Girls Just Want to Run For Office as Republicans and Exploit Feminism

   Friday's New York Times featured a front-page article detailing the political philosophies and campaigns of Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, both high-profile, politically inexperienced, ultra-conservative businesswomen candidates in California. Whitman is running for governor against Jerry Brown, while Fiorina is attempting to take Democrat Barbara Boxer's senate seat. The governor's race is at about 41%/41% at the moment, while Fiorina unfortunately seems very likely to win her race, leaving Diane Feinstein as the only liberal senator in California. There is no way I will vote for either candidate. Whitman's campaign has mostly consisted of her pouring money from her own billions as ex-CEO of eBay into advertisements bashing Jerry Brown (like the commercial with the clip of Bill Clinton bad-mouthing Brown? from 1992? the year they were running against each other for the Democratic primaries? the statement which Clinton explained as not what he meant -- which isn't probably true either, but whatever -- last week?). Although she does support abortion rights and is against Prop 23 (Prop 23 would undo AB 32, the environmental law), Whitman is a very traditional conservative, very corporation-minded and more focused on sounding like a good politician than on actually proving herself to be a good politician. She's had barely any experience, except for working on Mitt Romney's and McCain/Palin's campaigns in 2008, but lately Republicans have been valuing that fresh, new-politician smell, and decrying any experienced candidate as a "career politician" (oh, the illogic of campaign advertisements -- I think most people would like the idea of being led by people who have had some sort of knowledge and experience in office, and just two short years ago, conservatives were yelling about how Obama wasn't experienced enough. He'd been a senator, for chrissakes. Whitman's done basically nothing political and they're all just fawning over her. But I digress.) Fiorina is pro-Tea Party, pro-gun ownership, pro-Central Valley farmer (and thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner) and offshore drilling and Prop 23, as unabashedly conservative as Boxer is liberal, referring to San Francisco as "that other world" even though she lives in the Bay Area, and relies on her temp worker-to-HP executive (until she was effectively fired) story as a selling point.
    The main crux of the story was Whitman's emphasis of her event in Anaheim as a "women's town hall," her belief that free enterprise and fiscal discipline are subjects well-known to working women. She has a campaign group called Mega-Women and speaks in that oh-women-get-together-and-vote-for-me-because-I-don't-have-a-Y-chromosome-either sense. Fiorina, too, is trying to rally female voters. Whitman and Fiorina have good reason to rely on their gender to try to garner votes -- most Californian women are registered Democrat, though, of course, most Californian Democrats don't vote (neither do young Californians, but that's a different story). But I can't stand that women actually do this; they resort to old stereotypes and aphorisms to capitalize on their femininity or maternalism or non-maleness or whatever to try to get votes. And there are women who respond to this. I vaguely recall flipping through some idiotically bland ladies' magazine in line at the grocery store in '04 and reading a "Letter to the Editor" from some lady who probably proudly refers to herself as a "housewife" saying that she was definitely going to vote for George Bush because "of that old housecleaning mantra -- if you make a mess, you clean it up." This angered me; yeah, maybe that works to get some kids to clean up milk or whatever, but politically you do not vote incompetence back into office. An argument some suffragists used during the turn of the last century was that women would vote more compassionately, and not at all like men would; up through to today, there have still been women arguing that a female president would be good for America because she'd be more nurturing and responsible and, basically, act like a housewife. This further separates women from men, making it seem like the only way for a woman to be politically equal is if she, well, isn't; although some men do try to use military backgrounds as a sort of off-handed proof of their machismo and, therefore, electability, the majority of male candidates try to be elected because of presence and policy, whereas women politicians usually try to resemble Sarah Palin trying to rally "mama bears" to vote because of the children and whatnot. This bothered me in '08, when Hilary Clinton didn't make the primary and Palin attempted to gain her old supporters as a sort of, "well, since that girl didn't make it, why don't you vote for me?" faux-feminist type of thing. But I didn't want a woman to be in higher office; I wanted Hilary Clinton to be in higher office. And playing the gender card, like Whitman and Fiorina are currently doing, devalues women's right to vote and choose and support personal political beliefs.

All Tomorrow's Parties?

  Just by principle, I've always been simultaneously underwhelmed and annoyed by the Tea Party "movement." I have trouble considering a group of largely middle-aged white conservatives as a "movement," since historically consequential political movements are either young (the uprise of post-Kennedy liberalism in the sixties, as well as the Founding Fathers, who were for the most part on the young-ish side, and upstarts at that), minority-based (such as the Black Panther Party), or liberal (the Progressive movement in the early 1900s). This is not to say that the pendulum never swings to the conservative side, or that middle-aged white men tend to hold political power, but a movement which isn't young and doesn't have liberal vitality seems extremely laughable and likely to fail. But the Tea Party has been gaining quite a bit of media attention, first as a sort of sideshow of old guys in Patriot hats, but in the past two weeks, the Tea Partiers have been talked about everywhere from PBS' Newshour to the Today show, culminating in the most recent issue of TIME which features an oversized teacup on its cover. The group is still relatively small, still rallying with misspelled posters advertising fabricated anti-Obama conspiracies, still demanding a return to how America used to be (which is highly ironic, because if the majority of the party had been alive during, say, the Revolution, they'd probably all be dead. Lower life expectancy. And if they were actually living I highly doubt they would have enjoyed the progressivism of employing a new form of government. But I digress). The issue is that the Tea Party is actually winning, beating out establisment Republican candidates in Senate races in Nevada, Colorado, Utah, Alaska, Kentucky, Florida, and Delaware. Delaware is the latest story, featuring former anti-masturbation pundit Christine O'Donnell as the newest Republican Senate nominee who looks like a poor man's Sarah Palin and speaks in a bastardized version of apocryphal Jeffersonian with taglines like "When the government fears the people, there is liberty." There is also, of course, the off-chance that perhaps a government which was originally set in place to protect the liberty of its citizens and has managed to provide levels of freedom superior to the majority of the world's nations is actually a pretty damn good source of liberty, but the Tea Party doesn't really deal with such novelties as "reason" or "rationality."

   The "cause," as O'Donnell and others refer to it, desires a small central government, financial markets with little-to-no restrictions, low regulation, and few federal entitlements (TIME). The extreme conservatism doesn't bode well for traditional Republic candidates, but also haunts Democrats; Republicans have been voting more in this year's off-season primaries anyhow. Tea Party candidates, such as O'Donnell and Alaska's Joe Miller have been elected after elections with very few voters, and these candidates sell themselves based on their supposed connection to the "people;" they have very little political experience, which they somehow have twisted into a selling point. It's all part of their anti-elite campaign, regardless of the fact that they don't represent minority groups or the working poor or pro-union workers or the young or the politically literate or the non-radical conservatives. Their definition of the "people" is vague and largely incomplete. Personally, I don't feel threatened by or afraid of this Te Party; I think it's silly, and since I'm not a member of the GOP I'm not worried about my party being toppled. But on the other hand, I would feel a lot better having a more moderate GOP, and not have to live under the discretion of politicians elected by the idiot masses because they are, as Rush Limbaugh or  Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity, the ones farthest to the right. The demagogues are pushing for their supporters to vote as extremely conservative as possible, according to the TIME article, and even though I have enough faith in people to trust that most won't listen to the crazies, victories by people like O'Donnell make me question the sanity of conservative voters. These are the same people who call Obama a socialist, and here they are, vouching for the extreme right and not expecting to be called fascists -- obviously, I know this isn't fascism, but I mean it is a pretty hypocritical situation. But whatever, I keep digressing. Back to politics, I just don't agree with the Tea Party's support of devolution of health care and the EPA and the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. The Tea Party will likely die out by 2012, and if not that, then definitely 2016, but as for now they're an annoyance with increasing clout. Or maybe not. Maybe all this media focus just makes it seem that way.

   

Feelings, Followed by Less Personal Writing

    Today, I realize, is September 11th. I feel like I should post something relevant to this being the ninth anniversary of the attacks, but I can't figure out exactly what would even be relevant. I remember what it was like when everything happened; I was young, I didn't understand what was occurring, but I knew that something had happened. The grief was so palpable, followed by what I sensed was some kind of national bonding, a lot of compassion, a lot of outpouring of respect even from the most cynical. I'm not incredibly patriotic, in the sense that I'm not some blind, flag-wielding nationalist, but I don't think the way people felt was mere patriotism -- it was more about compassionate responses to human loss, and a reassessment of what freedom means. And I don't mean that in like a country-music-station, taking-a-gun-into-a-bar-in-Tennessee-just-because-I-can kind of way. I like having the freedom to criticize people in charge and policies I don't like and general hypocrisy in the media, to have whatever opinion I want about the nation's predominant religion(s), to (theoretically) be eligible for whatever school or job I want. Yes, it's self-interest in the most Madisonian terms, but it's also humanistic (and it's basically my version of what Jon Stewart said on The Daily Show on September 20, 2001 -- except everything he said was heartfelt and brilliant and beautiful). So that's what I've been thinking about in regards to the day's date, just what things were like nine years ago.
   Because I don't really know what matters now. Less than two years later, the U.S. invaded Iraq on the terms of finding WMDs (there weren't any) and al-Quida (who weren't secretly harbored there) and eventually turning into a dictator-overthrowing, "democracy-spreading" mission in futility ignoring the importance of the Shi'ite/Sunni dynamic in an attempt to Westernize the Middle East and occurring around the same time as Iran's controversial presidential election, continued strife between Israel and Pakistan, increasing worldwide oil dependency and a furthering of oil as a main cause of American warfare, continued terroristic activities in Europe, an American economic recession, etc. It hasn't been the best decade, apparently. Combat activities officially ended two weeks ago, but troops are still abroad, and will continue to be until next year (and about 50,000 will remain non-combatant). Islam-related news has been very prevalent the past few weeks, straight off the heels of the cultural center "debate" (I assume it's not really a debate if there's no actual, legal reason not to build the center), with that idiotic preacher in Florida trying to get his 15 minutes of fame. I'd really rather not even mention that story, since the over-mustached, under-educated little wannabe-demagogue (the church he founded -- and had to leave due to something along the lines of money laundering, I believe -- in Germany has decried him, as has General Petraeus, the Pope, et al) wouldn't be having any impact at all on the world if the media hadn't covered his story. Even that statement conflicts me -- the media should cover stories about book-burning and other violations, but at the price of giving a nutcase a microphone? Mayor Bloomberg called him an idiot, but cited freedom of speech -- I feel like destructing a Quran isn't an exercise in freedom, but an exercise in Klan-style passive-aggresive hate crimes. I saw this story covered on PBS Newshour, which showed video clips of flag and effigy-burnings (effigies of the preacher) in the Middle East; news of the man is well-known, giving the impression that all Americans are the same way as him, just as violent and stupid. And this information, just as Petraeus feared it would be, has been spread mostly by extremist groups. My realization after watching the segment was that this is not a battle between different peoples or different values, but a battle between uneducated extremist Christians and uneducated extremist Muslims. Both deny evolution, both want to convert everyone to their system of beliefs, both refuse to learn anything not strictly following a fundamentalist interpretation of dogma. I am fairly skeptical of any religion, and a good deal of my skepticism comes from the fact that stupid, hateful people like this exist in every expansionist religion.
  I just read an Associated Press article from yesterday describing Obama talking about the continued pursuit of Al-Quida leaders. The article included a quote from former 9/11 co-chair Lee Hamilton, stating that "the American relationship with the Islamic world is one of the really great foreign policy challenges of the next decades...[w]e're not going to solve it in a year or two or five or even 10 years." Obviously, the timespan it takes for two cultures to understand each other is a very, very long one, and most Americans don't have the patience, and most humans don't have the foresight. News stations are going crazy over the story about the woman sentenced to death by stoning in Iran for adultery, while one of the men involved only has a three-year prison sentence and in the midst of two other women sentenced to a similar fate. This is primitive, this is unjust, sexist, wrong -- but many Americans are using this story as a way to justify their own discomfort with Islam. You can't just tell a country that it's cultural law is wrong; it is wrong, but it's just not possible to change centuries-old law. At the same time, if Iran wants to be respected as a viable modern nation, this kind of human rights violation needs to end.
  I've gone far enough off-topic for now....

Oh, Democracy...

  I'm well aware that the United States is a representative democracy, not the pure democracy of Athens or whatever, that it's really a republic and all of that. But I came across the website for a progressive magazine called Democracy: A Journal of Ideas while trying to find some sort of substantial information about, really, anything. I found an article by Joe Klein, the venerable TIME columnist, entitled "DMV Liberalism," about pendulum changes between conservatism and liberalism. It looked at first to be an article about abstract theories and ideas, but it wasn't; Klein usually writes with substance and facts, which is why I don't mind reading what he writes. In this article, he calls for liberalism to produce a tide change similar to the Reagan-era conservatism beginning in the early 1980s, recognizing the difficulty to change the mind of nation so assured that government interference in their lives is bad, not paying higher taxes is good, and anything worth saying or doing can be done so succinctly and with immediate effect. Klein cites such acts as tax cuts and the uncomfortably quick move to invade Baghdad; actions like these are brash and noticeable and easy to digest for the general public as, well, actions -- but they're short-sighted and ill-fated. Liberalism's curse, Klein argues, is that creating a universal health care system or reacting effectively to  environmental issues or acting with diplomacy (as apposed jingoism or militant paternalism) abroad are all actions which will take much time, much work, and much patience on behalf of the public. Our culture, at least in the post-modern world, does not appreciate complicated processes or long-term planning, which makes conservative sound bites, vague mottos, and brash actions so appealing.
   In regards to the idea that perhaps the American public is not capable of understanding broad, complicated issues, that it's unreasonable to ask the masses to try to learn about issues instead of just listening to bastardizations of the definitions of "freedom" and "constitutionality" from self-serving fringe groups, I'm citing another Klein piece, this time his most recent column in TIME. In his article "How Can a Democracy Solve Tough Problems?," Klein discusses the act of kleroterion, an Athenian system used to pick a random group of citizens (free white men) to make an educated decision on an issue. James Fishkin, a professor at Stanford, has attempted to use this system in communities in several different countries; the results are actually very good. The groups are selected scientifically to represent the local population, and then all are educated on the issue by experts with opposing viewpoints. The citizens can ask questions to understand the issue, but are then forced to make their own decisions based on what they have learned. Apparently this led to Texas' surge in wind power and some public works decisions in a small community in coastal China. Fishkin reports that, in general, people aren't as into extremes as it seems; when given a chance to make an individual decision that will actually be heard, they tend to care more about what they are voting about. I'm not sure that I agree with this; they are plenty of stupid people who honestly don't care about being educated on anything once they've set themselves on an opinion of identified so completely with a larger group, so I doubt this kleroterion system could work in every community or on any platform larger than strictly local. But it is interesting, and far more substantial and forward-moving than Obama's blue-ribbon commission developed to study the federal deficit (as opposed to actually revising or expanding the frustratingly vague Keynesian economic policy), which is what the rest of the article is about. So I'm not sure what I think of the public as decision-makers, since I basically called us all a herd of impatient sheep in the first paragraph.