It’s the week after Thanksgiving, time for the holiday frenzy to begin. For me, now long retired from two or three hectic careers and now with a less frenzied private life, the primary emotion with which I contemplate the waning of the days is relief, since at my advanced age not so much is expected of me in the holidays.
But winter light always reminds me of a 1993 column by the excellent Ellen Goodman. Copyright law prohibits republishing it here, but you can read it in full in the Seattle Times archive.
A money quote in the piece (one of many) is this:
“For most of the year it is quite enough to fail to live up to Hillary Clinton. At holidays, we get a second chance to fail to live up to Martha Stewart.
Martha Stewart's tablecloth does not have stains from last year's cranberry sauce. Martha Stewart has never in her wildest imaginings used a spoon that was mangled in the garbage disposal. Martha Stewart has never served a store-bought dessert.
And Martha Stewart has never, ever, gone out on Thanksgiving morning scouring the 7-Eleven stores for their last can of gravy.”
This narrative will resonate, I’m sure, with many of today’s working parents (still mostly mothers) who struggle against the odds to provide the traditional cheery experience for their families in the holiday season.
However, since this column first ran in 1993 things haven’t gone so well even for Martha. There’s a new documentary about her life on Netflix which recounts the efforts of very serious people to punish her for becoming a paper billionaire by advising women how to attain the perfect lifestyle. She was ultimately convicted of a minor offense and went to jail for five months, though she’s risen from the ashes of her previous career by working very hard..
It’s ironic to see her drama unfold in a time period when we observe attempts by another public figure to re-populate the federal cabinet with rapists and thieves. A recent choice on Thanksgiving weekend was Edward Kushner, the father of Trump’s Son-in-Lawlessness Jared. Kushner père is one of those ex-cons whose convictions were pardoned by the departing previous president, who has now nominated him to become ambassador to France. Is there a lesson here? It seems pretty clear that guys doing traditional guy-type big moneymaking with attendant crime can get away with just about anything, but a women who makes lots of money doing traditional gal things has a target painted on her back, even when, like Martha Stewart, she makes her money legally. And perfectly.
Which brings us to lessons learned from the recent election.
Let’s leave aside issues for the moment and consider the vast number of American voters who proudly declaim “I vote for the man, not the party.” (Yes, mostly they say “man”, not “woman” or even “person”, because such cautious people don’t jump on stylish bandwagons like gender-neutral nouns.)
These are the uncommitted voters, the ones pollsters seek out in any election that’s even slightly close. Truth be told, they mainly base their opinions on the candidate’s personality, not his or her program. These people decline to state a party preference even when they do register to vote.
And here’s a heretical idea. Kamala Harris—glamourous smart, charming, experienced—might have lost this marginal vote because of the Martha Stewart factor. Kamala Harris and her campaign gmight have been just too perfect to appeal to the average voter.
On election night the talking heads on MSNBC said, dumbfoundedly, that her campaign was perfect, so how could she have lost? Indeed it was. Possibly too perfect by half.
The Democratic “convention” was not a convention but a perfectly choreographed spectacle. What it gained in perfection it lost in engagement. For most of the onscreen audience it didn’t read as the folks from home debating policy in real time, but simply as scripted players on a stage set with balloons and musical numbers. Even for us in Berkeley, Kamala’s birth home, the convention show felt more like Vegas than like the Oakland where she was technically born.
The rest of the Democratic campaign was similarly over-perfected. The V-P’s stump speech was great, but for the diminishing number of undecided TV news addicts it was repeated too often and was too predictable.
Celebrity endorsements might have done more harm than good. Regular people having trouble paying bills would be tempted to think that things might be great for Taylor Swift and Beyonce, but how about for me?
On the other hand, the clown car full of characters that Trump is now delivering for his cabinet are anything but perfect. They are womanizers, drunks, vulgarians and worse.
It’s been reported that the ex-president got the bad white-boy vote—at least he got the votes of those who could identify with all of those stereotypes, including an awful lot of white boys, plus some old white guys and even some of the women who tolerate them. Some young men in the catch-all category which references a family history of speaking Spanish—Latino, Hispanic, Puerto Rican etc.—were also tempted to vote for “a regular guy like me” instead of a polished and accomplished woman./p> Perfection can be too much for uncommitted voters, it seems.
Even relevant experience puts some people off. Here in Berkeley we’ve just elected a complete novice as mayor, casting aside two intelligent well-qualified councilmember veterans. The new mayor was recruited and funded by the real estate industry and endorsed by their legislative shills, including Buffy Wicks, who got her own job in a similar way.
From a Berkeleyside profile of Ishi:
Both [opponents, Councilmembers Sophie] Hahn and [Kate] Harrison, meanwhile, chalked up Ishii’s victory to an anti-incumbent sentiment that has swayed elections around the Bay Area and nationwide.
“I consider myself in very good company with some extraordinary candidates like Kamala Harris who were experienced, over-qualified, have an incredible record of success and ran pretty flawless campaigns,” Hahn told Berkeleyside. “But it’s just not what the electorate, anywhere in the country, seems to be buying right now.
Voters seem to be tired of perfectly qualified candidates with stellar resumes like Hahn and Harrison, not to mention Harris. They want to be represented by “someone who’s like me”. It’s the Martha Stewart factor. Go figure.
-more-
