The XX Factor: What women really think.

"I Find Her Kind of Endearing"

You're right, Jessica, that Kirsten Gillibrand—while proudly conservative—isn't totally orthodox. A smart progressive friend writes me with another example:

Despite the fact as a hard lefty I shouldn't, I kind of find her endearing. ... She voted for the Employee Free Choice Act and was a co-sponsor. Phew!

He adds:

I think that Paterson did not have a killer option and this is not a particularly bad pick. If Jerry Nadler was transformed into a 45-year-old woman from Buffalo with a "z" at the end of her name, great, but you go to war with the army you have.

I only beg the Slate art department not to get on the task of producing an image of Jerry Nadler transformed into a 45-year-old woman from Buffalo.

Clinton's Senate Replacement: Boobs Like Hillary, Views Like John Breaux

OK, so, at first blush, Kirsten Gillibrand—the replacement for Hillary in the Senate, announced today—looks like the ideal solution to all of New York Gov. David Paterson's problems. Like Caroline Kennedy, she's a woman. Like the big names in the replacement race, she's a talented buck-raker (as of this summer, she was crowned the "top fundraiser" among the 42 Democrats in the House class of '06). But unlike Kennedy or Cuomo, she isn't saddled with all that dynastic baggage. Perfect!

But she's also got politics. (Amid all the oohing and aahing over a lady politician's ascent, we sometimes forget that these political girl wonders have views along with their unusual anatomy.) And her politics are quite different from those of the other contenders. She's definitely the most conservative pick out of the possible replacements the Albany Times-Union handicapped. How conservative? Well, this fall she called her voting record "one of the most conservative in the state," and while I was skeptical when I first read that—including Republicans?—it's not too much of an exaggeration, especially now that the antediluvian Vito Fossella has been booted from office. 

Among the mavericky votes Gillibrand has racked up: a vote in favor of giving immunity to the telecom companies that helped Bush spy on U.S. citizens; votes against both Pelosi-supported TARP bailout bills; a vote for the May 2007 war funding bill, which lacked a troop-withdrawal deadline, the liberal mania of the moment (no other New York Democrat voted in favor); and a vote for this fall's proposal to roll back the District of Columbia's prohibition on semiautomatic guns. (In general, the National Rifle Association is a huge Gillibrand fan, making the extremely rare move of endorsing her over her Republican opponent this year.)

I have no way of knowing whether Gillibrand is conservative at heart or whether she's simply fastidiously cautious about reflecting her district, which—until November—was the most Republican slice of New York represented by a Democrat. But her elevation represents another triumph for the Blue Dog-style, Rahm Emanuel-style philosophy of expanding Democratic power: make economic crusaders (TARP vote: check) with strong veins of conservatism running through their politics (gun love: check) the new faces of the Democratic Party. (The photo at the top shows Gillibrand next to Pennsylvania's Chris Carney, a top poster boy for the fashionable red-tinged brand of Democrat.)

Well. We'll see what Gillibrand sounds like when Chuck Schumer is done with her.

If This Is Dynasty, I'm Joan Collins

Poor Caroline Kennedy: After eight years that made Bush I look way less embarrassing than he used to, we've had enough of political dynasties, thanks. It's unfair, though, to blame her for representing the old way and old guard when the true knock against her is that she hasn't been old school enough, and failed to fork over the kind of campaign cash to state and local Democrats that anyone plotting a political future knows is part of the cost of doing business.

In the end, New York Gov. David Paterson will fill Hillary Clinton's Senate seat with just one consideration in mind: He'll choose the person who he thinks will best secure his own political future. But if that's not Caroline Kennedy, then all the hand-wringing about her unfair familial advantage will have been wildly off-the-mark. The open criticism of her by any number of New York Democrats has already made clear that party people aren't exactly quaking in fear of offending her family; the oligarchy ain't what it used to be. And that this is the reaction at a time when Ted Kennedy is fighting brain cancer makes me think that maybe the "dynasty" has died out already, without an heir.

The Dissociative Mood

What I liked about the Times article about the Patersons' affairs was this censorious observation by reporter Danny Hakim: "The admission is likely to be a distraction for the new governor at a difficult time." It's a classic instance of what I call the dissociative mood, a grammatical tone that is struck when something that should have been stated in the first person with an active verb ("I or we did something") is uttered in the third person with a passive verb ("something was done to someone, mistakes were made, the whole thing is a mystery to us"). This inflection, characterized by bat-your-eyelashes disingenuousness, is found largely in government statements, for obvious reasons, and in the media, especially when we in the media report the effects of our own reporting but leave ourselves out of the account.

So: Why is admitting to consensual extramarital affairs that have long since ended likely to distract from Paterson's gubernatorial agenda? Why, because we, the media-or perhaps I, Danny Hakim-mean to make it an issue! Who else gives a damn?

Speaking of which, did any of you who read Rick Hertzberg's comment in The New Yorker go and look up the Martha Nussbaum article he quotes, the one written from Belgium, in which she declares that Spitzer was hounded out of office by "quintessentially American" Puritanism and mean-spiritedness? If so, I'd love to hear what you think, especially about the part where she compared being a prostitute with being an opera singer (apparently, not so long ago, they weren't perceived as being very different). Being fairly Euro-trashy myself, I kinda agreed with her and her podium-bashing conclusion:

What should really trouble us about sex work? That it is sex that these women do, with many customers, should not in and of itself trouble us, from the point of view of legality, even if we personally don't share the woman's values. ... What should trouble us are things like this: The working conditions for most women in sex work are extremely unhealthy. They are exploited by pimps, and they enjoy little control over which clients they will accept. Police harass them and extort sexual favors from them. Some of these bad features (unhealthiness, little control) sex work shares with other job options for low-income women, such as factory work of many kinds. Other bad features (police extortion) are the natural result of illegality itself.

In general we should be worried about poverty and lack of education. We should be worried that women have too few decent employment options and too little health and safety regulation in those that they do have. And we should be worried if men force women to do things sexually that they do not want to do. All these things are worth worrying about, and it is these things that sensible nations do worry about. But the idea that we ought to penalize women with few choices by removing one of the ones they do have is grotesque, the unmistakable fruit of the all-too-American thought that women who choose to have sex with many men are tainted vile things who must be punished.

Eliot Spitzer's offense was an offense against his family. It was not an offense against the public. If he broke any laws, these are laws that never should have existed and that have been repudiated by sensible nations. The hue and cry that has ruined one of the nation's most committed political careers shows our country to itself in a very ugly light.