Tedra Osell, aka Bitch, PhD, is participating in a “trialogue on gender, race, age, and presidential politics” over at the embarrassingly named Jewcy. Here’s the lede graf:
Do women have any special obligation to support Clinton’s candidacy? The obvious answer is no — only the most reactionary kind of identity politics would assert that women must support women, men must support men, etc. (And what are black women to do? Vote twice?)
It gets more complicated from there. So you should read the rest for yourself, lazy.
The Edge of the American West 
14 comments
March 17, 2008 at 10:04 am
eric
B, please.
March 17, 2008 at 10:16 am
KRK
The only entry in that trialogue coming out in favor of Hillary is embarrassing and in parts offensive. Surely someone could have been found to make a more compelling argument? This — It’s no surprise that Americans support a guy of any color before we support the white woman; non-white men got the vote in the U.S. a full fifty years before women did. — shows a pretty glaring ignorance of voting rights in America, even to an ignoramus like me.
March 17, 2008 at 10:18 am
eric
Like most things, it sounds better in Italian.
March 17, 2008 at 10:19 am
bitchphd
Eric, please do correct me. (I might also have been wrong later, when I say that Clinton didn’t do jack about Andrew Cuomo’s “shuck and jive” comment.) First person in recent memory? Or am I just embarrassingly wrong?
March 17, 2008 at 10:20 am
KRK
And this — I see the presidential race as Dallas in Washington, a nightly drama set in D.C. Is Hillary Clinton Joan Collins?… starring a spurned matriarch (Hillary), a…patriarchal patriarch (McCain), and a sexy young upstart who throws everyone into a tizzy (Obama). — is either very poor parody or a sad statement of what qualifies as thoughtful contemporary feminism.
And Joan Collins wasn’t even in Dallas! That was Dynasty!
March 17, 2008 at 10:21 am
KRK
(not sure I closed my italics)
March 17, 2008 at 10:29 am
eric
First person in recent memory
How about, most recent high-profile effort? The Committee on Economic Security tried to get it into the Social Security Act in 1935; no dice. Truman’s administration tried too. There’s some information here, and the book below:
Hirshfield, Daniel S. The Lost Reform: The Campaign for Compulsory Health Insurance in the United States from 1932-1943. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970.
March 17, 2008 at 11:21 am
bitchphd
Whew, I feel better. Truman and 1935 are long enough ago that the error, while an error, isn’t like mortifyingly egregious, as popular journalism goes.
(I will see if I can get the editor to correct the piece, though. Thanks!)
March 17, 2008 at 11:46 am
bitchphd
Correction made. With link, natch.
March 17, 2008 at 11:50 am
eric
Always happy to help, B.
March 17, 2008 at 2:49 pm
matt w
What about Nixon?
March 17, 2008 at 2:55 pm
eric
Nixon, among others, is mentioned in the article I linked to, Matt.
March 17, 2008 at 4:02 pm
thumbtack
Don’t forget Harris Wofford, whose 1990 senate campaign in Pennsylvania actually raised the issue on the national stage. Indeed, it was clear that ANY democratic presidential candidate or president in 1992 would be called upon to “do something” about health care. It was a hot button issue at the time, which is why Bill and other democratic presidential candidates ran on the issue. Hillary’s key part in the drama was to screw up the chances of meaningful health care reform hopelessly for at least 14 years.
Given the track record, I have been somewhat baffled by her ability to spin herself as the health care candidate.
March 17, 2008 at 5:10 pm
matt w
Nixon, among others, is mentioned in the four-authored piece in the American Journal of Public Health which I didn’t read I linked to.
Thumbtack makes a good point about Wofford. To nitpick, the campaign was in 1991 — it was a special election to fill out the remainder of John Heinz’s term after he died in a small plane crash. And it really was the harbinger of H.W. Bush’s defeat; IIRC the GOP strong-armed Dick Thornburgh to quit as Attorney General to run against the much less known replacement senator Wofford, and Wofford’s upset victory was the sign that Bush was vulnerable.