The founding…mothers? Whatever…man.

OK, I stole the title of this post from “America – The Book”. Give credit where it’s due.

Brief sidebar: Lately the best place for news analysis are the various fake news outlets. The Onion, Daily Show, Colbert. I dunno. Says something sad about the news media.

Anyway, I am going to jump into the icy waters of gender politics for a second. Yes, gentle readers I am the possessor of a Y chromosome so I realize this journey is fraught with peril, but here goes.

Are we past due for a woman president? Categorically, yes. No question at all in my mind. However, this is not a political issue. This is merely a statement about the woeful prejudices of my countrypeople. I am skeptical that prejudices can be changed. Having a woman president isn’t going to make people any less misogynistic, than say, passing the Civil Rights Act made people less racist.

My bottom line: voting for Hillary because it’s time for a woman president, is ridiculous. It’s not an ‘issue’. Gender is not an issue, and no Ms. Clinton, the boys aren’t picking on you because you’re a girl.

Are you really trying to tell me that this country is more sexist than racist? That the media is giving a black man a pass so they can gang up on a white woman? I’m asking you to really think about that.

The only issues are the issues. The actual, real, nuts-and-bolts, economic, foreign policy, trade issues. Anything that doesn’t directly have to do with that is a smokescreen. (for further discussion, I refer you to Michael Lind’s “The Next American Revolution”)

For a generation now, we’ve been told that abortion, affirmative action, gun control, these are issues. In that time corporate power has gone completely unchecked. Labor unions have been smashed, banking deregulated, power deregulated, mergers, the revolving door between K street and congress, massive debt, a housing crises, credit crises, health care crises, CEO pay is at astronomical levels….need I go on?

These are the only things we should be concerned with. Anything else is a diversion, including gender of the Occupant of the White House.

 

For women.

It seems the “older women” contingency of voters that make up the largest and most vocal part (generally speaking) of Hillary’s voter base say they sympathize with her because she’s a woman. They support her because of the “gender issue.”

What issue is that, exactly? The fact that the United States is one of the only countries in the world that has never before had a woman at the helm? Okay. I guess that is kind of a problem. It really makes us look bad, and recently, looking good is an American value.

So, it’s time for a woman president. Past time, even. I agree.

But don’t you want the best? Shouldn’t she be the most capable? As a woman — more importantly, as an adult, tax paying, (mostly) law-abiding citizen — I want to represented by someone at least solid, not just someone with a pair of ovaries.

Hillary seems to be, in the minds of her fans, some paragon of women. But I’d like to point out her total lack of a political career prior to being First Lady. And hell, while she was First Lady. Sure, I know they ran as “two-for-one”, supporters say she was just like any other advisor.

But she wasn’t hired as any other advisor would have been, and likewise no one voted her into office. She didn’t get to any of these positions because of her merit.

This is a bit of a slippery slope, I realize, for someone who’s writing a blog with her boyfriend as co-author. But belief in someone’s abilities and talents are, presumably, only part of the reason you’re with them or love them. It also has to do with your chemistry with them, how they make you laugh, how great a lay they are. Or, more cynically perhaps, if they knocked you up. Or how much money they have. It’s a lot of different things to different people and it doesn’t amount to the same as a job interview or being an actual candidate.

And you know what? I’m gonna go one step further and say Hillary never would have been senator, never had the public appeal to get that far if her husband hadn’t gone bed hopping.

As in the Texas debate, she constantly makes jokes and references to her suffering as the betrayed wife. Her slogan-meisters must have advised her that it somehow lends credibility to her image as a “fighter.”

For the last time: sticking with someone who clearly doesn’t give a shit about your emotional state doesn’t make you a fighter. It makes you a) ignorant b) ambivalent about or out of touch with that person and / or c) proves you still need something from them other than their love.

Hillary is many things, but dumb ain’t one of ‘em. And she may have been out of touch with her relationship at the time, but I would hope certain events would have snapped it into focus pretty fast. So it seems to me that she felt she still had more to gain — namely, momentum for her own political career — from Bill.

I’m sure it’s a hard line for any politician, especially female, to walk. I think a divorce would have made her appear empowered, in control of her life. But she might have appeared “weak” to voters with more traditional familial ideals.

So she stayed, and reaped buckets of sympathy from older women who also don’t have the guts to leave their husbands.

There’s a great episode of Futurama (go with me here) where Leela gets drafted to a Blurnsball (futuristic baseball) team, making her the first woman in the Major Leagues. She’s totally oblivious to the fact that she was put on the team as a publicity stunt until outraged female athletes rise up against her, saying she’s set them back, blown away their legitimacy.

I want to see a woman in the White House. There’s no question.

But I don’t want our first female president to have coasted halfway there on her husband’s coattails and, more importantly, Monica Lewinsky’s dress hem.

Maybe this isn’t news to many. But no one seems to want to mention it. And I’m not saying she’s the inventor of gold digging (er, vote digging?), but let’s call things what they properly are and not get swept up in the “Evita”-ness of it all.

The bottom line is, I’m anti-Hillary for the same reason a lot of women say they’re pro-Hillary.

Because I have to be. For women. As a woman, how could I feel otherwise?