Posts Tagged ‘super tuesday’
What’s Up to the Women?
It’s the quintessential difference between Republicans and Democrats. I don’t mean beliefs or legislative platform. I mean their ability to coalesce around a candidate and move forward expeditiously to get him or her elected.
Super Tuesday came and went without a resolution to who will be the Democrats’ standard bearer, while John McCain’s ascent to front-runner status was aided by the Republicans’ winner-take-all-delegates primary rules. The Democrats–we both love then and hate them for this characteristic–are more, well, democratic. So they have a complex if not downright Byzantine, proportional formula for awarding delegates to their nominating conventions.
Which brings me to the importance of women in this election this year. Check out the state-by-state breakdown in Women’s e-News today. Women are the majority in the population, even more so the majority of voters because a larger percentage of women then men actually cast votes. And this year, the intersection of race and gender has made the breakdown of how women cast their votes more volatile than ever, as African American women–a pivotal Democratic constituency–are choosing to vote for Barack Obama in epic proportions, as high as 80%.
Read MoreSuper Tuesday 5PM
For the last few days, the internet has been buzzing with impassioned presidential endorsements by feminists, many of whom have been in or even leading the movement for decades and others who are the bright young voices of the present and the future. This extraordinary piece of cultural criticism by Robin Morgan is my personal favorite.
Seems the women of America have found their voices concerning whom they do and don’t support, thank you very much.
So where then does Andrew Sullivan yes, the conservative (though gay and hiv positive—put those together with “conservative” for an amazing oxymoron) pundit get off in his thinly veiled misogynist attempt to instruct feminists on how to vote?
Read MoreSuper Tuesday 2PM
I’m blogging today for RH Reality Check. I’m on pins and needles thinking about the Super Tuesday presidential primaries–what they mean to our country, what they mean to me as an individual, what they mean to the future of my children and grandchildren, and indeed the world. Right now, at 2pm, I can take the large and long view:
Our daughter Donna called this morning from Phoenix, excited to tell us her letter-to-the-editor of The Arizona Republic had been published. Incensed by pejorative e-mails circulated by a conservative friend about the religious and cultural implications of Barack Obama’s middle name “Hussein”, she’d decided to speak out against the racism.
We congratulated her and then asked if she and her husband had voted yet. “We early voted. He was for Edwards. I voted for Hillary,” she said. Then she paused. “But now I kind of wish I’d voted for Obama.”
There ensued one of those intense family conversations going on in households across the country today, hashing out what each of us likes, dislikes, and worries about with each candidate, predictions about the various possible match-ups in the general election, and what the polls and pundits are saying.
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