Pump Up the Passion: Why Dems Need a Bachmann!
I wrote this commentary for the Daily Beast and titled it “Pump Up the Passion.” Of course, they flamed it up and called it “Dems Need a Bachmann!” My point is that this is a moment of opportunity for progressive women to soar to leadership in a politics that sorely needs leadership, but we must a) learn from our adversaries and b) stake out a bold agenda to define and drive the debate. I value your opinions greatly, so tell me what you think about these ideas.
Passion! What a relief to see President Obama express some in his jobs speech Thursday. And for the first time that I can remember, a presidential proposal specifically addressed women’s essential role in driving the economic engine.
But the political narrative shifts awfully quickly these days. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s presidential candidacy, a hot ticket just a couple of weeks ago, is suddenly melting. And Sarah Palin is in her bus, hurtling full-speed toward self-parody as an attention-seeking political used-to-be. While women’s importance in the political landscape can no longer be overlooked, some might say that the much-hyped “year of the conservative women” is over.
To feminists, right-wing ideologues like Bachmann and Palin might seem like tools of the patriarchy, co-opted by their oppressors as mouthpieces for a party that would disempower women and return us to the days of back-alley abortions and economic discrimination. But you have to hand it to the women on the ideological right. What they lack in compassion they make up for with passion. They have the fire of moral certitude. You know where they stand. That kind of clarity connects with voters.
And so I say, learn from your adversaries. Progressive women could stand to emulate these characteristics of their sisters on the other side of the partisan aisle. I doubt fewer right-wing women will run in 2012, and that’s fine with me. But the dual Bachmann-Palin flameouts provide a critical window of opportunity for progressive women—whose numbers and experience in elective office are triple those of women on the right, and who have by and large been the unsung trailblazers for all women in politics—to kick their roles up a few notches and lead the nation forward from its current morass.
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“Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann have breezed through the door that Hillary painstakingly built.”
It’s great that barriers to all women in politics have fallen precipitously despite continuing media bias and unequal access to big-money donors. Voters are more likely to trust women candidates, and rightly so: women legislators work harder and bring home more results for their constituents. Though they make up just 17 percent of Congress, women are 51 percent of the U.S. population, 54 percent of voters, and upward of 60 percent of progressive voters. That’s voting power that, if mobilized collectively and strategically, could change everything.
So many progressive policy initiatives and social movements since the 19th-century suffragists have been led by progressive women that it’s no wonder we get cognitive dissonance from the possibility that the first female president might be a right-wing Republican. Progressive women’s groups have led the way to recruit, train, and support women to run for office. Most of those groups are nonpartisan, such as the Women’s Campaign Forum, The White House Project, Women Under Forty, the 2012 Project, Running Start, and the National Women’s Political Caucus.
Without them, we would not have had Hillary Clinton’s 2008 run for president, after which voters understood that leadership is as likely come in a yellow pantsuit as in navy gabardine with a yellow tie. But as Siobhan “Sam” Bennett, CEO of the Women’s Campaign Forum, the oldest organization financially supporting women candidates, wryly told me, “Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann have breezed through the door that Hillary painstakingly built.”
That’s what we get for playing too nice. So let’s face down the progressive elephant in the room once and for all and nix the idea that any woman in political office is a net plus. Although complicated policies that work for the country are harder to communicate than simplistic antigovernment nastiness, women like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) show it’s quite possible to employ passionate progressive arguments without the negative aspects of zealotry. More progressive women need to step up just as boldly—now.
See Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s new initiative to get more women into politics. But which women? [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eD8TJNr6fw&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Because with lockstep “just say no” partisanship on the Republican side as the new normal and Democratic leaders too often supinely begging for crumbs of compromise, talk of bold change on the progressive side has gone mute. Yet small ideas will never be able to increment the nation’s economy into a future that’s emerging faster than Andrew Breitbart can whip up the blogosphere to bring down a member of Congress who tweeted inappropriately—sex scandals being one of the few truly bipartisan endeavors. And, by the way, haven’t those guys all been, well, guys?
This is exactly the breech into which progressive women should step. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) took a stab at it and her vision, the Emergency Jobs to Restore the American Dream Act, substantively informed the president’s proposals. Feminist economists like Nancy Folbre have long advocated many of the ideas that the president has now urged Congress to pass.
For progressive women, seizing this opportune moment to assert our own authentic moral strength, strong language that inspires our base, and courage to advance bold policy initiatives is nothing less than a profound responsibility.
It’s time to pump up the passion and let it rip.
GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”
As co-founder and president of Take The Lead, a leading women’s leadership nonprofit, her mission is to achieve gender parity by 2025 through innovative training programs, workshops, a groundbreaking 50 Women Can Change The World immersive, online courses, a free weekly newsletter, and events including a monthly Virtual Happy Hour program and a Take The Lead Day symposium that reached over 400,000 women globally in 2017.
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I am curious, Gloria, why you think the Democratic Party is the appropriate vehicle for this. You say “talk of bold change on the progressive side has gone mute.” I say, the Democratic Party has spared no effort to belittle such talk, deliberately taking it off the table, and it is no mystery why. It is that old triangulation strategy raising its noisome head once again. There is no authentic moral strength in the party leadership; its main strength is its ability to paint the Republicans as the worse evil. With the economy tanking, that may not be enough.
There is a battle raging for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, but I think the progressives lost that battle long ago. Though it may still seem possible to right that ship, it seems more likely progressive women are facing a stark choice, between going down with that sinking ship, or seeking an independent path. I wish you luck in your efforts to right the ship, but I fear you are wasting your energy on a party that has shown over and over it does not deserve it.
It appears to me that what you are seeking is a feminist revolution. Do you really think the Democratic Party wants anything to do with that? It has no problem with women willing to go along with the program, toe the line, so to speak, but this is a party dominated by the Democratic Leadership Council, which does not have a progressive bone in its body. But then, I suppose that all depends on how one defines progressive. President Obama, for instance, took great offense when Cornel West said he was not a progressive.
Cornel West ought to be ashamed of himself? For what, telling the truth about feeling betrayed? The truth hurts.
Women make up 60%of the Democratic party voters. My call is first of all for progressive elected women to make their own strategy to lead the party from where it is to where it should be. I think they should create a bold agenda and quit carrying the water for the male leaders who, though they might be fine human beings like Harry Reid, are simply too mired in the way politics have always been done and too meek to do anything else.
So in a way this would be a feminist revolution but a very different kind from the previous one. We are on the inside now, and we have to be willing to do much more than disrupt like a new movement does. We have to be willing to build and where necessary, rebuild. For that you must have a strong policy agenda to drive the debate.
Always the optimist, Gloria. As I said, I wish you luck. Elizabeth Warren could be an example of that kind of strong policy agenda that could turn things around, and there are others in powerful positions inside the Democratic Party. I am not saying your plan is unworkable, but I am saying the powers that be in the party will not cooperate, and I suspect women on the inside such as Hillary Clinton and Debbie Wasserman Schultz will not either; they will support the President. A strong policy agenda could right the ship, or it could be marginalized and ridiculed, as Democratic leaders and mainstream pundits have been doing consistently to critics from the left. Are the women who vote Democratic doing that because they support the party, or because they fear the alternative? Does the party support women, or only pretend to? I think women have to grapple with these questions, because I have seen the Democratic leadership stabbing women in the back too often to consider that leadership at all trustworthy.
The subtitle of Heart’s blog is WRITING THE LONGEST REVOLUTION. The feminist revolution has many stages. Unfortunately she is rather disillusioned with the feminist blogosphere and has hardly done any blogging for over a year. She is active on Facebook, however. We will be presenting an alternative agenda, but the media firewall against radical ideas is formidable. I have commented before here about the misuse of the word radical. I keep getting fundraising letters from the Democrats raising the alarm about the radical Republicans. There once were truly Radical Republicans; they were the abolitionists who pressured Lincoln to emancipate the slaves. These modern Republicans are nothing like that; they are extremist reactionaries, but since mainstream media has created such a warped idea of the meaning of radical, it suits Democrats to use the word as a pejorative, and of course, Republicans return the favor, calling Obama radical.