By Krissah Williams
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 6, 2008
LEBANON, N.H. -- It took Laurie Tostenson years of mopping floors, washing sheets and "screaming twice as loud" as the men around her before she managed to change her janitors' scrubs for a blazer befitting a supervisor at New Hampshire's largest hospital.
When Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton declared last year that her candidacy was a chance to "shatter America's highest glass ceiling," Tostenson was just the kind of voter she was targeting. And by all rights, Tostenson should be a Clinton voter -- a career-oriented Democratic working woman who is most concerned about making health insurance more affordable and ending the Iraq war.
And yet . . .
Tostenson decided last week that she "couldn't get past a basic distrust I had for her and for some of her personal choices."
Clinton has targeted working-class women such as Tostenson, banking on their support to propel her to a historic victory in the primaries and in the general election in November. Dating to her first Senate race eight years ago, Clinton connected with them by describing herself as a strong woman who has overcome challenges. Many identify with her as a working mother. Others see her as a fighter for issues they care about, such as health care and education.
Clinton needs them to come through for her in a big way in New Hampshire, where she is trying to revive her campaign after a devastating third-place finish in Iowa last week. New Hampshire may be just as disappointing: Fifty-four percent of Democratic primary voters in 2004 were women, but in the most recent CNN/WMUR poll, Clinton was virtually even with Barack Obama.
At the start of the campaign here last year, Tostenson was leaning toward Clinton. She said she thought that electing a woman president could "break down walls for people who've been affected part and parcel by the 'good-old-boys club.' "
Both women were born to Republican parents, and, though they came of age more than a decade apart, both were affected by the women's rights movement and its focus on equal pay and gender equity. Tostenson gets Clinton when she tells the story of how awkward it was when she walked into her Little Rock law firm visibly pregnant. Tostenson has dealt with male bosses who gave her grief for staying home with her sick son.
And she didn't think it was so funny when a woman at a John McCain event in New Hampshire asked, "How do we beat the [B-word]," because Tostenson knew people in her line of work had said the same about her as she struggled to advance.
"You get a reputation after a while of being a certain way -- a witch with a different letter," said Tostenson, 44. "It makes me uncomfortable, because that's not who I am, and that's not who I like to be. I've resigned myself for many, many years to it."
Still, she thought Clinton was weak for not publicly demanding more respect from her husband after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. She said the whole episode was "humiliating." When Tostenson's first husband cheated, she forgave him for the sake of their family. The second time, she kicked him out and kept the house.
"You can do one of two things: You can be strong, or you can let it beat you up," Tostenson said. "She could have been a better example."
And though they've shared struggles, Tostenson does not think Clinton knows what it means to stretch $63 at the grocery store and leave with only three bags of food. She doesn't think Clinton can relate to someone who has to spend virtually her whole check on heating oil.
So Tostenson is backing Obama, a black man with whom she's shared few common experiences, but with whom she feels a connection. Her eyes filled with tears as she watched Obama deliver his victory speech to a mostly white crowd of Iowans Thursday night. It wasn't until that moment that she realized that she believed voting for him was a way of righting historic wrongs. A vote to unify white-and-black America was more powerful than one to elevate a woman to the presidency, she thought.
"Good for us," she said while watching Obama. "It's been too long."
Obama worked as a community organizer in housing projects, and his wife has talked about the difficulty of paying back college loans. Tostenson said their lives feel authentic to her in a way that the Clintons, who have long been public figures, do not. When Obama said putting the country on the right track would take a lot of hard work, Tostenson thought, "Well, he's not sugarcoating it."
But when Clinton said President Bush has marred America's reputation and made wrong-headed foreign policy decisions, Tostenson thought Clinton was doing too much blaming.
"If someone tracks all over your floor, I don't care who did it, I just want someone to clean it up," she said.
Tostenson married at 18 and four years later gave birth to a son. She stayed home to care for him for five years, and when she went back to work because she needed the money, it was as a part-time janitor in a nursing home.
For eight years, she cleaned rooms and washed soiled sheets, before becoming head of a housekeeping crew at a retirement community. Her boss there was unfair, she thought. He would see a freshly mopped floor and never acknowledge Tostenson and her crew. But when something was out of place, he would tell her, "I don't want to hear any excuses," she recalled.
Tostenson went over his head and told upper management that they should name another director to oversee housekeeping. She said she "had to scream louder and longer to be heard," and assumed her suggestions were being ignored.
Apparently not. In 2000, Tostenson was promoted to housekeeping director -- even though she hadn't applied for the position. She has since become T training and quality assurance manager for the housekeeping staff at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. It took longer than she wanted, but she had made it.
"They felt I had demonstrated all the necessary skills and education that I need to do that job knowing that I didn't have a college degree," Tostenson said. "It really was a leap of faith."
Likewise, Clinton has been successful in politics, and part of her pitch to women is that she can help them get what they have earned. Clinton tells the story of Lilly Ledbetter, an Alabama woman who for 20 years was paid less than her male counterparts at the Goodyear factory where she worked. Ledbetter won a pay disparity suit against her employer only to have her award overturned by the Supreme Court.
"Don't believe that the hard work is over -- we still have a long way to go," Clinton said at a women's event last fall in Iowa.
Tostenson sounds a lot like Clinton when she talks about helping female housekeepers advance. She has developed programs to help them get ahead and has tried to convince them that they can operate the large, high-speed burnishers used to wax floors, just like the men, so they can make more money than they do pushing a mop.
"This is a chance to do more for yourself," Tostenson told one woman.
But they parted ways after the assassination of former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto, when she heard Clinton say, "I have known Benazir Bhutto for a dozen years. I knew her as a leader. I knew her as someone willing to take risks."
To Tostenson, that sounded like one of the most arrogant and opportunistic things she had ever heard. "I felt like she was sticking her nose up in the air saying 'I knew her. Aren't I important?' " Tostenson said.
It again made her question whether Clinton, who attended Wellesley College 60 miles down the road, could really relate to a small-town New Hampshire working mother whose parents couldn't afford to send her to college.
Though Tostenson is a supervisor, paying the bills is still a struggle. The $1,000 it costs to fill a 300-gallon oil tank that heats the small ranch house she shares with her second husband, 23-year-old son and 70-year-old father is almost as much as a month's paycheck. She earns more than her husband, who is an assistant manager at a department store, and her son, who stocks shelves at CVS at night.
Tuesday morning she plans to enter the fire station in Canaan to cast her vote for Obama, though she worries whether he has enough experience to be president. Her hope is that he will hire the right people, make sound decisions and manage around obstacles, just as she has.
"I really think it all comes down to the right person at the right time," she said. "It shouldn't be about what gender they are. It really shouldn't be about what color they are. It really needs to be about what they are going to do about our issues and problems."
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