October 19, 2016--Hillary's Gender Problem

It has been widely reported that Hillary Clinton and her team are distressed that polls show she is doing less well with young woman than among middle-age women who form the heart of her base.

Madeleine Albright summed up these feelings back in February when she said something in public that she had been saying in private--that there's "a special place in Hell for women who don't help each other" i.e. who don't vote for Hillary.

It is understandable that she and Hillary Clinton would feel a version of this--

Why weren't the younger generation of women grateful for the changes Albright and Clinton have helped to bring about? Fair question because it is true that they both, and now especially Hillary, broke and are breaking through the most important and formidable glass ceilings.

Why were so many young women flocking to Bernie, a late-middle-age white man who is more like their fathers or grandfathers than feminist movement leaders such as Albright and Clinton?

Partly because he is a sort of grandfather type (though a bit strident and know-it-all in my view) and many young people seek grandparents who often understand them better than their own parents. Partly because Hillary's has a schoolmarmish public speaking style that sets off unpleasant bells and whistles and on the stump and TV can sound more preachy than empathetic.

But more profoundly, many professionally successful young women feel that much of the struggle is either over or what's left of it should be focused on the kinds of issues they face in their careers and family lives and which they feel Hillary doesn't understand or "get."

They are less interested in equal-pay or affirmative action, for example, then what Sheryl Sandberg wrote about in Lean In--how women should no longer doubt their ability to combine work and family and thus do not need to avoid demanding assignments in anticipation of having children. And that, as the result of the positive outcomes of "leaning in," put themselves in a better position to ask for what they need and to make changes that could benefit others.

But this may be about to change. And, if I am reading the situation correctly, it will ironically be because of Donald Trump ever-more-disgusting misogyny.

The so-called Billy Bush open-mike tape where Trump joked so graphically about his sexual stalking is hopefully the last in a long list of last straws that should have much earlier doomed his candidacy. But somehow didn't.

From his slander about John McCain, to his boasting that his supporters would stay with him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, to his mocking and abuse of female reporters, Mexicans, and people with disabilities, to egging on "Second Amendment people" to "take care"of Hillary, to his . . .

Many of us have our list of his worst calumnies that should have brought him down, but up to now, in spite of what he has said and tweeted, no matter how offensive he has been, he wiggled free and in some cases perversely seen his poll numbers rise.

But not this time.

Young women especially, very much including those who have fought on campuses against date rape and other offenses directed at women, are now seeing support for Hillary Clinton coinciding with their feminist agenda.

They also are seeing that the agenda is not in fact completed and that it is important to work on that and to do so in solidarity across generations. Equal pay, for example, may now be seen to be very much a practical and symbolic issue.

Young women may not feel fervent about Hillary for some of the reasons noted above, but because of what she would do about court appointments and pressing a gender-aware social policy agenda as well as the metaphoric power of what having a female president would mean, I am sensing that this generation of women will now vote heavily for Clinton and likely contribute to a landslide.

There will be no more examples of Trump wiggling free. This is the last straw.

July 12, 2016--Ruth Bader (Goodbye) Ginsberg

It is rare for Supreme Court justices to speak publicly. Unless they are making the rounds hustling a book. In that case mammon trumps courtly custom.

But just yesterday one of the Supremes trumped all of this--Ruth Bader Ginsburg not only spoke publicly but politically--trashing Donald Trump and bemoaning the possibility that he might be elected president.

She didn't do a Madeleine Albright, relegating people who do not vote for Hillary to "rot in hell."

Ginsberg did Albright one better, sputtering, "I can't imagine what this place would be--I con't imagine what the country would be--with Donald Trump as our president. . . .  For the country it could be four years. For the court it could be--I don't even want to contemplate that."

But contemplating that, quoting her husband, smiling to the New York Times reporter, she added, "Now is the time for us to move to New Zealand."

Among other things, I hope she has an updated passport since I think that's a fine idea. At 83, with little energy or discretion remaining, even having not said something this outrageous, it is long overdue for her to head for the Antipodes or Boca.

In the same Trump interview, she also rued the fact that the Senate has refused to vote on President Obama's nominee to replace the recently-departed Anton Scalia.

But she failed to mention her own situation and inevitable replacement because as an old and ailing octogenarian soon to be departing or retiring in New Zealand, with the possibility that Trump might be in a position to nominate a replacement for her (she, not I, brought up the subject) as concerned as she now is about the ideological balance on the court, she should have stepped down during Obama's first term to assure that a liberal would take her seat.

But no. There she more-or-less still sits. Full of herself and hypocrisy.

February 8, 2016--The Gender Trap: Albright's Inferno or Where the Boys Are

At a campaign event on Saturday in Concord, NH, when introducing Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, scolded young women for supporting Bernie Sanders.

With the grinning Clinton at her side and New Jersey Senator, Wall-Street favorite, Cory Booker on stage left applauding enthusiastically (see below), the 78-year-old former secretary mocked Bernie Sander's political revolution, saying that electing the first female commander in chief would be "a true revolution."

Feeling it, she added--

"We can tell our story of how we climbed the ladder, and a lot of younger women think it's done. It's not done."

Feeling it even more, she apocalyptically shouted, "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other!"

A "special place in hell"?

Later, to double-down, in an interview with NBC News, Albright said that "women could be judgmental toward one another and they occasionally forget how hard someone like Mrs. Clinton had to work to get to where she is."

Note that she referred to Ms Clinton as Mrs. Clinton. A bit of a hint about how hard she felt Hillary Clinton, wife of Bill, had to work to get to where she is.

Not to be outdone, Friday night on Bill Maher's Real Time, 81-year-old Gloria Steinem, perhaps the feminist movement's most prominent remaining icon, while explaining how women tend to become more active in politics as they grow older (this not verifiable by facts or data), claimed that younger women were backing Senator Sanders mainly because they could meet young men--"When you're young, you're thinking, 'Where are the boys?' The boys are with Bernie."

This self-revealing comment suggests that this might be some of what motivated Ms Steinem back in her day, but it also ignores the obvious evidence that half or more of Bernie's youthful supporters are women. The polling numbers show that.

This suggests, in Steinemian terms, that in reality "the girls," more than "the boys," are with Bernie and perhaps, to Ms Steinem, more comfortable projecting herself back to the 60s, it's deja vu again. As a reminder, check 19-year-old James Kunan's 1969 best seller, Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary, in which he confessed that a lot of guys showed up at the "revolution" to meet girls and get laid.

To be honest, that was at least half the reason I showed up at my Alma Mater, Columbia University, during the campus-occupation "revolution" of 1968. I did meet some girls but didn't manage to get any. Though I did manage to get my hands on one of President Grayson Kirk's cigars. Symbolism abounds.

This parade of strident, aging feminist supporters is the reason Hillary Clinton, to her tone-deaf chagrin, has thus far been unable to appeal to young women. Or to young men.

An astonishing 85 percent of them are with Bernie.

Talking at them, shaming them, and assigning them to hell will likely mean that 100 percent of young voters will soon be with Bernie.

It's not that young women (and many young men) are unaware of feminist history and how far the Madeleine Albrights, Gloria Steinems, and Hillary Clintons have come, or how hard that was, or how significant their achievements have been--how they blazed a trail and punched many cracks in the glass ceiling, all those good and remarkable things--but it is 2016 and young people do not want to be reminded constantly how much they are beholden to their grandmothers'' generation. (Yes, grandmothers--time is whipping along).

They want to live their lives, frankly taking advantage of the opportunities and ways of living brought about by their predecessors. They do not want to be told to look at everything through a gender lens. And they decidedly do not want be hectored by being told what to do, what to think, or what to feel. By men or by women.

It's their time.