Why are we debating a woman's right to run for president?

I’ve been disturbed by two male cartoonists depicting Sen. Hillary Clinton taking her campaign to Mars.  On one, the tagline is “The woman never quits.”

 

Why is this funny?  It’s only funny if you think her campaigning in primary elections is wrong.  Why would it be wrong for a person winning millions of votes and winning big victories in key states to continue campaigning?  Why would a fierce competitor with impressive credentials who is running a close second quit?

 

In 1980 Ted Kennedy challenged an incumbent president for his own party’s nomination, creating friction within the party.  Ted refused to withdraw and went into the convention with 1,225 delegates to Carter's 1,981, with only 122 uncommitted. There was nowhere near the outcry and outrage in the media for Ted to get out of the way that there is now for Sen. Clinton, and the stakes aren’t any higher now for the D’s than they were in 1980, where we saw the tide turned to the Reagan revolution.

 

There’s no doubt that viewing Sen. Clinton’s daring to stay in the race and be taken seriously as laughable is sexism.  It simply hasn’t – and wouldn’t – happen to a man of her stature.  If we treat women differently than men in the same situation, that’s a double standard.  That’s sexism.  Acknowledging sexism doesn’t make you a feminist – it makes you fair.

 

Last I checked, the U.S. Constitution sets certain minimum qualifications for the presidency, but being a man isn’t one of them. So why is it, then, that much of the cultural and media debate during this campaign since early on in the primary has been over whether Sen. Clinton is entitled to run at all?

The Constitution is not a barrier – it’s people’s attitudes, both of women and men.

 

A male commenter to my blog quoted a woman who thinks Sen. Clinton should get out as some kind of proof that it’s not a sexism thing.  It’s true women are joining the call – I’ve seen women columnists refer to Sen. Clinton’s staying in the race with the same disdain as the male cartoonists, calling her “embarrassing,” “shameful,” "shameless," “full of hubris,” and my favorite from the ever reliable mean girl Maureen Dowd, “unseemly.”

 

The question is not whether it’s sexism because it is.  Some of my commenters have written better descriptions than I have about why this is sexism.  See Ann Drist's blog for some thoughtful writing on this topic, from someone who isn't personally a fan of Sen. Clinton.  The question is what does it say about women and men that they want to view a competitive woman as somehow unseemly and embarrassing. 

 

The supposedly progressive columnist Bob Scheer has written several pieces in the San Francisco Chronicle arguing that because he believes women are by nature more peaceful than men and because Sen. Clinton may have some hawkish tendencies, that she somehow isn't advancing the cause of women and so women shouldn't vote for her.  I can't make sense of his claim and don’t know what kind of mother issues Bob may have, but I’m no more peaceful than my male friends.  The question for men like Bob is – what is it in their construct of their own identity that requires them to pigeonhole women into traits they see desirable?

 

As for women who call out other ambitious and competitive women as "shameless," I've written before about internalized sexism.  I could quote volumes of scholarly work on this problem, and I also know it when I see it.  (See good description in comment from Lexia below.)  Maureen Dowd, with her pen as an opinion writer for the New York Times, holds one of the most powerful journalistic positions in our country.  Yet she repeatedly writes pieces ridiculing powerful women as "manly".  During Howard Dean's campaign, Dowd wrote a piece cutting apart Dean's wife, a busy and successful doctor, for not wearing makeup and styling her hair to help out her husband's campaign. 

 

Dowd is an ambitious, powerful woman who writes pieces suggesting it's unseemly for women to desire power. I leave it for the psychologists to unravel that. 

 

A year ago I didn't believe we were living in a country not ready to elect a woman president, as predicted by an African cabbie in Manhattan.  Now I see he didn't go far enough.  We're not even ready to allow a woman to run for president.

Comments

[Alison]

Oh, I can't stand Maureen Dowd. I agree with everything you wrote about her - she is totally sexist. And let's not forget about how one of your commenters cited the wisdom of Camille "there's no such thing as date rape" Paglia as evidence that Hillary should get out of the race. Get real. T

[Alison]

Well, it seems Obama doesn't like running against seasoned female candidates. He played old-style politics to wipe Alice Palmer off this Chicago ballot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3Ned5TQoW4

Now, is this sexist or just dirty?

[Lexia]

Maureen Dowd is illustrative of several studies and books on the psychology of the oppressed. For example, her writing is a classic case of horizontal aggression and she herself demonstrates one of the paths women take who recognize but won't confront their oppression: make the victims responsible but exempt oneself.

But to me more than anything, she and her like are the predictable outcome of thirty years of the media saturating Americans' leisure time with the idea that sexism is okay, that sexual bigotry doesn't really hurt anyone, only women, and that hate speech's proven harm hurts no one, because it hurts only women. She and the rest of the Ladies Against Women are living examples of Kenneth Clark's famous illustration of the effects of institutionalized prejudice, the experiment with the dolls that was so effective in Brown vs. Board of Education. With no way out, the victims of systematic bigotry come to believe they are indeed inferior.

It's infuriating that so many liberals (NPR being a flaming example) ask women to understand this about men and join in the fight to remedy it, but also demand that women not apply this understanding to their own inferior status.

[David Mosby]

Lisa,

You ask “Why are we debating a woman's right to run for president?” Answer: No one is questioning a woman’s “right” to run for president, as you well know. The entire premise of the question is a straw man fallacy.

Criticism of Hillary is not tantamount to criticism of women. Lack of support for or opposition to Hillary is not proof of sexism.

Hillary started the primaries with an almost unassailable lead in the polls and an immeasurable advantage in terms of name recognition and support from the party establishment. She raised record amounts of money and in the end ran an extraordinary campaign. Unfortunately for her and her supporters, in the beginning of the campaign she and her staff made fatal strategic and tactical mistakes that cost her the nomination.

The truth is that the sexism you refer to is more imagined than real. That is not to say that Hillary has not been the victim of any sexism. But any fair-minded and reasonable assessment of the campaign would have to conclude that it is not possible for Hillary to have won 20 states, raised $250 million and earned more than 17 million votes if she were the victim of widespread and endemic misogyny in America.

The Speaker of the House is a woman. The Secretary of State is the second woman to hold that post. With the exception of the Presidency and the Vice-Presidency these are the two of the highest and most prestigious offices in the land. Your specious allegations of sexism do not stand up to rational scrutiny.

Now Obama has won and Hillary has lost. Anyone who genuinely cares about women's rights, child poverty, health care, the well-being of America's troops, and the peace and stability of the world will now support will now support Obama because his policy positions and those of Hillary's are virtually identical.

Those are the facts.

[David Mosby]

By the way, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, both respected nonpartisan research organizations, issued a new study of primary news coverage showing that: "Democrat Barack Obama has not enjoyed a better ride in the press than rival Hillary Clinton."

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/854/candidate-character

[David Mosby]

Alison,

You said in a previous post that you'd vote for McCain instead of Obama. That is your right. But are you aware that McCain has referred to his wife as a "cunt" in public?

http://www.drudge.com/news/106692/author-mccain-called-wife-cunt-trollop

[Ms. Ann Drist]

>>If we treat women differently than men in the same situation, that’s a double standard. That’s sexism. >Lack of support for or opposition to Hillary is not proof of sexism.>Criticism of Hillary is not tantamount to criticism of women. <<

Your premise is precisely upside down (or backwards if you prefer): Hillary gets a lot of criticism that is gender-based or depends on stereotypes of women, or that all women have been or are vulnerable to. IOW: much criticism of Hillary is based on criticism of women (or more accurately, Hillary-as-woman).

[Ms. Ann Drist]

OOps, my lengthy comment got all garbled, not sure why. Just delete it, I guess. So sorry.

[demwit]

I agree that Hillary Clinton's basic right to be a candidate was questioned. In addition to all the undemocratic and arrogant demands that she get out of the race, there were constant suggestions that she was simply inauthentic and got to be a major candidate only because she's married to Bill, which in effect denies her any significant status as a candidate or even as an individual human being. Moreover, her character was constantly attacked in a way Obama's wasn't. His basic humanity was never questioned. He was never a "monster" or a "demon" or a "hag," etc., etc., as she was routinely called on NYT blogs. Even the NYT Op-Ed page began to accuse Hillary of racism and ethical defects after she seriously challenged Obama by winning in Pennsylvania, and after that it often tried to assassinate her character with ridiculous editorials and columns (except for Krugman, who's a scholar and likes to stick to facts).

The flip side was that the press didn't seriously vet Obama until March, after the majority of states had already voted, so it's quite possible to regard those earlier vote totals as illegitimate, since voters didn't know what they were voting for. Various counts of articles pro and con about the candidates vary wildly in their results, since the results depend on the criteria used to frame the searches. But the beginning of the vetting process for Obama clearly was related to the Rev. Write videos in March. This time period also coincides with the beginning of a series of high-powered attempts to falsely brand Hillary as a rabid racist.

Without the sexism, the fake charges of racism, and the failure of the press to vet Obama until the spring, who knows, Hillary might even have gotten 20 million votes, as her surprise win in S. Dakota suggests.