Democratic Conversation

Hillary Clinton has finally spoken. “I’m in. I’m in to win.”

This is the Republican strategists’ dream come true. They will try as hard as they can to “soften” Hillary so that she can get the Democratic presidential nomination. And then they will pounce: on her past, her politics, her connection to her husband, her failed administration of a health care bill back in 1993, her political opportunism, even her gender. Oh, yes, her gender.

I don’t predict this Republican response out of pique, or cynicism. I find the evidence of political operatives working just such games throughout the USA’s history: you work to get the opposing candidate with whom you think you can most easily beat nominated for election. In our most recent past, John Kerry was the Republican’s dream come true: a war veteran who argued against the Vietnam War (back in the day) that so many conservatives blame its loss on the Liberal mindset of “fold your cards when things are going bad” (forgetting, of course, that Nixon ended the war, after escalating it; after 58,000 American kids were already in their graves); John Kerry was a senator, with many years of seemingly incongruous voting habits on the Senate floor (to which any senator cannot stand up in scrutiny, since legislation is all about compromise); John Kerry was married to a “foreigner”; John Kerry spoke French.

Hillary Clinton carries the same kind of baggage: Whitewater, the failed land investment scheme in which the Clinton pair made a few dollars, and created for conservatives a multi-year investigation to besmirch the Clintons, only to result in unfounded charges of any crime committed (but Americans have a soft memory, and so this will be one of the first highlights of Republican salvoes); Vince Foster’s suicide (July, 1993): did Hillary have an affair with Foster? Was he murdered because he was “the man who knew too much”? (tabloid pap long since dispelled, but will resurface somehow through direct Republican action or a side groups willing to sling old mud); her “yes” vote for George W. Bush’s Iraq War, but now is critical of Bush’s incompetent handling of his invasion and occupation of Iraq (another tired strategy to paint Democrats as flip-floppers, as if “in for a penny, in for a pound” is the only kind of opinion one can have as legislators).

If these criticisms of Republican strategists (and so, Republicans themselves, I imagine one can surmise) makes you think I am a Hillary supporter, you are wrong. In fact, I don’t like Hillary Clinton’s politics, and I think she is too much a polarizing and controversial figure to be a viable, electable, presidential candidate. To be more specific: Hillary talks like a liberal, but she wants to appear a centrist, yet shows the wherewithal to easily be a conservative trickster in sheep’s clothing. In short, Hillary is a consummate politician, and all of those are very good for themselves, but bad for a country. Likewise, Hillary Clinton caries with her the hated connection with Bill Clinton (among conservatives, surely, but also from a good portion of the electorate who simply voted for George W. Bush out of “Clinton Exhaustion”; her “liberal” stances on everything from nationalized health care to minority rights sets her up against at least half the country, a base of fiscal, social, and religious conservatives that will divide the political lines as much in 2008 if Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee as George W. Bush has done with his disastrous invasion and occupation anti-strategy.

Yet there is one overriding negative to Hillary Clinton’s potential presidential nomination: she is a woman, and American voters do not like women. Americans, as a whole, don’t like conservative women, they don’t like liberal women, and they especially don’t like women who have power.

Yes, this is a highly inflammatory comment, I know. I say these words not in hesitation, however, of backlash, but in abhorrence for what this says about American men and the male culture. There is evidence for my saying this, both statistical and anecdotal. Many of you already know this. We can throw out all the statistics of women in Congress, women CEOs, and women business owners: when weighed against the numbers of men in like positions, women have a paltry batting average of success. This is not for lack of trying—the glass ceiling has been talked about for more than a generation, and is still in place. And it is not for lack of numbers, because women today make up an equal proportion of the population between the ages of 15 and 64 years (source: Wikipedia).

The facts remain: median personal income for women aged 25 years or older is $12,896 less than for men in the same category (source: US Census Bureau, 2006); only 8 of 500 Fortune 500 CEOs are female (source: NPR.org); “Based on domestic crime data kept by 17 states, experts estimate that 1.37 million domestic violence offenses were reported to the police in 1991, women were the victims in an estimated 83% of the cases (1,130,000)” (quoted source: Abuse Counseling and Treatment, Inc., from National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women); women are held up as sexual objects in USA society, objects to be used by boys and men for simple pleasures (source: watch television for 1 week, programs and advertising); pornography, the abject exploitation of females, is a $10 billion per year business in the USA (source: 2004 stats, CBS News).

I could continue siting such stats for several thousands words, actually. What is most striking, just talking with people, the under 35 crowd mostly, is that there is a huge segment of the US population that sees women as inferior to men, in mind, body, and spirit. And this age group is supposed to be the enlightened ones. There exists a a smaller, but more voting prone, segment of society that grew up post-WWII (the Baby Boomers) who have well-defined male-female “roles” in the household, society, and politics. This is the environment in which we yet live.

There is definitely a stigma attached to women, and it comes from men (mostly). Hillary Clinton is a ripe target. The Republicans and their conservative base understand this all too well. They know how to press the so-called “hot button” issues with the middle-minded, middle-American voters. They know, too, what is at stake: power. Hillary Clinton knows what is at stake: power. I hope the Democratic party understands that what is at stake is not power, but the near future stability of the US economy, getting our soldiers and country’s treasure chest out of Iraq, and just perhaps the viability of the USA as a principled nation in a world sorely lacking in such models.

As much as I have wanted to see a female president for many, many years—a person of high intelligence and diplomatic guile, a model for young women to achieve beyond their otherwise lofty (I hope) dreams—the American male mind, on the whole, will need to percolate a bit longer before it discovers that many women are in fact quite capable of expanding America’s vital role in the world as ambassador of rational thought, democratic values (a la The Bill of Rights), and peaceable existence.