The New York Times has an article in today's edition about the issue of gender within the context of the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, dealing in particular with the phenomenon of angry old white women who have somehow reached the conclusion that gender discrimination played a major, if not decisive, role in Hillary Clinton's (still technically pending) defeat. Some of these women have threatened not to vote for Obama in the fall if he gets the nomination. One of them, Cynthia Ruccia, has even formed an anti-Obama group called Clinton Supporters Count Too, consisting of women in swing states who intend to campaign against Obama in November. Listening to Rucca, one gets a sense of how woefully out of touch with reality many of these women are:
“We, the most loyal constituency, are being told to sit down, shut up and get to the back of the bus,” she said.
Whoa. First of all, there's not a white woman alive who knows anything about the "back of the bus," so let's not even go there. Yes, women have suffered discrimination throughout history, but what women have had to go through in this country, while certainly unfair, hardly approaches the scale of what African-Americans have had to endure throughout most of the 400+ years they've been on this continent. And no, Cynthia, women are not in fact the most loyal Democratic constituency. For illustration, one need look no further than the exit polls from the last presidential election: during that race, women supported the Democratic challenger over the Republican by a mere 3 points (51%-48%), while African-Americans who voted for the Democrat outnumbered those who didn't by an overwhelming 8-to-1 margin; this ratio of black support for Democrats is typical of the loyalty African-Americans have shown to a party that has historically relegated them to the margins. For Rucchia to pepper her angry rhetoric with loaded references to historical experiences that she knows little about is insulting to African-Americans, and far too typical of the way that Hillary Clinton and her supporters have dealt with the issue of race in this campaign.
Another angry old white woman who threatens to vote against Obama, and one who seems certain to get a lot more attention than Rucchia, is none other than Geraldine Ferraro:
Ms. Ferraro, who clashed with the Obama campaign about whether she made a racially offensive remark, said she might not [vote for him] either. “I think Obama was terribly sexist,” she said.
Bear in mind, this is a former Democratic vice-presidential nominee we're talking about here, and the first woman nominated to appear on the ticket of either party. As a politician and a woman, she should know and appreciate what four more years of Republican rule will do to a woman's right to choose. And yet despite that, she insists that she might vote against the party's nominee. Taken in the context of her earlier remarks about Barack Obama having it easier as a presidential candidate because he is black, one is left wondering how much of her hostility towards Obama, and by extension the hostility of her fellow angry old white women toward him, is due to perceived sexism on his part, as opposed to actual racism on their part.
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(via The Page)
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