As the Twin Cities’ best feminist, I get a little queasy when I see some of what passes for “feminism” these days.
The most notable thing about this campaign, of course, is that it inevitably pits two key “identity politics” camps against (in this case) an older white guy – but, first, against each other.
And, to some – the WaPo’s reliably shallow and shrill Linda Hirschman, in this case – there’s just no getting past the identity politics:
Maria Shriver sure has great hair. Stepping up to the microphone at a girl-power rally in Los Angeles on Feb. 3, California‘s first lady tossed her tawny tresses with authority and instructed Golden State women to vote for Sen. Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primary on Super Tuesday. So urgent was the matter, she said, that she had come to the rally “straight from my daughter’s riding lesson.”
Two days later, working-class California women, many of whom can’t even afford to give their daughters health care, much less riding lessons, ignored Shriver’s mane-shaking advice and voted for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton by a margin of 2 to 1, even as many of their better-off sisters fell into lockstep with the Kennedy heiress.
And there we have one of the most puzzling conundrums of the 2008 Democratic contests. Black voters of all socioeconomic classes are voting for the black candidate. Men are voting for the male candidate regardless of race or class. But even though this is also a year with the first major female presidential candidate, women are split every way they can be. They’re the only voting bloc not voting their bloc.
The simple reason, of course, is that America is not a nation of blocs.
Well, that’s not true. America has tons of blocs. 80% of active-duty military, most married women with children, white married males with kids, engineers, Cuban-Americans, Southerners and Westerners, businesspeople and evangelicals vote Republican. Most teachers, union members, unmarried women, drug dealers and professors vote Democrat.
What do those “blocs” have in common?
Well, as opposed to “women” and “black Americans”, they’re matters of choice. One chooses to be each of those things (even “Cuban-American”; the status started and continues with a choice).
For the Clinton campaign, this is devastating. A year ago, chief strategist Mark Penn proclaimed that the double-X factor was going to catapult his candidate all the way to the White House.
At the time, I figured Mark Penn was an idiot. Apropos nothing much.
Instead, the women’s vote has fragmented. The only conclusion: American women still aren’t strategic enough to form a meaningful political movement directed at taking power. Will they ever be?
If “women” (womyn?) want to marginalize “themselves”, “they” should feel free.
Hirschman seems bedeviled by the notion that woman are people, not X-chromosome-seeking vote-bots:
I can imagine the strategists for the senator from Illinois thinking, “What’s that song in Verdi‘s ‘Rigoletto’?” Women are fickle.
Turns out it’s true.
From the moment the primary season began, the group “women” divided along racial lines. Black women have backed Obama by more than 78 percent. But even after subtracting that group, white women (including Hispanics) are still the single largest demographic in the party, at 44 percent. If they voted as a bloc, it would take only a little help from any other bloc to elect the female candidate. White women favor Clinton. So why is she trailing as the contest heads to Ohio and Texas?
The answer is class. As of Feb. 19, the day of the Wisconsin primary, ABC pollster Gary Langer found that white women with a college degree had favored Clinton in the primaries by 13 percent up to that point. Among less educated women, meanwhile, she commanded a robust 38-point lead. But each passing week since Super Tuesday has seen a further erosion in support for the senator from New York among the educated classes. In Wisconsin, she won a minority of college-educated women. And unless there’s some sort of miracle turnaround in Ohio and Texas, this is what may cost her the Democratic nomination.
In other words, drat the luck, women – even Tic women – aren’t votebots!
For the chattering classes – and there is no chatter-ier columnist in American than Linda Hirschman – “women’s politics” all starts with abortion, extends through “swag”, and ends…well…
This isn’t the class divide I would have predicted a year ago. Among women, the obvious thing would be for lower-income, non-college-educated white and black women to line up behind the candidate with the more generous social platform. Both Clinton and Obama have generous platforms, but Clinton’s health-care plan is more ambitious, and she was the first to propose mandatory paid family leave (which mostly women take).
But Hirschman can’t resist the snooty (emphasis):
But women, black and white, stubbornly refuse to behave according to a strict model of economic self-interest. Black women of all income levels have gone for Obama.
Even before Wisconsin, a plurality of elite white women split off from their poorer counterparts to vote for Obama. So did many of their opinion leaders — Shriver and her Kennedy cousin Caroline, and powerful female governors including Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas.
And to Hirschman, it’s just unconscionable that women would think (or, given Obama’s dearth of considered policy, “think”) beyond their chromosomes:
So many feminists’ turn to solidarity with their own class is a surprise.
Because, Linda Hirschman, for women who you’d probably not call “elite” – and men, for that matter, too – it’s the pocketbook, stupid.
I’d tell you to read the whole thing, but all that’d do is get you depressed.
