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.
No comments:
Post a Comment