5QQ: Leslie Sanchez (Plus, Book Excerpt!)

From You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe by Leslie Sanchez

Chapter 1: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuits

…Most interesting of all were the reactions to NBC’s Lester Holt when it was reported that he seemed a bit too incredulous when discussing Clinton’s clear lead over Obama on the “commander in chief” question:

With the field of Democratic candidates reduced to two, we asked primary voters, “Who would make the best commander in  chief of the U.S. armed forces?” And here, it was [Sen.] Hillary Clinton [D-NY] who was the clear favorite. The first woman candidate with a serious shot at winning the presidency beat out her male rival—look at these numbers—50 percent to 30 percent. Keep in mind, this at a time the nation is fighting on two fronts.

Was it a moment of ill-advised humor, or of being caught off guard by an inappropriate comment on the campaign trail and trying to brush it off with laughter?

In fact, it was a profoundly telling moment, that however far down the road we think women have come to equality, we may not be there yet. Granted, live television’s a high-wire act. We’ve all made the blunder we wish we could take back. Unfortunately, these spontaneous outbursts override the substance of the news story, which in this case was profound.

And then there was the infamous “iron my shirt” incident.

On January 7, 2008, on one of Clinton’s final campaign stops before the New Hampshire primary, two men stood up in the school auditorium where she was speaking and started shouting, “Iron my shirt!” at her—the same slogan that was on the signs they raised. Clinton kept her cool, remarking, “Ah the remnants of sexism, alive and well,” to the applause of her audience before cueing up the lights so police could see to come and take the two hecklers away. “As I think has been abundantly demonstrated, I am also running to break through the highest and hardest glass ceiling,” she continued, on a sober note, though at the end of her speech she was composed enough to jest, as the question and answer portion of the program got underway, “If there’s anyone left in the auditorium who wants to learn how to iron a shirt, I’ll talk about that.”

The incident made the news, of course, but it didn’t cause outrage, at least not in the general population. One blog actually tried to brush it off as a harmless prank connected to a couple of kids who wanted to generate some publicity for their radio show, noting that one of the perpetrators, a “Nick Gemelli, who is 21, and born at least a decade after ‘iron my shirts’ was an anti–women’s rights slogan, didn’t have much of a rationale. ‘I just don’t think a woman should be president,’ he said.” Some others had the temerity to suggest that the kids who pulled it off were plants by the Clinton campaign itself to drum up their own publicity. Even Candy Crowley demurred on this one: “I saw the two boys in New Hampshire . . . hold the sign ‘iron my shirts’ or whatever. It didn’t strike me as intrinsically sexist. It struck me as intrinsically stupid.”

But let’s forget, for a moment, that one of the things we all should have been fuming about was that a couple of smart-aleck kids were asking a United States senator to do their laundry. The disrespect to the office should have automatically triggered our ire no matter the gender of the senator involved.

Imagine what might have happened in the press if the scenario had been just a little different. What if the incident had taken place during the recent election of the new chairman of the Republican National Party? What if, during one of Michael Steele’s speeches, these two young men had stood up and started waving signs and shouting at him the slogan “Shine my shoes”?

Did you suddenly feel a looming silence? Did the room just feel a little colder?

My bet is that, if “Shine my shoes” had been the slogan of the day, it would have galvanized us as a community and fomented protests in a way that just didn’t happen when Clinton was asked to iron shirts. In a way,  that couldn’t happen because she is a woman and, as a culture, we don’t yet take sexism nearly to heart the way we do racism and other forms of prejudice.

This is not to say that nobody was ticked off. It was in the aftermath of these attacks that we saw legions of women—particularly middle-aged and older, low-to-moderate-income, white and Hispanic women—rise up in defense of Hillary. This was the birth of what Senator Clinton would later dub “the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuits” in her speech to the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Leslie Sanchez is the founder of IMPACTO Group LLC (a premium communications firm for clients targeting the Latino/a market). In 1999 she created the first-ever multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at Hispanic voters for the Republican National Party, and also served as executive director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans. She has been seen on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Fox News Channel, CNN, NPR, PBS, NBC’s Today Show and Nightly News, CBS’s Early Show and ABC’s World News.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.