Why We Need a (Liberal Democratic) Woman President

At the end of Bernie's portion of the Iowa Black and Brown Forum they asked him whether we've made more progress against racism or sexism. Without missing a beat, Bernie said sexism.

In a Black and Brown Forum maybe that was the safe answer-I don't know for sure about that. But no one including all the young women seemed to have a problem with it.

The problem is, it''s profoundly wrong.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz made the recent comment that young women are complacent. Ms. Wasserman-Schultz has been criticized for being partial to Hillary. But she is right about this.

"I spent a lot of 2008 arguing with women like Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who couldn’t fathom why younger women weren’t more excited about Hillary Clinton. In a just-published New York Times Magazine interview, Wasserman Schultz was asked whether she sees a generational divide in Clinton support. “Here’s what I see: a complacency among the generation of young women whose entire lives have been lived after Roe v. Wade was decided,” she replied.

"We heard this sort of thing constantly eight years ago, when young women abandoned Clinton for Barack Obama. “What worries me is that some women, perhaps especially younger ones, hope to deny or escape the sexual caste system; thus Iowa women over 50 and 60, who disproportionately supported Senator Clinton, proved once again that women are the one group that grows more radical with age,” Gloria Steinem wrote.

"Nevertheless, now that I’m 40, I understand the exasperation of older Clinton supporters in a way I simply could not at 32. That’s because—in my own, admittedly very privileged experience—it’s only as I approach middle age that I’m aware of what being a woman has cost me. In my twenties and early thirties, I felt that I enjoyed the same professional attention and opportunities as my male colleagues. I didn’t realize at the time that being treated as an ingénue and being treated as an up-and-comer are not the same thing, and that only one comes with a continuing skyward trajectory. I couldn’t have seen then how so many of the men in my peer group would soar beyond the women, how having children would change my professional prospects, how aging would mean being treated with less respect instead of more. I didn’t know what it was to feel my status falling while that of the men around me rises. As it does, the unending contempt that Clinton receives for her clothes and her hairstyle, for growing older and stouter, have become personal to me in a way they weren’t eight years ago."

"I don’t regret supporting Barack Obama then, and I don’t blame the women—of all ages—who support Bernie Sanders today. (If I thought Sanders was electable, I’d be backing him myself.) But when I read the many, many stories about the generational divide over Clinton, in which young women blithely downplay the significance of breaking men’s nearly two-and-a-half-century lock on the presidency, I can’t help but feel that they are, in fact, a little complacent. A Times piece reported on the thoughts of one 19-year-old woman: “A woman will be elected president ‘pretty soon’ anyway, she said, regardless of what happens in 2016. Why does that woman have to be Mrs. Clinton?” I know how she feels, but that only makes me angry and a little sad about how naïve I once was about sexism’s continuing salience. So yeah, fire Debbie Wasserman Schultz. But understand, too, why Clinton matters so much to women like her."

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/01/06/the_head_of_the_dnc_says_young_women_are_complacent_she_s_not_totally_wrong.html

This is one reason I don't buy for a minute that we've made more progress on gender than on race-besides the obvious point that race trumped gender in 2008.

In 2008 once Obama won Iowa, most African-Americans reasoned that if a state as white as Iowa voted for Obama they coudn't miss the opportunity for a black President. You didn't hear blacks saying 'Gee, you know we'll have a black President some time, why must it be Obama.'

It was just different. Even the attacks on Hillary in 2016 are so often totally freighted with gender. Even now you get female pundits declaring that of course her husband's infidelities that she was the victim of should be held against here-'It's fair game' they declare. 

My argument here is not simply for Hillary Clinton as President but for a woman President, full stop. We need one and we need one now. I have to say it ought to take you a little aback by Bernie saying gender issues are mostly in the past. Roe v. Wade is under more threat than ever-in many states a woman's right to choose is basically over. 

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/planned-parenthood-abortion-the-war-is-over

I notice that Bernie didn't mention a woman's right to choose once last night. Ok, you may not want to totally blame him as he wasn't asked about it. But even when you don't ask he always slips in talk about the billionaire class and the banks. 

Is he unaware of this assault on a women's right to choose? Many Bernie supporters and other Hillary haters dismiss her as engaging in 'identity politics.' 

No one would have dared accuse the Obama supporters-both black and white-who wanted to see our first black President as engaging in identity politics, yet this is the refrain and there is no criticism of it. 

Biden is now trolling Hillary-sucking up to Bernie. Joe has a pretty putrid track record on women's rights at least regarding a woman's right to choose. It's hard to really be pro women's right and be opposed to their own freedom of choice. 

Bernie has a better record on choice than Joe-Bernie's terrible on guns but on choice I believe he's more in line with the generic Democrat line. 

But you know he doesn't talk about it much. I had a Twitter argument with a Bernie supporter who said Bernie supports choice just as much as HRC does, he just doesn't talk about it all the time. 

That's the problem. It's not just what a candidate says but what they don't say. Economic inequality matters to Bernie-it does to me and Hillary as well. But on matters that matter less to him, Bernie doesn't shout. He says don't shout about gun violence, on choice he doesn't say much of anything. 

This is the difference in having a woman. Hillary and Bernie may agree on choice and women's rights but for whom is it a bigger priority? Who talked about it and many issues facing women last night and who didn't?

In 2008 we needed a-qualified, liberal Democratic-President. In 2016 we need a female version of the same.