reflectivepundit: Washington Post Op-Ed Article on Hillary Clinton and the “Clueless” Female Electorate

January 28, 2007

Washington Post Op-Ed Article on Hillary Clinton and the “Clueless” Female Electorate

By Brigitte L. Nacos
A week after a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 59% of American women of all ages and educational backgrounds have a favorable view of Senator Hillary Clinton, an op-ed article in the Post by Linda Hirshman, a retired professor of women’s studies, informs us that “there’s no guarantee that Clinton would receive enough votes from women to be elected.” Of course, there is no guarantee. Nor would any campaign worth its salt tailor its appeals to the “gender gap” in the electorate that has been exaggerated in past election campaigns. But the op-ed writer’s assumption based on 20 years of studying women and politics does not tell us anything about female voting patterns in the up-coming campaign, since no woman was ever a serious candidate for a major party’s presidential nomination, let alone becoming the nominee. It is likely that a number of women—and men--will vote for or against Hillary Clinton because she is a woman. But many voters will cast their ballot based on what policy positions on Iraq and other pressing issues candidates take. For the op-ed writer, however, women are “not rational political actors—they don’t make firm policy commitments and back the candidates who will move society in the direction they want it to go. Instead, they vote on impulse, and on elusive factors such as personality.” How is that from a self-described feminist!

To drive her point home, the author interviewed a handful of stay-at-home moms in the Washington area who “read People and Real Simple magazines. They all listen to news on the car radio, mostly National Public Radio. And almost all their full-time working husbands consume immeasurably more political information than they do ("He reads 10 times what I do," one told me), reading news magazines and political Web sites and bringing home political information from their jobs.” For the author, these politically clueless ladies confirmed her “theory about why women don't decide elections.”

I know many stay-at-home mothers and grandmothers, many working women, and many female students who are not at all like the women the author interviewed and thus no confirmation for her theory. And for any politically challenged woman it is not hard to think of a male counterpart. But since her mini sample revealed that female voters are interested in Senator Clinton’s personality—not her policy positions, the author writes that “Clinton may have to go personal to bring the women home.” And here the author points to “the soap opera story of the century with that charismatic, faithless husband.” Since the op-ed piece suggests that “a lot of her [Clinton’s] campaign will have to involve putting her on the couch and analyzing her character and motivation,” one wonders whether the author has similar suggestions for likely male candidates with marital problems in their past. After all, male candidates court female voters, too.

Posted at 11:43 PM in Election campaigns, Mass Media | Permalink