Quote of the Day:
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, asked whether Clinton’s vote for the Iraq War should disqualify her from the support of progressive Democrats, responds that “what’s important is what it would mean to elect a woman president of the United States.”
–Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe
Unfortunately, even some Republicans are beginning to rally around the notion that former Hewlett Packard CEO and GOP hopeful Carly Fiorina deserves their support because she is a woman. To her credit, the feisty Fiorina hasn’t been reduced to pleading that her biology is her main qualification for high office.
President Obama received a boost because so many Americans were eager to elect an African American president. There was an honorable motive at the heart of this: Americans wanted to put finished to aspects of our troubled racial history. The results, however, were an abysmal economy and the decline of American prestige in the world.
I don’t think the hype about electing a woman is quite as disinterested. It seems more a cynical ploy to rally support for one woman.
You’ll see just how much progressives care about electing a woman if Fiorina gets traction!
But don’t all the people who plan to vote on the basis of gender know that they are betraying the original goals of the feminist movement? Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby writes:
Of course voters are free to cast ballots for any reason they like, including feel-good symbolism or sentimental tokenism. But no one should imagine that there is honor in voting for Clinton because she’s a woman. Wasn’t the key point of feminism, after all, that women are more than biology?
It is just a matter of time before the U.S. elects a female president. When this happens, she should be somebody who has wisdom, courage, knowledge of our Constitution, and the ability to lead.
This woman will not ask for our votes on the basis of biology. She will campaign on her ideals rather than her chromosomes.
Or so I dare to hope.