Believe it or not, today the Senate will swear in 20 women, an historic high. Sixteen of those women will be Democrats. They think that their relative lack of testosterone will make the Senate a less confrontational place. I’m not sure if they are being overly optimistic or not, but I am a firm believer that more estrogen in government equals better policy. I base this, in part, on the observation that if this country still restricted the vote to white male property owners, we would be more reviled internationally than South Africa ever was. That is because white male property owners in this country are, as a group, overwhelmingly supportive of the policies of the right-wing of the Republican Party. And if this country was run by the right-wing of the Republican Party, most people in the world would want to crush our country for its unbelievably assholish outlook and behavior.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Are you sure they haven’t infiltrated throughout the country and aren’t still running it by default?
More of us ladies in Congress can only change it for the better I say.
OT, but looks like the admin is planning to hit the ground running:
Obama Plans Immigration Reform Push This Month
Are we carving out exceptions for ThAtcher and Imelda Marcos/
Or Golda Mier or Indira Gandhi or… ?
In many of the democracies that have elected women to their highest office (which is to say, all of them but the United States), the pathbreakers have been conservative because since more people willing to elect a first woman despite policy differences are liberals, that’s an easier path to cobbling together a winning coalition.
But, excepting the very rich, women at the parliamentary/congressional level – where budgets are passed – are more likely to be empathetic and more likely to understand the struggles of “ordinary” folks.
That said, women are just as capable of being ignorant assholes as guys. (C.f. Palin, Bachmann.) In our local politics, some of the nuttiest people we’ve had were women, and they got elected precisely because low-information voters assumed the woman was better than her male opponent. Supporting a person solely because of their gender, race, age, sexual orientation, or other demographic is never a good idea.
and then still get something done. So glad to see backbones in the Senate with the likes of Elizabeth Warren.
Wasn’t it tbogg who said something like: What do the politicians who were simply outraged at the idea of Elizabeth Warren heading up the new consumer organization call her now? Senator.
I hope they choke on it!
However, I am also pretty sure she will earn their grudging respect pretty quickly.
Goes without saying that this group of women contains some of the most eloquent fighters to have come to Congress in memory.
They won’t be satisfied with talking points and with Sandy on the immediate agenda it’s a great opening act for them to show the good old boys whatfor.
Kudos to Gore & Co for sparing us this BS:
Glenn Beck tried to buy Current TV
Did Glenn Beck even have the half a billion to pay for it? And Al Jazeera is paying for access, limited as it is.
When you say “more estrogen in government equals better policy”, I know what you mean, but that cannot be an adequate formulation, as the likes of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Michelle Malkin, Pam Geller, Megan McArdle, and on and on and on, have no less estrogen than Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi, Marcy Kaptur, et al.
There is definitely such a thing as a woman’s outlook and the feminine touch, but we need to judge people as individuals.
When you say “White male property owners are overwhelmingly supportive of the policies of the right-wing of the Republican Party”, are white female property owners really that far behind? And a lot of the bedrock supporters of those policies are Fox News watchers with little or no property to speak of. There are also great regional differences. New England and the West Coast don’t look much like Wyoming, Oklahoma, or the Deep South.
Obama won 39% of all white voters in 2012 — exactly the same percentage as with Clinton’s victory in 1992, and significantly higher than for losing Democratic candidates in 1972 (Nixon v. McGovern, 32%), 1980 (Reagan v. Carter, Reagan v. Mondale, 36%) and 1984 (35%).
Yes, the Republican Party skews strongly white, but it has large support from white females as well. Eighty-eight percent of Romney voters were white. Romney won white women 56/42%.
At the same time, 56 percent of Obama’s support was white, 24 percent black, 14 percent Latino, 4 percent Asian, and 2 percent other. The disparity is not white vs minority, but whites vs diversity.
An impressive sixty-eight percent of single women voted for Obama, but 53 percent of married women voted for Romney.
The last sentence of my penultimate paragraph above should read “The disparity is not white vs minority, but RIGHT-WING whites vs diversity.
It makes me think of Woody Allen’s joke about how bisexuality immediately doubles your chances of getting a date on Saturday night. If you consider women equally with men, you double the pool of candidates for leadership positions.