The XX Factor: What women really think.

Hillary vs. Tina: The Brawl Continues

When Men Suffer Job Losses, Women Suffer Abuse

A post from Double X writer Vanessa Gezari:

Emily, I think Reihan Salam is onto something in his recent piece on the end of male power, in which he notes that the recession’s disproportionate impact on men resonates in the world of politics, where women are gaining ground (at least in places like Iceland) in a backlash against male financial mismanagement. Salam is right that the recession provides one more lens through which to observe global power’s shift from men to women; he’s also right that the backlash against men can spark a sometimes-violent secondary backlash against women in places where they gain economic and political power ... (Read more in Double X.)

The Havoc Wreaking He-cession

In Foreign Policy, Reihan Salam is predicting that male dominance will be a casualty of the economic downturn (or the he-cession, as he calls it, since more men than women are being laid off). He writes:

The great shift of power from males to females is likely to be dramatically accelerated by the economic crisis, as more people realize that the aggressive, risk-seeking behavior that has enabled men to entrench their power—the cult of macho—has now proven destructive and unsustainable in a globalized world.

What will follow is not a femitopia, but rather ... (Read more in Double X.)

Hillary for Senate

Ann, don't you love how we've all turned into headhunters for Hillary, eager to pitch in and help her locate just the right job? State wouldn't be the best possible platform for her diplomatic and managerial skill set. But Hillary as war czar isn't quite the ticket, either. (Because nearly everything reminds me of a scene from a musical, what I'm thinking is "May God bless and keep the czar ... far away from us.'' In the Senate, for example.) Obama has created a problem for himself by dangling a major cabinet post as an option; if he doesn't offer it to her now, her partisans won't be happy. But it would be even worse to begin his bright new day in Washington with a confirmation hearing starring all the ghosts of Clinton scandals past. And Defense doesn't work as a Hillary landing pad any better than State does; her initial and lingering poor judgment on Iraq wasn't a plus in any way. Where did rewarding those who were wrong about the war ever get us? Truly, I never followed the '04 reasoning of those who argued that since Bush made the mess, he should be the guy on cleanup. During the run-up to the war, I remember talking to a top Clinton foreign policy person who patiently explained to me that, in fact, the Clinton and Bush administration's views vis-à-vis Saddam and invading and coalition-building were just not that different: "Together if we can, alone if we must.'' Which is why Clinton at DoD would not be different enough for me.

OMG: Katie Couric Interviews Sarah Palin

Here's the interview on the economy, and here's the interview on foreign policy. Total viewing time is about eight minutes.

I am speechless. She cannot possibly be this uninformed. You absolutely have to see these for yourself to believe them. These are self-mocking; they could be SNL appearances. Tina Fey couldn't possibly improve on this.

This is why they've been keeping her under wraps.

Voters Need To Get Real

As Melinda laments, people don't seem to care so much about experienced or informed in their candidates. Many who would consider refueling in Ireland a visit to Europe also believe Gov. Palin has sufficient international policy knowledge to be half the presidential ticket. That the untraveled VP nominee might soon need to rebuke both Putin and Saakashvili or stare down whomever inherits Kim Jong Il's nuclear stock pile evidentially has no more significance to many voters than if those responsibilities were challenges on Celebrity Apprentice. As long as the winner is smarter than a 5th-grader, Americans seem willing to be satisfied with the result. The American Idolization of democracy has apparently taken hold. But perhaps the distortions and tricky framing of the GOP campaign that lately resemble creative editing of reality TV writing are even more Machiavellian than they seem. I wonder if Karl Rove is secretly advising McCain to go "too far" in order to force Obama to go negative. (See, he can be as callow and politically manipulative as everyone else!) If so, personally, I'd like to see a daisy ad scare the voters back into reality.

Thoughts From a Hillary Supporter Who Might Go for McCain

Just received this e-mail from a friend, a Washington lawyer who is a lifelong Democrat and a generous donor to the party. She supported Hillary in the primary and is undecided about what she'll do in November:

I just read your XX column, and I wanted to share a couple thoughts. Even though Hillary characterized her campaign as a big feminist movement in her exit speech, I'm not sure all her supporters saw it that way. I also think the risk of defection to McCain is very real, and not limited to uneducated, working class types. Just in my office, I know 6-7 women, all lifelong Democrats from VA who are now planning to vote for McCain. They are all highly educated people who follow politics closely, and a couple even worked for Dems on the Hill at one point or another. The decision to defect to McCain has nothing to do with Hillary as a woman or Obama's personality. They like Obama enough as a person, but they think he's an empty suit—rhetoric with little record behind it. Even if they agree more with Obama's positions, it seems risky to put such an inexperienced person in the White House—especially after what happened last time. I think the media misses this. It is not all about feminism. 

Having said that, I know there is a bit of truth to the feminist argument. I also know a strong, pro-choice Democrat from Maryland—someone who regularly hosts NARAL dinners—who is defecting to McCain, even though she understands his views on abortion. I doubt if this woman ever even voted for any Republican before in her whole life, and she just contributed to McCain's campaign. Truly amazing! I think Obama will have a real problem in the Electoral College if he does not find a way to reach out to the people who voted against him—for whatever reason. For now, I'm undecided and I'm planning on staying that way for a while. My big issue is the economy and both Obama and McCain are weak in that area, so it probably doesn't matter much.

I answered her that the experience issue doesn't resonate with me, especially as Cheney and Rummy had been around since the last ice age, and where did that get us? Hillary has been in the Senate only four years longer than Obama: big whoop. If you count his time in the Illinois Senate, he's actually had more experience as an elected official. (And while of course her experience as first lady counts for something, would we give Laura Bush full credit for those years—even though, as she belatedly tells us, she, too, had a big policy role all along?) The whole experience question just feels like a stand-in for race, or maybe something else I'm missing. Because when someone says they would slit their wrist before voting for Obama, that is NOT about Clinton having been in the Senate longer.

And here's my friend's response, which shows that hurt feelings cut both ways during the primary season, and opened some wounds that Obama must now work hard to help heal:

I think her years as first lady count for something, but regardless, she has a much better command of the issues. He was a back-bencher in the state senate, not committee chair, etc. ... He improved during the debates, but even at the end he was flubbing basic tax, economic, and foreign policy issues. Maybe I've been dealing with those issues for too long, but honestly, he is constantly struggling for answers and contradicting himself. I think it would help if he gave voters a sense of who he would appoint to his Cabinet. If he is just going to be an inspirational figurehead, I'd like to know who's going to be advising him. ... Bottom line—the divisions here are very, very deep for all sorts of reasons, and Obama has got to find a way to reach out. Many people are hurt by all the name calling in the campaign. [My son] was repeatedly called a racist at school for supporting Hillary, and I know they have had to address similar issues in [a private school in Washington]. I've heard that some African-American women who supported Hillary were subjected to threats and taunting. Of course, it's not Obama making those comments, and people need to realize that there is a downside to all that young voter passion, but it does not make you want to switch to the other team. Five years ago, I would have voted for McCain in a heartbeat because I've always liked him. He's definitely sold out to the right in those five years, though, and that's what gives me pause.'

That she's even thinking McCain should give her party pause, too.

Clinton and McCain Are the "Safe'' Candidates?

Maybe John is right that the assassination of Benazir Bhutto is apt to win supporters for the "safe'' presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. In much the same way that voters decided it was "safer'' to reward George W. Bush's bumbling in Iraq with ... another four years in which to work more of the same magic. "You don't switch horses in midstream'' was the operative cliché in '04. That's the argument for the "safe'' candidates in '08, as well: To lead in a complicated and dangerous world, experience is required. Unless, of course, voters can be persuaded that experience of the sort that got us where we are today is the problem rather than the solution. In which case, neither Clinton nor McCain looks remotely safe -- or different enough. 

Benazir Bhutto

Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated today at a rally near Islamabad. A suicide bomber reportedly shot her at close range then detonated an explosive, killing Bhutto and 20 others. Bhutto was a complicated woman—underneath the traditional veils she was a graduate of Oxford and Harvard, who spoke flawless English. But then under all that she was also a political creature who had mastered the sort of shape-shifting needed to cast herself as a historic figure in the mold of Indira Ghandi or Joan of Arc. This sharp sketch of Bhutto in the New York Times last month suggested that under all the compelling Western-sounding rhetoric, Bhutto was really no different than centuries of predecessors—doling out political favors and reportedly treating the government coffers as the family cookie jar.

What kind of woman survives multiple assassination attempts and persists in attending huge political rallies in an open vehicle? Perhaps if your father and brothers are killed all around you, that starts to feel quite normal. 

In a diary she wrote for Slate just over 10 years ago, Bhutto offers a few clues. Balancing her duties as opposition leader in the National Assembly of Pakistan against her responsibilities to her children, she sounds like any working mother: “I do not like my children watching cartoons,” she writes “But I am feeling guilty. I have to catch a flight to Islamabad where the Parliament is based. So I cave in.” But what really pervades this weeklong account is a feeling of walls closing in on her. When she hears of threats to burn down her home in Islamabad, she acts to relocate her children to schools in Dubai. From her veil that keeps slipping off to the inability of an unaccompanied woman to “hail a taxi or drive a car,” in Pakistan anymore, Bhutto seems forever pressed to be smaller than she wants to be. References abound to retorts she doesn’t offer and comebacks left unsaid, “I get angry. Stop it, I say. That's what they want. You are not going to play their game.”

Interspersed between the almost mundane recitations of who in her government has been kidnapped, arrested, or released each day are Bhutto’s frequent references to the small indulgences—the pizza binges and chocolate cakes and the books—Western trappings in which she indulges almost helplessly.

After finishing Caesar's Women by Colleen McCullough, Bhutto reflects “Here we are heading towards the third millennium, and the conduct of men and women still mirrors the style of Caesar's age.”
“Does time go forward or backward or just stand still?” she continues. “Do we fight the same demons in each era and in each century only with different methods and in different styles? Are we condemned to a cycle of patterns that keeps turning and ending up where it started?” For Bhutto, at least, the choice was to repeat the patterns set by her family—fighting her way to center stage, and dying larger than life.

In her diary there is an exchange with her then-7-year-old daughter, Bakhtwar, that reveals a Bhutto who may have nevertheless believed she could defy that pattern. As her mother leaves for the airport Bakhtwar looks up at her mother and waves casually, "Bye, it was nice seeing you. Come back soon," she breezes.
"What do you mean," replies Bhutto. "I am your mother. I am stuck to you like that arm of yours for life."
"But, Mama, my arm keeps going away," she complains.
"But it always comes back," says Bhutto.

Shamed by "Sand and Sorrow"

Our son insisted that we watch Sand and Sorrow on HBO last night, and I am filled with shame after seeing it: Not only has our government done little to stop the ongoing genocide in Darfur, but have I so much as dropped a note to my elected representatives? No. There are schoolgirls in Batavia, Ill., who have done more to raise awareness about the some 400,000 innocents who have died in the province since 2003, when the Sudanese government began sending the janjaweed in to crush a rebel movement by slaughtering the region's non-Arab civilian population. President Bush correctly labeled the situation but was slow to do anything more, and the film suggests that that's partly because the CIA thinks it is getting such good al-Qaeda intell out of the government in Khartoum. (Quality stuff like this? Or on the contrary this? Or in any case this?)

One of the African Union observers sent in to watch and take notes is living the experience of the Nick Nolte character in Hotel Rwanda. He returns to his barracks at day's end and doesn't always feel like eating, because the kids he's seen all day are going hungry. In his tent at night, he's freezing under two blankets but can't sleep for thinking of the families not far away who don't even have one to share. On a daily basis, people who live in Darfur must decide whether it is better to send women and girls out to look for firewood—knowing they might be gang-raped—or men, who would be killed. But the real question for the rest of us, as Harvard's Samantha Power says in the documentary, is which country is going to send in real troops with a real mandate to do more? Any hands there in the back? Not so far, and this slow-motion horror show has been playing out for four years already.

Until we step up, even humanitarian aid is hard to get where it needs to go. In an op-ed this morning in the Wall Street Journal, Mia Farrow quotes Oxfam's director in Sudan, Alun MacDonald: "Our staff are being targeted on a daily basis. They are being shot, robbed, beaten and abducted." The security situation, he insisted, "is the worst since the entire conflict began." Seven aid workers were killed in October, according to Macdonald. "These aren't conditions we can keep working in." What would it take to change those conditions? The political will, of course. The movie includes footage of Barack Obama taking the lead on this issue in Congress, along with now-former presidential aspirant Sam Brownback.

We Need To Talk

Melinda and Rachael, your recent posts about knee-jerk political assumptions and the trend toward only listening to people we agree with really resonated for me. In years past, I had no trouble finding my political tribe. As a lefty lesbian, I might occasionally roll my eyes at the bourgeois liberalism of the mainstream American left, but I knew the difference between us and them.

And then, to oversimplify matters, came 9/11. Suddenly, I was out of step with a lot of my friends on national-security and foreign-policy issues, and conversation became more difficult. Should I tell my pals they sounded naive and disturbingly isolationist? Could they disagree with me without denouncing me as a deluded cog in the Bush-Cheney war machine? (The answer to both questions is sometimes.)

It's tempting to stay silent, but while I occasionally rely on a rueful smile to convey, "I think you're totally wrong, but now's not the time for that conversation," I've mostly learned to express my dissent. For one thing, it's more honest: To paraphrase a line from this week's Exes and Ohs, "You start be saying nothing ... and soon you have nothing to say." (I get all my political philosophy from bad TV shows.) But it's also damaging to pretend we all agree when we don't. One of the reasons I've found the anti-gay-marriage referendums of the last few years so hurtful is that, judging from the wide margins most of them have passed with, lots of Democratic voters supported them. My assumptions about what Democrats believe betrayed me.

We need to talk. The Democratic Party needs pro-life progressives. And the GOP needs social liberals (pro-life or not) like you, Rachael.