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UPDATED:  MAR 19, 2008 

“SEX, POLITICS, AND POLICY”

This column is being written about a month before you will have had a chance to read it.  By then, it may well be out-of-date.  Having lost Wisconsin (by a lot), if Senator Clinton has not won at least one of Texas and Ohio and is not also well-placed for the upcoming Pennsylvania primary, she will likely be functionally out of it by mid-March.  Because of her political drive, all the campaign contributions she has brought in and her responsibility to those donors, and the tenacity of her core staff as well as of her husband, she may be staying in the race hoping for some political miracle.  And so, whether it is over for Sen. Clinton or not, I would like to consider the arguments that have been made in favor of her candidacy from the outset of her campaign that have been based on her sex.  The argument has gone that Democrats, especially progressive Democrats, should be supporting her because she is a woman and because she is the first woman candidate for the Presidency who started out with some reasonable chance of winning both her party’s nomination and the office itself.

Some time ago I wrote a response to one of these missives saying “vote for Hillary because she is a woman” that came to my email inbox, but it could have been written to or about any of the many, many of them I have seen.  Let me share my thoughts on this issue drawn from a comment that I sent to a friend on article by Robin Morgan, an early and long-time political feminist, “Goodbye To All That (#2)” posted by the Women’s Media Center on February 2, 2008 (http://www.womensmediacenter.com/ex/020108.html).  She concludes a lengthy and excellent commentary on various kinds of prejudice that infect US politics by saying “As for the ‘woman thing’?  Me, I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman—but because I am.”

I was grateful for Ms. Morgan's article, which I had not seen previously.  I have been active in progressive politics since childhood.  A major element of those politics is on achieving equal rights for women. It happens that I chaired the closing Plenary Session of the 1967 National Conference on New Politics in Chicago in which modern political feminism made one of its first major public appearances.   I made sure that the rules that had been set up to limit podium time for various speakers were suspended in that case.  However, I realized early on that it is not the sex of the political figure that counts, it the policies that they stand for. 

Let’s consider some examples.  Gender politics would tell us that we should have supported Margaret Thatcher for Prime Minister of Great Britain, because she was the first woman to hold that post.  She did nothing less than end most of the elements of social democracy in Great Britain (other than the National Health Service, and she tried hard to destroy that too).  So hey, what about Condolezza Rice?  Not only a woman, but an African-American woman to boot.  She surely would deserve our support, no?  And then we had the first woman appointee to the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Conner.  An obvious choice for backing, based upon her sex.  Well, on the election night in 2000, at a Republican (!) Party, this Supreme Court Justice was heard to say (and she must have said it pretty loudly too because the quote turned up in Time magazine) that it would be a bad thing if Al Gore became President.

I have supported women politically when I felt that they supported correct policy, when it comes to women’s rights as well as on the other major issues.  I have supported men for the same reason. 

I did not vote for Sen. Clinton in the New York State primary because:

A) She was and is wrong on the War and painted herself into a corner by refusing to admit that when the campaign started because her then Penn-driven polling told her that at the time is was politically the right thing to do. She will continue to be focus group and poll-driven.

B) She has Bush 41 problems with the "Vision thing."

C)  She does not seem too concerned with the central issue of restoring and preserving US Constitutional Democracy, either in her campaign or in her voting patterns.

And then on political process matters:

A) Because of who she is in terms of very high negatives, and who she is (still) married to (for better or for worse), she is very likely not electable.

B) Neither the Senator nor her husband knows how to deal effectively with their true enemies (and I know that personally having been on the inside of their disastrous non-campaign in support of the Clinton Health Plan in 1994) and they never will.  They are really good at attacking their political allies with whom they have minor differences on policy, or with whom they are contesting for office.

I was not a huge Obama fan at the time I received that particular message vis-à-vis Clinton, although I felt that he had potential. I voted for him because on most of the major policy issues he seems to take reasonable positions and right now, more importantly, he is the only one of the two who has a reasonable chance of winning and if the Democrats don't win this time there might not be a next time. There might not be a next time even if they do, but at least with Obama we would have a chance that there will be.  The more I have seen of him, I must say, the more enthusiastic I have become, and not because he is a great speaker (which he is), but because of what he speaks about and appears to stand for, in terms of policy. 

In terms of policy, then, let us return to Sen. Clinton and what for me is the number two issue in this election, the Georgite War on Iraq (the Georgite War on the Constitution being number one).  It is well known that Sen. Clinton has frequently said, about her vote on what became the War Authorization resolution, “If I had known then what I know now. . .”  

In an article entitled “Powell’s UN Fiasco: Fresh and Festering” published by Ray McGovern, one of the leading members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) on the International Clearinghouse on Feb. 6, 2008 (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19301.htm) he said in part:  

“When those of us in [the then] fledgling VIPS movement learned that [former Secretary of State Colin] Powell would address the UN on Feb. 5, 2003, we decided to do a same-day analytic assessment . . . [We wrote in part, to President Bush]: ‘Your Pentagon advisers draw a connection between war with Iraq and terrorism, but for the wrong reasons.  The connection takes on much more reality in a post-US invasion scenario [bold in original].  Indeed, it is our view that an invasion of Iraq would ensure overflowing recruitment centers for terrorists into the indefinite future.  Far from eliminating the threat it would enhance it exponentially. . . .’ [a]fter watching Secretary Powell today, we are convinced you would be well served if you widened the discussion beyond violations of Resolution 1441, and beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.’ ” 

At the end of his column, Mr. McGovern goes on to say: “Five years later, we take no pleasure at having been right; we take considerable pain at having been ignored.  The impending debacle was a no-brainer, and serious specialists like former UN inspector Scott Ritter, to his credit, were shouting it from the rooftops.  What follows is more than a mere footnote.  It is not widely known that our Feb. 5, 2003 memorandum analyzing Powell’s speech was shared with the junior senator from New York.  Thus, she still had plenty of time to raise her voice before the Bush administration launched the fateful attack on Iraq on March 19.” 

She didn’t know “then,” in terms of the original war authorization resolution (which to this day she, in her lawyerly fashion, claims wasn’t one, even though functionally it fully suited the purposes of the Georgites).  But she did know something very significant before the invasion.  Does that count, one might ask?  Is she dissembling, or would she use a lawyer’s reasoning to say “oh, but you didn’t ask me that question, about that piece of information”?  With either alternative, since she would be succeeding the Presidential champion dissembler, parser-of-the-language-to-enable-law-breaking-by-his-administration, how would she be differentiated from him (or from someone, sorry, cannot resist, also a lawyer, who at a critical time in the history of our country, held a definition of “sex” that differs from the one widely used)?  On the other hand, if she were President and that piece of paper were to come across her desk after she had already decided upon a given policy, and she were to do nothing with the information, would she really to be considered to be someone who is, as she says, “ready to be Commander-in-Chief on Day One?” even though at crunch time she might be a Commander-in-Chief no different from the one we’ve had for the last seven-plus years?  Dissembling?  Or not really ready.  Ah well.  Decisions, decisions. 

It is these types of considerations, not considerations of her sex, on which American voters of both sexes should base their decisions in the voting booth.

Addendum: 

As if to echo the sentiments above, the item below appeared on The Huffington Post Blog on February 20, 2008, after this column was completed: 

Jon Wiener: “Anti-Hillary Sentiment On The Rise Among Leading Feminists,”

(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jon-wiener/antihillary-sentiment-on_b_87610.html, February 20, 2008)

“More than 1,000 feminists have signed a statement criticizing Hillary Clinton and supporting Obama for president - evidence that Clinton's support among women activists continues to decline. The group, "Feminists for Peace", started out with 100 signers before the super-Tuesday primaries, and has 1,200 signers two weeks later. . . . 

“Those endorsing Obama include writer Barbara Ehrenreich; longtime peace activist Cora Weiss; Katha Pollitt, columnist for The Nation; Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times writer Margo Jefferson; women's rights historians Alice Kessler Harris and Linda Gordon; political scientist Frances Fox Piven and actor/activist Susan Sarandon.”

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This column is based in part on “Dr. J.'s Commentary: Money and Politics” that appeared on BuzzFlash on Mon, 02/11/2008 (http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/100), and “Dr. J.'s Commentary: Iowa, Policy, and the Democrats that appeared on BuzzFlash on Thu, 12/27/2007 (http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/091).

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