The news/talk show 'Washington Week' came to Glendale, CA yesterday for a public taping at the Alex Theatre. A couple of students and I attended the show, which included a question-and-answer session after the main show. The focus on the Democratic debate of the previous evening got me thinking about an idea that my wife had raised months ago: the party may decide on its nominee in the same way a high school chooses its student body president.
Imagine the smartest, most involved, most organized young girl in the senior class. She knows everyone, is friendly with all the groups and cliques, even those she doesn't belong to. She has some disadvantages: some people don't like her (some vehemently so), she is not the most attractive or athletic in the class, and some are jealous of her abilities. But she has been aiming at the school presidency since she was a freshman, building her resume, experience and connections and she is the odd-on favorite to be the next one.
Along comes a new transfer student: tall, handsome, athletic, popular, a guy both other guys and girls like. He gets elected homecoming king just after he arrives at school. Someone soon whispers to him (actually several someones), 'why don't you run for student body president?' You'd be great, you'd be a shoe-in. He says what people want to hear, that he'll solve the rifts between the cliques, that he'll end the privileges given to the rich kids, that he'll represent all the students, not just some. He's the kind of guy everybody wants to be seen with. And in the end, the young charismatic boy beats the smart organized girl.
I realize this is a collection of shop-worn cliches and is sometimes not true in real life, but the working of this old trope is still powerful. And it highlights something else in the decision between Clinton and Obama: he is actually, despite being black, the safer, less transformative choice, because he still is the embodiment of the tall, lean, attractive, charismatic male. In short, putting a black man in the White House is less radical that putting a white woman there.
It's a matter of numbers, history, and patriarchy. Symbolically adding the 6% of the population that is black and male to the 37% that is white and male is less significant that adding the 37% that is white and female. Black men, despite the many obstacles they have faced, have had the right to vote decades longer than women of any color. And lastly, Obama represents an expansion of the dominant patriarchy, not its fundamental overturning. It's just always been easier to pick the handsome homecoming king over the girl who's the frumpy nerd.
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