HillaryClintonOffice.com launched hosting only one feature: a contact-button. She wants us to talk to her. #herewego
In today’s politics and media, you no longer have to be a member of the elite corporate world to make a significant impact. An influential part of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent popularity stems not from her own work, but from the success of an internet meme called “Texts with Hillary.”
The site featured a series of captioned pictures of people supposedly texting Clinton alongside a captioned response of her on her phone. The messages and their replies were fictional, but that just evidences how a public figure can become a site for storytelling; stories that drew together conversations from the state of the music world to the State of the nation.
In that spirit, I will compose this piece #OntheFuture with a series of textable/tweetable points that engage with Clinton as a person and as a figure in under 120 characters.
“Can a man run the State department?” Secretary Kerry, that depends on what kind of State Department we want. #nojoke
Everyone got a laugh when the new Secretary of State John Kerry said that he had “big heels to fill.” He may not be laughing when he has to fit his feet into them.
Hillary Clinton, or any woman, serving for four years in such an important public office does in fact change the nature of the position. The experience and perspective she brought to the last four years are ones that cannot easily or possibly be replicated by Kerry.
There is no return to the status quo, women are changing the world underneath our feet and for some it may require a change in traditional foot-wear.
What does it mean that the most popular public figure in the US is a woman? A new standard model for all genders. #69%
A public poll taken at the end of her term as Secretary of State put Hillary Clinton above all other public officials, including President Obama. Clinton’s approval rating ranked in the 69th percentile, while the President’s rating trailed her in the 51st percentile. No other politicians, Democrat or Republican, came any closer.
While Clinton’s popularity extends beyond gender, neither is it inextricable from it. Such a high rating demonstrates and reinforces her as a model for aspiring politicians of all embodiments and identities. In other words, in a critical sense, woman is becoming the new standard for excellence.
People speak about “the End of Men.” I wish they were more serious, so we could begin imagining what could come next. #post-man?
Some have objected that Clinton is not feminine enough. I wonder if they ever complain that their men are not feminine enough. The thought is not unreasonable.
With more and more women running the workforce, hosting the greater majority and diversity of advanced degrees, becoming the chief money-earners and the heads of house-holds, women are setting new standards for all genders and how we are to discuss gender.
Complaints that women are now expected to do it all are fitting, because while certain aged boys-clubs hold on to key positions, a vacuum is being created in their wake, in other locations in the male-network. Men are stepping out of school and the work-place, but are generally not stepping into available positions in child-care, house-care, etc. As it is, many men (as well as women) have felt failed by an untenable model of masculinity that has made them obsolete in certain respects without the desire or the action to create a new one.
Ask “What comes next?” but let’s imagine beyond history; i.e. Clinton 2016 would not be Clinton 2008. #norshoulditbe
Histories are inscribed in the present in our skin and bone, but things change and so the present as well as the future opens up potential for what may happen and what we may become.
There is a comfort (1) in predicting that Clinton will run again for president in 2016, (2) running the numbers that might predict her success, and (3) reading Clinton as stepping down from the office of Secretary of State to prepare for the run.
However, we should remember that (1) Clinton today is not who she was in 2008 and she may not now nor in four years desire the presidency in the same way, (2) the needs and demands of the country can change radically within a year so that in four years’ time Clinton may be in a very different position if she ran, and (3) Clinton exists outside of the political arena and it is impossible, perhaps even difficult for those that know her, even herself, to say for sure where her decisions today will take her.
While I right now would be excited if Clinton ran for President in 2016, I don’t want to limit my desire to what I simply know.
What I want more than Hillary Clinton running for President: half a dozen women for President + some more. #stackthedeck
Do we want Hillary Clinton to run? Does she want to run? Is this what we should be asking?
Let’s change the premise of the question, because my daughter(s) will be Hillary Clinton, but things we cannot yet imagine, facing an America demanding skills we don’t yet have ourselves. We are holding ourselves and our children back by imagining too small, by imagining too little too late, and we do that by trying to imagine for them.
Rather than demand that Clinton run in 2016, let us instead work to ready the ground for who we need when the moment comes. If we need Hillary Clinton in four years, then I hope there is room enough for six of her to show up; and many more others.
How do we educate, train, burgeon their possibilities, give the loans, grants, scholarships, healthcare, the co-workers, the environment, the language, the ideas, the confidence to become unthought-of realities that are at best better and at very least other than the nightmares that we are able to imagine? How do we explore our blind-spots? How do we ask the right questions? That is where we meet ourselves in the present, thinking #OntheFuture by looking at this moment as an opportunity in its limits and its uncertainty.
Let’s change the question from “Is America ready?” to “How do we make it more ready?” and “Let’s do it.” #makeitbetter
Image from: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/state-department-responds-claims-clinton-faked-illness-191054821.html
