{"id":10417,"date":"2007-01-25T11:48:27","date_gmt":"2007-01-25T16:48:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/01\/25\/10417.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:55:43","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:55:43","slug":"capitol-hillary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/01\/25\/capitol-hillary\/","title":{"rendered":"Capitol Hillary"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There was an odd minor foofaraw in Left Blogovia recently when Mark Schmitt suggested<\/a> that we all refer to the junior senator from New York as Senator Clinton, \"without exception\". The response, generally, is that as long as her campaign refers to her as Hillary on posters and bumper stickers and whatnot, bloggers would feel free to refer to her by her first name without considering it demeaning. It's an interesting question, and terribly complicated. It's true that there are only a handful of Senators (and a few Congressmen, too) who are known by their first name outside their districts. I suspect Bernie Sanders will be one, in the long haul. Newt Gingrich certainly was, and I think if anybody referred to Teddy in the context of legislation, there wouldn't be much doubt. It's a sign of distinction, as well as being a sign of having an at least moderately unusual first name. Women in the Senate (and, sadly, the House as well, really) are more likely to have \"unusual\" names for Senators, simply because there are more Bobs than Barbaras.\n

I understand the position that using her first name is not demeaning, since it is (a) at her invitation, and (2) used with men of distinction as well. And yet, because the double standard exists, because (among other reasons) there really are more Bobs than Barbaras in the Senate, I think it does come off a little ... diminutive. Dismissive, almost. In part, that's because her political opponents so often referred to her by her first name alone, and did so in tones of contempt. It has been observed that she is deliberately attempting to defuse that by using her first name by itself so frequently. I understand that, too. That the attempt is deliberate does not necessarilly make it well-advised, though, nor does it mean the attempt is likely to succeed. She may want the name to be free of either sexist taint or partisan sneer and still fail.\n

The discussion that I've seen (and I've missed most of it, I'm sure, in part because my computer is like Generalissimo Francisco Franco) has missed the important difference between what is good for Hillary Clinton's campaign chances and what is good for the Party. I maintain that Senator Clinton has a very good opportunity to become a long-service influential and powerful Senator in the mold of the aforementioned Senator Kennedy or her own state's Daniel Patrick Moynihan. I know that we want to take back the White House, and that she wants to be President, but I think the best thing for our Party (and for our nation, because I think the success of our Party's policies would be good for our nation) would be for her to settle in to the seat she now holds. Now, I don't really think that the blogosphere has a tremendous amount of rhetorical power (at the present time, at any rate), but I do think that a respectful formality, a distant but warm tone, would be the right one to strike.\n

One thing that is very difficult for a Party (any Party, but particularly one laboring under our Constitution) is that its leaders have a natural tendency to degrade their rivals within it. We will have (and we should have) a vigorously contested nomination, with half-a-dozen or more candidates of very high quality putting forth their own policy slates, personae and priorities to see which will get to be the personification of the Democratic Party for at least a year. Part of that competition will be negative, will be the useful argument about why each of them is unfit for the highest office in the land. That gets ugly, and I certainly don't enjoy that part of it, but it is a necessary part of the process. Fine. But afterward, the candidates who don't become the nominee will (I hope) continue their careers of public service. I would hope that all the bloggers who agree with that view will attempt to treat all the candidates with a certain necessarily formal respect, to encourage (for instance) Senator Clinton to, when she loses the nomination fight, attempt to live up to that title.\n

And, of course, Your Humble Blogger simply likes<\/i> to refer to people with their honorific wherever possible. I am naturally going to look for a philosophical framework to hold up my aesthetic preference. That's how it works. But I do think that there is a lot more to it that saying that we should call her Hillary because she calls herself Hillary on her web page.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/i>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was an odd minor foofaraw in Left Blogovia recently when Mark Schmitt suggested that we all refer to the junior senator from New York as Senator Clinton, “without exception”. The response, generally, is that as long as her campaign…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10417"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17944,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10417\/revisions\/17944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}