama’s clarification, at the end, was somewhat lost in the applause: what she essentially concluded was not that there was no cost to her daughters, but that politics—and giving Sasha and Malia the example of the work that politics entailed—was important and valuable, too. She wasn’t exactly saying that the cost to them was worth it: the point was more that she had realized that politics could be good for her girls. She was both saying that her daughters were paramount and that the work of raising them would never be completely sundered from the work her husband did. Domesticity, politics, and work were intertwined. (I’ve written more about Michelle’s speech over at Daily Comment.)
The basic dilemma of work and home was addressed, if not resolved, at the town hall. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand talked about how being elected meant getting to set your own office’s hours; she acknowledged that most jobs don’t work that way. Val Demings, the police chief of Orlando, who is running for Congress—and had the most gripping presence of any of them—talked about how “it is not easy, but the mission is bigger.” Demings also said that women had to be able to ask for help—for child care, for example—and what it meant to discover that others were willing to be there to give it. Everyone spoke about how women running for office had to learn to ask for money. Ashley Judd, who was on the panel, and is also a Tennessee delegate, railed, in amusing terms, against Todd Akin.
The crowd knew a lot about Todd Akin, who is running for Senate in Missouri and has spoken about “legitimate rape” and sharply limiting abortion rights. His name got a reaction every time it was mentioned. Schriock, in her remarks in the atrium afterward, said that everyone needed to remember that Akin was “not an outlier here,” and that if his wing of the Republican Party prevailed, “we will know every day what it was like for our mothers and grandmothers,” in the years before Roe v. Wade was passed. The goal, she said, was to instead “talk about what it will be like for our granddaughters.”
Afterward, Tulsi Gabbard, who is running for Congress in Hawaii, said that when she started her primary campaign, against the mayor of Honolulu, no one knew who she was: “My opponent was already looking for a chief of staff.” She had come back from two deployments with the Hawaii National Guard, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. Gabbard is now thirty-one. She thought she could beat the mayor; and she did.
For more of The New Yorker’s convention coverage, visit The Political Scene. You can also read Ryan Lizza on Julián Castro’s keynote address and the relationship between President Obama and Bill Clinton; John Cassidy on Michelle Obama’s convention speech and Obama’s and Paul Ryan’s false statements about the economy; Amy Davidson on the First Lady’s speech, the gay-rights platform, and whether Democrats are better off than they were four years ago; and Alex Koppelman on Obama and the American Dream.
Photograph by Jeff Dailey/EMILY’s List.
