|
|
|
Ms. President?
 In
1984, when Walter Mondale chose Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, the
media went wild over this “historic” step forward for women.
Some milestone. What was all the excitement about? Women had already
been senators, cabinet members, and prime ministers for a long time.
 We’ve also been
coached to respond to other “historic” firsts, such as the first
female astronaut, the first female network news anchor, and so forth. I
understand that nowadays women are also writing novels and directing
movies. Golly gee.
More recently we’ve seen an equally silly frenzy about the
first female speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Nancy Pelosi
herself spoke as if this too were a great triumph against the odds. Excuse
me for yawning.
So
my emotions aren’t exactly at a high pitch at the prospect of Hillary
Clinton as our first woman president. I’m slightly alarmed at the
prospect of Bill Clinton’s becoming our first male first lady, but heck,
these things happen. I can take it if I have to.
Actually, I think I’d enjoy it. Would women vote for Hillary just because she’s a woman?
Whither the women’s vote, the gender gap, and all that? Such talk is
soooo twentieth century.
Sure, some women would vote for Hillary because of her sex
— a few little old feminists in tennis shoes who are still burning their
bras, I suppose. But others would vote against her because — oh, you
know how women are. They observe and react strongly to things men
aren’t even aware of. That’s why they make good novelists and
film directors.
Men
will tend to judge Hillary on her positions — or, to put it another way, by
their own ideologies. Women, I think, will judge her more by her character,
and women are more sensitive judges of character than men. For better or
worse, they will give more weight to her dealings with her husband, especially
during the Lewinsky scandal.
![[Breaker quote for Ms. President?: Judging Hillary]](2007breakers/070129.gif) Was
she really fooled? Or was she only
pretending to believe his claims of innocence? If so, was she justified in doing
so? These questions aren’t easy to answer. It’s quite possible,
even likely, that women will judge her more harshly than men will. I
wouldn’t bet very heavily on sisterhood to deliver Hillary the
women’s vote in 2008.
If
you take a more lenient view, you may think of Hillary as Ginger Rogers to
Bill’s Fred Astaire, doing everything he does backward, in high heels.
All that has changed is that she’s dancing solo now.
Some conservatives can’t shake the idea that Hillary is a
Marxist revolutionary hiding her true colors as she bides her time. But
we’ve already had our revolution, and it’s continuing under
Republican management. How much worse could she be?
She
showed a flash of charming humor the other day when she joked about having
learned to deal with “evil men.” A little more of that would go a
long way toward dispelling her image as cold, calculating, and ambitious. You
don’t expect Lady Macbeth to enjoy a good laugh at herself.
My
chief apprehension about any woman president is that she might feel she had
to prove she could be as tough as any man. Of course we have the same
problem with male presidents. The first President Bush was a decorated
veteran, but he had to face mockery about the alleged “wimp
factor” until he took us into a couple of wars.
Hillary may have learned her lesson after voting in favor of war
on Iraq. She’s still paying for that among Democrats who no longer
trust her. And she’s not yet tough enough to oppose the war outright.
Merely second-guessing the Bush administration is a poor substitute for
leadership.
But
she’s not really offering leadership; she doesn’t have to. She
has money, organization, and name recognition — and her name
isn’t Bush. That may be more than enough.
Joseph Sobran |
||
| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
|
||
|
||
|
Archive Table of Contents
Current Column Return to the SOBRAN’S home page. |
||
|
|
| FGF E-Package columns by Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and others are available in a special e-mail subscription provided by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. Click here for more information. |