Don’t Stereotype Me!

I’ve had it. And the 2008 election system has just started.

According to the pollsters, I am one of those “older female voters” who can be counted on to support Hillary Clinton because, after all, we’re so much alike. We share a gender.

This may come as a big shock to the so-called “analysts” who like to slice and dice the electorate into “interest groups” and “market niches” based upon some wonky version of identity politics, but women—even those of a “certain age”—are not a monolithic voting bloc. Not long ago, I wrote about my irritation with negative gender stereotypes: the South Carolina (female) Republican who employed a sexist term for Clinton, and the patronizing (male) commentators who applied a gender lens to every tactic employed by her campaign. I think many women feel the same impatience with that sort of one-dimensional approach to her candidacy.

But guess what? Many of us are equally impatient with a candidate who seems to feel entitled to our votes simply by virtue of a common gender, and with pundits who give that entitlement legitimacy. When Barack Obama was asked whether he anticipated getting a major share of the African-American vote, he sensibly replied that he expected he’d need to earn every vote. He clearly recognized what the “chattering classes” seem unable to grasp, that women, blacks, Latinos, young people and all the other groups into which voters get lumped consist of individuals who are more—and more complicated—than those labels reflect.      

In both the Republican and Democratic primaries, we have seen strong signals that voters are tired to death of the poll-centered politics of the last few election cycles. Both Huckabee and McCain have based their appeals to GOP voters on straight talk; Mitt Romney, vastly better financed and clearly more acceptable to the business wing of the party, has dutifully designed (or changed) his positions on the basis of his polling. Conventional wisdom favored Romney, but so far, actual voters haven’t.  

Among Democrats, as Frank Rich observed in the New York Times, it is the Clinton campaign, led by pollster Mark Penn, that is following the older script. “In Mrs. Clinton’s down-to-earth micropolitics, polls often seem to play the leadership role. That leaves her indecisive when one potential market is pitched against another.” If those polls also tell her she can count on women’s votes, she’s in for a surprise. This election won’t be decided on the basis of gender or race. They won’t be irrelevant, but they won’t be decisive, either.

This is an election about the future, about where we are going as a nation. It is about who can best bring a sour, fractured, dispirited citizenry together again, about who can best heal the deep divisions created by wedge issues and culture wars and pandering to political bases. It’s about vision and hope—and yes, change.

It isn’t about identity politics. Candidates who think it is are part of the past we so desperately need to change.

 

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Squirelly History

Well, I see that in addition to recipes for cooking squirrels in popcorn poppers, Mike Huckabee has shared some wisdom about God’s plan for the U.S. Constitution, specifically His desire to insert provisions prohibiting abortion and same-sex marriage. As in, God doesn’t want us aborting or cavorting (with or without state sanction), and we ought to revise the U.S. Constitution to reflect God’s will on those matters.

Leaving aside the broader issue—i.e., why, if I wanted to live in a country where some people’s narrow vision of religiosity was made the law of the land, I wouldn’t just move to Saudi Arabia—I want to address one claim Huckabee made, because it is a common theme of arguments against same-sex marriage. Huckabee said, “Marriage has historically, as long as there’s been human history, meant a man and a woman in a relationship for life.”

Except that’s simply untrue. And not just untrue around the edges; it is massively, demonstrably, wildly untrue.

In Ancient Greece, marriage was important, but for entirely practical reasons. Parents chose their children’s partners for economic reasons, and the purpose was to produce children. Women were considered inferior to men, who were free to indulge their romantic and sexual desires elsewhere; as Demosthenes famously explained, “We have prostitutes for our pleasure, concubines for our health, and wives to bear us lawful offspring.” Many men also established sexual and emotional relationships with young boys, and those relationships were widely accepted. Husbands could divorce relatively easily, especially if the wife proved infertile.

In Rome, marriage was personal and optional, and evidently so widely disregarded that the Emperor Augustus found it necessary to pass laws compelling people to marry. Even then, there were three kinds of marriage: one called “usus” where the couple simply moved in together; a more formal variety that involved a ceremony with witnesses; and an upper-class version requiring ten witnesses and a priest. Divorce was common for all three types, and tended to be pretty informal.

In early Israel, a man could have several wives and concubines. You’d think that Huckabee, who is so hung up on God’s law as revealed in the bible, might recall the story of Jacob, who married two sisters, Leah and Rachel. Or that of Solomon, who had 700 wives and 300 concubines. (Solomon was evidently one busy dude!)  Divorce was permitted if you were the husband—wives weren’t so lucky. Both marriage and divorce remained entirely civil matters.

Over the following centuries, marriage came increasingly under the influence of the Catholic church, which was extending its authority over more aspects of life generally. Catholic theologians decided that marriage was for life (although there were grounds for annulment), and imposed a number of other rules. Even so, however, it wasn’t until the 12th Century that priests got involved in the marriage ceremony, and not until the 13th that they actually took charge of it. Marriage continued to be a practical, economic arrangement.

Martin Luther declared marriage “a worldly thing” that belonged to the realm of government, not religion, and the English Puritans decreed that marriage was purely secular. (When the English Reformation occurred, the religious significance of marriage was reasserted.) The Protestant reformers also allowed divorce.

Here in America, there have been various experiments with marriage. In 1848, the Oneida community cultivated a form of group marriage. They called it “complex marriage” and every woman was married to every man in the community. (They also practiced so-called “scientific breeding.”) And we all know about Mormon polygamy. While the Mormons have formally renounced the practice, polygamy persists in many parts of the Middle East to this day—among President Bush’s princely pals in Saudi Arabia, for example. (Not only that, a so-called “Christian polygamy movement,” unrelated to Mormonism, began in the U.S. in 1994.) In Senegal today, it is estimated that 47% of marriages are “plural” or polygamous.

Why this brief—and incomplete—excursion down history lane? Because it really fries me the way the radical right manufactures history out of whole cloth. They have succeeded in promulgating an ahistorical mythology in which the Founding Fathers—most of whom were Deists—created a “Christian Nation” that looks remarkably like their own version of Christianity. Like Huckabee, they blithely fabricate wholly fanciful historical “facts”—confident, evidently, that no one reads  history anymore.

Mike Huckabee knows a lot more about fried squirrel than I do. But he obviously doesn’t know  much about other countries, world history, U.S. history or the Enlightenment philosophy that guided those who drafted our Constitution.

 

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Political Will…Or Won’t

Will we or won’t we?

The Indiana Commission on Local Government Reform issued its recommendations while I was teaching a class for mid-career government employees in Southern Indiana. They applauded many of the proposals. When the conversation turned to the likelihood of action, however, they were cynical. As one said, “Ultimately, those guys in the statehouse look out for their own political interests, not those of the citizens.”

We all have a stake in proving him wrong.

Those of us who teach public administration like to use words like “transparency” and “accountability.” What those terms mean in simple English is that citizens should be able to figure out who is in charge of what, and who made what decision. It isn’t rocket science.

The Commission’s recommendations would eliminate lots of unnecessary layers of government, and that streamlining would obviously have a major fiscal impact. But important as cost-saving is, the real product of reform will be more transparency, more accountability, and greater efficiency. (How many township assessors or county coroners do we elect based upon their skills in assessing or dissecting? How many of us even know who’s running for those positions?)

The major elements of the report have been widely publicized, but other excellent  recommendations haven’t received enough attention. I particularly like Recommendation #24, which would prohibit employees of a local government unit from serving as elected officials of that unit. (Under this provision, Monroe Gray, among others, would have been disqualified from acting both as lawmaker and city employee.) As the report points out, such service is a clear conflict of interest. It undermines the chain of command and procedures for discipline, and “diminishes the faith that citizens must have that local governments act in the public interest.”  

Recommendation #16 proposes moving municipal elections to even-year cycles, when all other elections are held. Not only would this save the considerable costs involved in holding an extra election, it might improve voter turnout for these contests. In the last Indianapolis mayoral election, for example, only a quarter of those who were eligible voted. Thirteen percent of registered voters chose Greg Ballard. That’s hardly a mandate, and that reality will make it harder for him to govern.

Many of the other recommendations are equally common-sensical. Several have been kicking around longer than I have—and believe me, that is a long time!

I’m not suggesting that legislators obediently enact every single one of the Commission’s recommendations. Some will need to be tweaked. All should be fully debated and analyzed. But overall, the Commission has produced a map to the 21st Century for a state whose administrative structures mostly date from the 19th. If the bulk of these recommendations become law, we can expect the outcomes the Commission identifies: local governments that will be “more understandable, more efficient, more effective and more accountable.”  

The question is whether we have the will to withstand both vested interests and civic inertia—if we have the will to prove my cynical students wrong.   

 

 

 

 

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Rhymes with Witch

Women who venture into preserves formerly considered male get used to sexist put-downs. There has been progress; females attending law school today are unlikely to encounter the sorts of accusations that were routine when I was one of a handful of women students in the 1970s: I was taking a place that should have gone to a man. I was just a bored housewife amusing myself with tort law. My children would become drug addicts.  

People—okay, men—who should know better still say remarkably stupid things, of course. Just last year, Representative Steve Buyer told The Hill that women "don’t fight fair. Men do very well at focus, well at what’s in front of them. Women bring their memories to the debate and bring in things that may not even be relevant…  They bring in external things that may have occurred in the past. So you have to come in, nod your head and be a good listener."  But most politicians—whatever their private prejudices—have learned to avoid such patronizing buffoonery.

And then Hillary Clinton decided to run for President.

Now, Hillary is not my favorite political figure, but there are plenty of reasons to oppose her candidacy that do not rest on gender. If the polls are correct that she has a significant lead among women, it may be in part because women resent the gender-based putdowns by some of her opponents. The most recent episode, and the one that has gotten the most attention, was the exchange between Senator John McCain and a (female!) supporter who asked him “How do we beat the (rhymes with witch)?” McCain just laughed at the use of this time-tested epithet for “uppity” women.

McCain’s response can at least be dismissed as political. But what about what passes for professional commentary from our increasingly irrelevant chattering classes? Chris Matthews, commenting  after one of her appearances, said “We were watching Hillary Clinton earlier tonight and she was giving a campaign barn burner speech, which is harder to give for a woman. It can grate on some men when they listen to it. Fingernails on a blackboard..” Another time, he characterized her voice as “shrill” and her body language as “judgmental,” terms unlikely to be applied to a male.

In a recent column,  Maureen Dowd reported on some telling research. In one recent study, Columbia University professor Ray Fisman confirmed the staying power of certain long-standing  gender biases.  As he put it, “We males are a gender of fragile egos in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own.”  Catalyst, an organization that studies women in the workplace, found that “women who behave in ways that cleave to gender stereotypes — focusing on collegiality and relationships — are seen as less competent. But if they act too macho, they are seen as ‘too tough’ and unfeminine.”

There are plenty of valid reasons to vote for someone other than Hillary Clinton.  “Rhymes with witch” isn’t one of them.

 

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Rhymes with Witch

Women who venture into preserves formerly considered male get used to sexist put-downs. There has been progress; females attending law school today are unlikely to encounter the sorts of accusations that were routine when I was one of a handful of women students in the 1970s: I was taking a place that should have gone to a man. I was just a bored housewife amusing myself with tort law. My children would become drug addicts.  

People—okay, men—who should know better still say remarkably stupid things, of course. Just last year, Representative Steve Buyer told The Hill that women "don’t fight fair. Men do very well at focus, well at what’s in front of them. Women bring their memories to the debate and bring in things that may not even be relevant…  They bring in external things that may have occurred in the past. So you have to come in, nod your head and be a good listener."  But most politicians—whatever their private prejudices—have learned to avoid such patronizing buffoonery.

And then Hillary Clinton decided to run for President.

Now, Hillary is not my favorite political figure, but there are plenty of reasons to oppose her candidacy that do not rest on gender. If the polls are correct that she has a significant lead among women, it may be in part because women resent the gender-based putdowns by some of her opponents. The most recent episode, and the one that has gotten the most attention, was the exchange between Senator John McCain and a (female!) supporter who asked him “How do we beat the (rhymes with witch)?” McCain just laughed at the use of this time-tested epithet for “uppity” women.

McCain’s response can at least be dismissed as political. But what about what passes for professional commentary from our increasingly irrelevant chattering classes? Chris Matthews, commenting  after one of her appearances, said “We were watching Hillary Clinton earlier tonight and she was giving a campaign barn burner speech, which is harder to give for a woman. It can grate on some men when they listen to it. Fingernails on a blackboard..” Another time, he characterized her voice as “shrill” and her body language as “judgmental,” terms unlikely to be applied to a male.

In a recent column,  Maureen Dowd reported on some telling research. In one recent study, Columbia University professor Ray Fisman confirmed the staying power of certain long-standing  gender biases.  As he put it, “We males are a gender of fragile egos in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own.”  Catalyst, an organization that studies women in the workplace, found that “women who behave in ways that cleave to gender stereotypes — focusing on collegiality and relationships — are seen as less competent. But if they act too macho, they are seen as ‘too tough’ and unfeminine.”

There are plenty of valid reasons to vote for someone other than Hillary Clinton.  “Rhymes with witch” isn’t one of them.

 

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