There has been muttering in various parts of the internet about how some of the objections to Hillary Clinton's presidential bid might be sexist in nature. Although identifying bias in politics is less straightforward than in scientific publication, this hypothesis should be experimentally verifiable. In most elections, the people who actually run for office are generally not people's first choice. So for those who maintain that they have nothing against women presidents in general, but object to Senator Clinton in particular, I ask this question:
What women would you endorse for president, were they to enter the race tomorrow.
My short list:
Christine Todd Whitman
Olympia Snowe
Mary Jo White
I tag everyone who doesn't self-identify as a bigot.
That'll catch people who are so sexist that they would never, ever endorse a woman for president... but not those who set a higher bar for female candidates than male candidates.
ReplyDeleteWhat you really want is a statistical comparison of the number of women on someone's overall presidental shortlist, to the proportion of women in some reasonable pool of potential candidates (the establishment of which is itself potentially subject to sexism, but hey). But that takes too long.
I nominate Barbara Boxer and Barbara Lee.
I'm not particularly interested in catching people- warlock hunting was never my style. I'm more interested in seeing who people name, and what their thought processes are that generate those names.
ReplyDeleteBoxer might be pretty good. I especially liked it when she bitch-slapped James global-warming-is-a-hoax Inhofe last year. Watch it here:
ReplyDeletehttp://thinkprogress.org/2007/03/21/gore-boxer-inhofe/
I don't like Hillary, I never really have, I don't want her to be president...if people think I'm sexist for that, then can do so. They would be wrong.
I'll bite:
ReplyDeletehttp://jrepka.blogspot.com/2008/01/women-for-president-meme.html
I would vote for Mary Lou Zoback, Marcia McNutt or Marcia Neugebauer any day.
ReplyDelete