Feminist affirmative action for the Presidency?

My mom sent me this Washington Post piece and I couldn’t help but be a little nauseated by the backwards form of feminism represented by NOW Regional Director Marion Wagner’s and NOW Virginia Chapter President Marj Signer’s views. As the Post story reports:

Clinton goes into today’s crucial primaries in Texas and Ohio with her candidacy on the line, and Wagner believes it is ignorance and bigotry that undermined it. As Wagner and other NOW executives toured Ohio last week, they repeated a resounding message: Clinton has been mistreated by an opponent who subtly demeans her, by a mainstream media that ridicules her, by voters too threatened to vote for a confident woman, by young women who no longer feel the urgency of the women’s movement, by African American women for whom race is more important than gender.

Never mind that this sounds strikingly similar to Democrats whining about George Bush ’stealing’ the 2000 election when the truth was Al Gore couldn’t even run a campaign effective enough to win his own damn home state. What really bothers me is Wagner’s position that women should support Clinton simply because she’s a woman. She believes that white women who support Obama are misguided and black women who support Obama view race as more important than gender.

The problem, NOW leaders said, is that too many young women have [turned] to Obama because they feel no obligation to vote for a historic first for their gender. Signer, a lifelong advocate of women’s rights, has a 23-year-old daughter who ‘fell in love with Obama.’

“She just doesn’t relate to the fact that the opportunities she’s had are because of people like Hillary,” Signer said. “She’s young, and she doesn’t have our sense of urgency.”

Oh, I see. So NOW’s goal is not to eliminate sexism in our hearts, minds and pockets but to institute a program of affirmative action for the presidency. I wonder how all the female supporters of Obama - white, black, Hispanic, Asian - would feel to know how much they’re letting down the sisterhood.

Look, I don’t deny that sexism still exists in our culture, but I certainly don’t think that’s the reason Hillary Clinton has had difficulty getting ahead. Sorry, but you can’t spin an ‘unfortunate woman can’t get ahead in a man’s world’ sob story about a woman who enjoyed unprecedented power as First Lady, defeated a popular, young, good-looking white man for the Senate seat in New York State and entered these presidential primaries with both a power and financial advantage. I also think it’s a pretty tough sell to suggest that being a white woman is more difficult than being a black man in America.

When Clinton shed tears during an interview before the New Hampshire primary women hailed it as a triumph of feminism - she showed her true colors, allowed her emotions to show through and many credit her NH win to that moment. But let’s ignore the glaring double standard (i.e., if a man did the same thing it would have ended his campaign).

Perhaps most troubling is my suspicion that if Obama were up against a white man with exactly the same credentials as Clinton, many of these women would support Obama – not because they’d prefer his vision, but because of their weariness with white men.