Monday, October 10, 2016

Nancy Pelosi: "This is what they had; their white-man-ness."



 
     As the Trump presidential campaign drifts away from the iceberg of that recording of The Donald bragging how he uses his celebrity to grope women, alarm bells clanging, staffers rushing around the tilting decks, the vessel of his ambition settling into the water, beginning, at long last, it seems, the final plunge to the bottom, we are left with a question:
     Why isn't the prospect of the nation's first woman president a bigger deal?
     When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, there was a pervasive sense of history. A nation that spent its first 87 years with legal slavery was now choosing a black man as leader.
     This should be even more significant, because, if you look around the world and over the ages, prejudice against women is far more widespread and severe than bigotry against blacks ever was.
     But don't trust me on that.
     "When I ran for Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black," said Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman elected to Congress — in 1969 — and who also sought the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination.


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8 comments:

  1. Something tells me when Hillary is elected president, it won't come close to the magic that was Grant Park on Nov. 4, 2008. Which reminds me, Leonard Pitts' novel Grant Park was a great read, I wouldn't mind reading a sequel.

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  2. And African males could vote (at least until Reconstruction ended) before any female could.

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  3. I can't but think of what a hard time Jane Byrne had right off the bat as Mayor and the stupid comments from Trump about putting Hillary in jail lead me to believe that her election won't stop the efforts to delegitimize her. Will we have 8 years of incessant Benghazi hearings and goofs from the innards of the FBI howling about her "getting off" on the email fiasco? I shudder at the thought. But, of course, the alternative is far far worse.

    john

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    1. And of course, we'll be endlessly hearing all about how Hillary rigged the election.

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    2. And of course, we'll be endlessly hearing all about how Hillary rigged the election.

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    3. For sure. Trump is already making excuses for losing.

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  4. Just as the Founding Fathers would have found inconceivable a Black man occupying high political office, about women they would undoubtedly have subscribed to the views expressed by their contemporary, the 4th Earl Chesterfield in a letter to his son.

    "I will therefore let you into certain arcana that will be very useful for you to know, but which you must, with the utmost care, conceal and never seem to know. Women are only children of a larger growth. They have an entertaining tattle and sometimes wit, but for solid reasoning and good sense, I never knew in my life one that had it, or who reasoned or acted consequently for four and twenty hours together. Some little passion or humor always breaks upon their best resolutions. Their beauty neglected or controverted, their age increased, or their supposed understandings depreciated, instantly kindles their little passions, and overturns any system of consequential conduct that in their most reasonable moments they might have been capable of forming. A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humors and flatters them as he does with a sprightly, forward child, but he neither consults them with serious matters, though he often makes them believe that he does."

    Although women gained the vote in 1920 they only started making inroads into government and the workforce in the 1940's, when "our boys," (a characterization that has fallen by the wayside as a consequence) were away at war. Your many readers who weren't really around way back then might not fully appreciate how far the ladies have come in only a half century.

    Tom Evans

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  5. Being a former first lady may count against her to some people. Sure we want a female president, but not one who got there through marriage.

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