The Crossed Pond

I’ve spent a fair amount of time during the campaign season puzzling over how to properly refer to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. In particular, I’ve been a little put-off by the widespread tendency even among the professional media to refer to her simply as “Hillary”. It seems insufficient to me to justify this in terms of distinguishing her from her husband–after all, we had two Senators Kerry/Kerrey for a good long time, and nobody in the media felt compelled to refer to them simply as “John” and “Bob”.

Ron Brown at the often-intriguing Frame Problem blog has a simple explanation:

The wife of Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy made an interesting observation on Super Tuesday. She noticed that newscasters and commentators were referring to Hillary Clinton on a first-name basis, but to all other candidates either by last name or full name. I agree with Mrs. BA in her assessment that this is a clear case of sexism. It may have unconscious origins in many cases, but it is reflective of, at minimum, implicit sexism.

Brown defends this thesis reasonably well, and it may even be correct. There’s a couple of problems, however. The most substantial is the campaign’s deliberate decision to push the “Hillary” brand in everything from the campaign’s website to spectacularly horrendous campaign videos.

This strikes me as a rather strange path to take in order to humanize the candidate. The predominant meme that the Clinton campaign has been attempting to push down our throat is one of experience and technocratic expertise. “Hillary” seems like a feeble attempt to compete with Obama in terms of personal appeal, the ineffectiveness of which has been made evident by Obama’s recent surge.

It is almost certainly too late for the campaign to pull back from the brink in terms of the “Hillary” brand, or to complain about media sexism when they hear it repeated back at them. But let’s keep our ears open in terms of how the campaign spokespeople refer to the candidate. Is she “Hillary” or is she “Senator Clinton?” It’ll be a good barometer in terms of determining how they’re defining her, and whether they’re going to go back to the policy-centric approach that was originally percieved as their strength.