SYMPATHY FOR THE SISTERS
If you have a bone of compassion in your body, you gotta feel for the women. This was their year, dude! Finally, finally, 88 years after getting the right to vote, one of their own was poised, on the brink, an easy primary season and a walkover general election away from the presidency.
This was big. This was huge. A woman president. Not Vice President, not Ladies’ Auxiliary President, not Presidentette, but President of The United States of America. The biggest job in the world.
Now, almost certainly, it’s not gonna happen. Looks like we’re gonna have a black man, instead.
So, what went wrong? Does race trump sex? Feminist friends of mine, including the one I’m married to, say it’s just the opposite. They say that sexism is much more deeply entrenched than racism in America, and not only in America. Sexism is the way of the world.
I agree. Race is an artificial construct anyway. Races mix, blend, merge, shade into one another until race and color become indistinguishable. Barack Obama is called a black man, but he’s no more black than he is white, he’s no more black than, for instance, Tiger Woods. And, apparently, a whole lot of Americans are real anxious to at least start putting the “race question” behind us.
But sex is real. With apologies to the transgender community, the sexes don’t merge, blur and become indistinguishable. They can’t. Unlike race, sex is a fundamental, biological split, right down the middle of the human condition. And for most of the time since humans have had a condition, women have had it worse. Sexism is real too.
We’ve been making good progress against sexism, lately. We’re not there yet, but women in America are catching up, the glass ceiling is shattering, pretty much everywhere. So why not a woman president?
Because you don’t elect a sex president or a race president, you elect a person president, and Barack Obama is an infinitely more appealing person than Hillary Clinton.
When feminists say that a woman is called “shrill” when a man is called “aggressive,” they’re right. Men are “competitive” and women are “bitchy?” Right too. But these truths confer no immunity, and therein lies the rub.
Hillary Clinton is shrill, she is bitchy, she acts tough as nails and then cries “poor me” when she thinks “vulnerable” plays better. Hillary Clinton is a 60 year-old woman who had—let’s just say it—the balls to claim she “found her voice” in New Hampshire. Last month.
Hillary’s greatest asset is also her greatest liability, and it has nothing to do with her sex. She is ambitious to a San Andreas fault. She will say and do—has said and done—almost anything to get what she wants. She wants this thing so bad she can taste it. It must be extremely painful to feel that taste turning to ashes. I actually feel bad for her.
But not as bad as I feel for the sisters. They needed a champion and they got her. The African-American community gets the second coming of JFK and women get the feminist equivalent of Al Sharpton.
I’m not saying she’d make a bad president, but I don’t think she’s going to get the chance, and she shouldn’t. Not this year. There is a better person running.
