Was Sexism at Play During the DNC Roll Call?
Instead, as a possible example of “soft” or “ingrained” sexism, I offer the occurrence of the roll call vote to nominate Hillary Clinton for president at the Democratic National Convention.
Copyright Jenny Warburg
Clinton earned 3.7 million more votes and 1000 more delegates than did Senator Bernie Sanders. And yet, since wounds among the Sanders supporters were fresh and unity was the party’s main goal, the campaigns engaged in a negotiation over how the roll call of states would play out. As a comparison, in 2008, when Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, the orchestration of the roll call had the delegation from the state of Illinois “pass” on its turn to cast delegate votes in favor of letting the New York delegation go “out of order.” To that point in the roll call, the delegate count had not delivered the required number of votes to then-Senator Obama for him to officially become the nominee. Instead, then-Senator Clinton stepped to the microphone and asked for a suspension of the roll call so that Senator Obama could be named the party’s nominee “by acclimation,” essentially suspending the rest of the roll call and nominating Obama immediately. The convention chair moved to suspend the rules, the delegates cast a lusty voice vote in favor of nominating Senator Obama and celebrations broke out in the hall, which were covered live on television.
Contrast that to how the roll call vote for Hillary Clinton took place. The states and territories went through the traditional process of announcing their votes for both Clinton and Sanders. There was no official marking of the totals in the arena, so no one really knew that South Dakota’s vote made history by putting the first female major-party nominee over the top. There was no cutting short of the roll call to declare Clinton the nominee by acclimation. Instead, Vermont, the home state of Senator Sanders, went last and Senator Sanders asked the convention to declare Hillary Clinton the nominee, but failed to call for her to be nominated by acclimation. And since the entire roll call had played out and she had already secured the delegate votes needed to win the nomination, Senator Sanders’ action amounted to a somewhat hollow symbolic attempt at unity.
From the perspective of politics, this is what the campaign negotiated. Party unity of Clinton and Sanders supporters was seen as paramount and the Clinton campaign appeared to have been willing to accept less than she granted President Obama in 2008. But to some observers, the fact that the United States had just made history by nominating the first woman major party candidate for president actually got less attention than it might have if so much attention had not been paid to making Sanders supporters, and perhaps Sanders himself, feel better about things.
On a day that should have been a crowning achievement for Hillary Clinton, a significant amount of attention went to Bernie Sanders. And so the question remains: Was this sexism at work?
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http://msmagazine.com/blog/2016/08/01/was-sexism-at-play-during-the-dnc-roll-call/
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