Which Women Support Hillary (and Which Women Can’t Afford To)

A story of two voting Blocs

By Sarah Leonard

http://www.thenation.com/article/which-women-support-hillary-and-which-women-cant-afford-to/

I’m going to posit something radical: The most vocal support for Hillary Clinton comes from women in the commentariat, very much like myself, who have had to fight sexism to succeed in public-facing, white-collar professions and relate to Hillary’s struggle to do the same. Many of these women have also engaged in other struggles that are the opposite of Hillary’s—women like Sady Doyle, Amanda Marcotte, and my own colleague Katha Pollitt are foes of Wall Street and imperial misadventure, while Hillary has often been a friend to the wealthy, and a hawk. A quote from Lena Dunham, stumping for Hillary in Iowa, captures the sentiment well: “As a newly grown-up woman who has experienced my fair share of backlash, public shaming and of puritanical judgements, that [Hillary’s resistance to sexist attacks] really moves me.” And it’s not just true for someone thrust into fame as quickly as Dunham. Every well-known feminist is subjected to the same language on Twitter that is directed toward Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail: bitch, harpy, dumb, ugly, and so on. As Doyle writes, “Her story moves me…simply as an example of a woman who got every misogynist trick in the world thrown at her, and who didn’t let it slow her down. On that level, she’s actually become a bit of a personal role model.” To quote another Clinton, we feel her pain.

There is a part of our own pain that we hope Hillary Clinton will fix. Marcotte, no stranger to misogynist trolls of all stripes, writes that “yes, having a woman president does matter, if only to spend election night watching the spreading urine stains on the pants of the men who spent months lecturing feminists.” Erica Brazelton wrote in these pages in June 2013 that “seeing said bodies in spaces not originally reserved for them matters.” Or to quote Sady Doyle, “When people yell at me, or dislike me, I no longer think oh, how horrible this is for me. I now think, well, if Hillary can do it. Seriously. If Hillary Clinton can be called an evil hag by major media outlets for most of her adult life and run for president, I can deal with blocking ten or twenty guys on Twitter.” Some of those guys are Sanders supporters; much digital ink has been spilled over the presence of “Bernie bros,” or dudes whose support for their candidate is expressed by being assholes to Hillary supporters. In other words, Hillary Clinton’s professional success represents one step closer to a meritocracy, where every little girl (and boy) knows that a woman can be president, and that this might trickle down to all of our workplaces, allowing each professional young woman to be taken a bit more seriously. To quote Kanye West’s timeless words, her presence itself is a gift—what she does is of secondary importance.

It's not very easy to measure the power of example. But let’s try.

This is a really interesting argument, because it is not, of course, very easy to measure the power of example. But let’s try. Some countries have tried to create policy around female representation. For example, lawmakers in Norway noticed that women were vastly underrepresented on corporate boards. So, in 2003, they passed a requirement that 40 percent of every LLC board be female. Eleven years later, a study has found that “no evidence of significant differential improvements for women in the post-reform cohort, either in terms of average earnings or likelihood of filling in a top position in a Norwegian business.” Women still, by and large, take time off to raise children and suffer from sexism in promotions. There has, however, been another Nordic model that’s worked quite well. In 1995, Sweden put in place a policy that not only offered generous parental leave, but motivated both men and women to take it by offering some months of parental leave that would be lost if men didn’t take advantage of them. This counteracted the effects of entrenched sexism (women would stay home and fall behind, while men did not). Today, things aren’t perfect, but women take 75 percent of parental leave, as opposed to 99.5 percent in 1974, and Sweden has ranked in the top four countries for gender equality since the World Economic Forum introduced their gender gap rankings in 2006. In other words, bright examples are a pretty inefficient way to create change, while interventions in the workplace and the distribution of wealth works pretty well.

To take another example, Sheryl Sandberg, the author of Lean In, has become a model for white-collar women everywhere; I have been critical of her book, but in reading it found plenty of advice that applies to my white-collar workplace and that I could plausibly take as advice. Her example and encouragement are no doubt a great boon for women committed to working in competitive Silicon Valley startups. At the same time, Sandberg’s example only goes so far—it doesn’t do much good to tell a housekeeper to “lean in”—she’d just be doing more work for her boss, with no gain for her, buying into a system emotionally that exploits her physically. And in fact, when Sheryl Sandberg visited Harvard, in part to celebrate women in business, she was petitioned by housekeepers at a Harvard-owned hotel who hoped that she would “lean in” with them as part of their campaign for a union and better working conditions. She declined. They ultimately gained a union anyway and have seen work abuses drop and income increase.

All of this is to say something pretty self-evident if you think about it—example and representation is probably pretty important within a class—it’s hard to prove, but our gut tells us that role models matter. The mere existence of female leaders can inspire confidence in others who have opportunities and just need that extra strength to seize them. What representation is pretty bad at doing is affecting who gets those opportunities—if you’re poor, no positive example is gonna just boost you out of it. That’s an old right-wing myth—if you can look up at your superiors, you can tug your bootstraps in their direction.

Others have catalogued Hillary Clinton’s opposition to policies that would redistribute wealth and power toward women a la the Nordic model, so I’ll keep that brief here. Suffice to say that she has spoken about women caring for their children on welfare with venom and has made herself an enemy of the poor. She is surely not the most egregious opponent of women’s well-being—she is, after all, pro-choice—but her allies, practically speaking, are big donors like Goldman Sachs and Walmart, which lobby hard against redistribution and good treatment of women in the workplace. Voting for Hillary is, unfortunately, a strike against poor people.

So, to support Hillary Clinton is to support a genuinely good example for white-collar women’s behavior when trying to beat sexism at work at the expense of policies that might help the majority of women. Or is that a false dichotomy?

Some believe that the presence of Bernie Sanders in the race has offered an alternative—his policies redistribute more, and he is a self-professed feminist, but…he is a man. No inspiring grit-in-the-face-of-sexism to be had in this old white dude. He is, however, a socialist and, if you haven’t figured it out already, I think socialism is women’s best hope because it accounts for the policies that will get them the stuff they need. His policies are better for more women because they’re more redistributive.

“When we heard Bernie Sanders talking about everything we’ve been talking about it was a no brainer,” says Karen Higgins one of three co-presidents of the National Nurses Union and a nurse for the last 40 years. She’s spent the last 37 working in intensive care and at 62 still works full-time at Boston Medical Center. When I spoke with her, she was home preparing to go campaign for Sanders in New Hampshire. The NNU has endorsed him, citing his longtime alignment on their trademark issues: single-payer healthcare, taxing Wall Street, less college debt for their kids, and opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which includes concessions to pharmaceutical companies. Contrary to much commentary on the left, the nurses don’t regard a commitment to single payer as foolishly ideological: Higgins describes receiving intensive care patients whose first question is what the treatment will cost and how they can pay. She differentiates between an insurance system (Obamacare) and universal healthcare, which would eliminate the need for individuals to wrangle with private companies. It’s been a long time since a serious candidate carried a commitment to this system as a banner issue. The nurses of the 90 percent female union, as a result, have found themselves more inspired by Sanders.

When I ask Higgins about gender, she does seem a tad regretful. “There’s a piece of me as a woman that would definitely have loved to see a woman in that position so there’s a little bit of a heartbreak that she did not come out as strong” on the nurses’ issues. “It would be nice if she had taken a stance.” What does she think of the Twitter phenomenon of Bernie Bros? “I don’t think think I’ve seen that one. I’m not good about Twitter.”

It's possible to fight sexism at work and abuse the help. One could argue Hillary has done this on a national scale.

The argument that a Clinton presidency would increase respect for women, while a Sanders presidency would do nothing to create greater gender equity is belied by the experience of nurses and the people they serve. Hillary might face sexism at work, and so might white-collar women, but so do the nurses—they do care work largely assigned to women that has enjoyed little support from the government in terms of funding, wages, and reasonable structures of care. The problems that afflict the majority of women can only be resolved in the realm of organizing, policy-making, and other large-scale efforts. The proper question for a presidential election is who will forward these big programs. It is absolutely possible to fight sexism at work, come home, and abuse the help. One could argue that Hillary has done this on a national scale. “I hate to say this to women,” says Higgins, “but that has to be the real priority, whether it’s a man or a woman—what it’ll take to get people back on their feet in this country and take care of them.”

The Democrats’ ‘Super-Delegate’ Mistake

June 17, 2016

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/06/17/the-democrats-super-delegate-mistake/

Exclusive: Democratic “super-delegates” – hundreds of party insiders – tilted the presidential race to Hillary Clinton though not chosen by voters, an undemocratic idea that was never intended, says Spencer Oliver who was there at the creation.

By Spencer Oliver

The issue of the Democratic Party’s “super-delegates” threatens to divide the Democratic Party at the Philadelphia convention as Sen. Bernie Sanders argues that the automatic vote given these party leaders made the race undemocratic because they did not compete in the primaries and caucuses and broke heavily and early in favor of Hillary Clinton.

And Sanders has a point. I was there at the creation of this party feature and I can attest that the idea of “super-delegates” making up around 15 percent of the voting delegates – and thus holding a powerful influence over the selection process – was never what was intended.

The original thinking was that a relative handful of state party chairs who had to remain neutral while setting up the primaries and caucuses would still get to go to the conventions. However, the numbers of “super-delegates” kept expanding and expanding as other party leaders lobbied to be included among those not having to compete in the delegate-selection process.

The “super-delegate” system was born in the wake of Democratic Party efforts after the 1968 convention to make the presidential selection process more open and democratic. I was involved in the work of all the reform commissions as the administrative assistant to Democratic National Committee Chair in 1966, later as President of the national Young Democrats, and subsequently as the founding Executive Director of the Association of State Democratic Chairs.

Named for their various leaders, these reform efforts were called the Wagner, McGovern, Fraser, O’Hara and Sanford Commissions, which made their reform recommendations to the DNC. All were tasked with making our party more open, more transparent, more inclusive, more democratic, and ultimately more successful in attracting the broad support of America’s diverse population. In other words, the idea was to put more power in the hands of rank-and-file Democrats.

This represented a major reform from the 1960s when party bosses like Carmine DeSapio in New York, powerful Governors like David Lawrence in Pennsylvania and Mike DiSalle in Ohio, and legendary Mayors like Richard Daley in Chicago dominated the Democratic conventions and had an outsized role in picking the Democratic presidential nominee.

The reform commissions were a response to that unpopular and highly criticized system. The Mississippi Freedom Party at the Atlantic City convention in 1964 and the anti-war protesters in Chicago in 1968 made the reform inevitable and certainly necessary.

Reforms and Consequence

The reforms brought American citizens much more extensively into the process of choosing the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer. The reforms also required State Democratic Chairs to be neutral as they organized their states’ primary and caucus systems. However, that meant the state chairs could not be elected to attend the party conventions as delegates committed to one candidate or the other.

So, the State Democratic Chairs proposed the idea of so-called “super-delegates” in the early 1970s, arguing that they should be automatic delegates because the reforms called for by the Wagner Commission and the DNC would otherwise exclude them from participation in the conventions. The DNC bought that argument. After all, they would be a relatively small number of delegates.

But then the governors wanted the same privilege, followed by congressional leaders and then the DNC members themselves. This expanding group now constitutes nearly 30 percent of the 2,383 delegates needed for nomination, significantly diluting the strength of the pledged delegates elected in primaries and caucuses.

Along the way, the “super-delegates” seem to have forgotten why they are there — and how they got there — in the first place.

On Feb. 12, 2016, when DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was asked on CNN whether the existence of “super-delegates” might give the impression to regular voters that the process was rigged, she answered: “Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grass-roots activists. We … want to give every opportunity to grass-roots activists and diverse committed Democrats to be able to participate, attend and be a delegate at the convention. And so we separate out those unpledged delegates to make sure that there isn’t competition between them.”

But “super-delegates” really were an unintended outgrowth of the reform process and indeed fly in the face of the reform goals, which were to extend to the average voter the power to select the party’s nominee. By contrast, the “super-delegates” are given the power to vote for the nominee simply because they occupy – or in some cases occupied years ago – positions that entitle them to vote without having to earn that privilege by participating in the primaries or caucuses. Is this fair? Is this democratic?

What’s Good for Kazakhstan…

I am reminded of my past experience as secretary general of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s parliamentary assembly in organizing the election observation mission to the first elections in Kazakhstan in 1994 when we were trying to encourage the former Soviet republics to transition toward democracy.

The Kazakhs were trying to move in that direction, but they adopted an election law that allowed the President to appoint 25 percent of the parliament. For that reason, we declared that the election was clearly unfair. The Kazakhs were mortified and internationally embarrassed. They later changed the law and – although democracy has not yet blossomed in that part of the world – such non-electoral legislative appointments have disappeared throughout the area. Yet, a similar rule exists in the Democratic Party of the United States of America.

I am not arguing that our party leaders should not attend the Philadelphia convention. They should be on the floor, entitled to speak, to lobby, to advocate and to impart their wisdom and experience to their fellow delegates. They have certainly earned that right. But they should not have the right to vote for the Democratic Party’s choice for president and vice president.

That “super-delegates” would hold such power over the selection process was never the intent of the party’s reforms and indeed goes against the goals of those reforms, which have largely succeeded in drawing citizens more directly into the process while also broadening the Democratic Party’s tent to include minorities, women, unions, young people, LGBT – just about every component needed for electoral victory.

This divisive issue of “super-delegates” can be easily resolved. The party leaders, i.e., the “super-delegates” themselves and – most importantly – our members of Congress and governors, should make the “super-delegates” non-voting delegates, with all the convention privileges and honors they deserve, except the right to vote on the nomination. The DNC could even do this by meeting the day before the convention and amending the party’s rules to correct this democratic deficit in our system.

Spencer Oliver recently retired as Secretary General of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly. He previously served for eight years as a senior official at the DNC. And for more than twenty years on Capitol Hill, concluding as Chief Counsel of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

TRUMP MIGHT ACTUALLY WIN?

Can Hillary Win Over Bernie Voters?

by Ted Rall

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/16/can-hillary-win-over-bernie-voters/

Unless you follow politics closely, you could be forgiven for thinking that Hillary Clinton has locked up the Democratic presidential nomination. This is not true. She still doesn’t have the requisite number of delegates. That could, and probably will, happen next month when her lead in superdelegates puts her over the top at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia – when the superdelegates actually, you know, cast their actual votes.

The media, however, doesn’t want you to know that Bernie Sanders is still in the race. And so, based on that flimsiest of measures – an opinion survey of superdelegates who are allowed to change their mind at any point before July’s DNC – they’ve called the Democratic race for Clinton.

This completely illogical reasoning logically leads pundits to the question of the month: how can the Hillary Clinton campaign convince progressive supporters of Bernie Sanders – whose race was largely based on the assumption that Clinton is so far to the right that she might as well be a Republican – to vote for her?

Every four years mainstream political writers and commentators push Democrats to the right after the primaries, arguing that swing voters decide presidential elections. Like trickle-down economics, however, that doesn’t seem to have been true any time in the recent past. Political parties seem to perform best when they motivate their base to turn up at the polls. Given the fact that Republican voters are congenitally more likely to fall in line behind their nominee even if he turns out to be a potato – or, this year, a proto-fascist – than Democrats, it’s obvious to everyone that Hillary Clinton will need as many Bernie Sanders supporters as possible in November if she indeed becomes her party’s nominee.

Obvious to everyone but Hillary.

Last week, NBC’s Lester Holt asked her about Sanders: “Can you name one idea that he’s put forward that you want to embrace? That he has really changed your position on?”

Her answer: a big fat negatori.

“Well, it’s not that so much as the passion that he brought to the goals that–his campaign set,” said Clinton.

Granted, I can’t think of anything she could do to get me to vote for her. But there are millions of Sanders voters who could be convinced not to sit home on election day, support a third-party candidate like Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, or defect to Donald Trump. She’ll need those voters if there are any more Orlando-style terrorist attacks (great for Trump’s fear-based campaign) or, for that matter, after presidential debates in which I expect Trump to savage her.

Maybe Debbie Wasserman Schultz can schedule those debates for the middle of the night on Kazakhstani state television.

Except when she’s hanging out with investment bankers and Walmart board members, Hillary Clinton reflexively refuses to compromise. If she continues her “I have nothing to learn from Bernie and he’ll be lucky to get a speech at the convention” attitude, however, better get prepared for President Trump.

What do Bernie Sanders supporters want? As Trump says, everything is negotiable. So let’s negotiate!

“Add back the public option to the Affordable Care Act,” Howard Dean suggests to Hillary in the New York Times. “Let Americans vote with their feet about whether they want to be in a single payer or the current system.”

The problem with that is, big insurance companies bribed her with $13 million in campaign contributions to get her to say that single payer “will never, ever come to pass.”

Dean wants Clinton to back Sanders’ “massive overhaul of the criminal justice system, starting with emptying for-profit prisons and juvenile detention centers.”

Nice idea, except that here too, she’s owned: she collected as many big donations from lobbyists for the for-profit prison industry as Marco Rubio.

He also wants her to embrace Bernie’s push for reforming Wall Street – but how likely is it that someone who made over $100 million giving speeches to scumbags in the financial services industry will turn against her backers?

“She should release the transcripts of her speeches and explain any of the objectionable things she said in them,” says Stephanie Rioux. If Clinton were going to show us her speeches, it would already have happened.

It may not feel like it now, but Hillary Clinton is in a pickle.

Her supporters keep citing her willingness to support Barack Obama after her defeat in 2008 as an example Bernie Sanders ought to emulate now. But Clinton and Obama were ideologically virtually identical. Both were members of the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council. True, Obama pretended to oppose the Iraq war, which Clinton supported. But Obama wasn’t in the Senate in 2003. When he did get the chance to vote on Iraq, he voted six times out of six in favor of funding it. And he continued the war long after he took office.

Conversely, there’s a huge gap between Clintonism and Sandersism. Bernie Sanders is essentially a Democrat circa George McGovern in 1972: he favors big government antipoverty programs, socialized medicine, and a limited role for the US military overseas. He’s skeptical of free trade agreements, and hasn’t met a Wall Street banker that he likes. Hillary Clinton isn’t just against all that – she’s diametrically opposed, essentially a Republican circa George W. Bush in 2003, many of whose advisers she shares.

“Sanders supporters…are motivated not by animosity toward Hillary Clinton but by a sophisticated analysis and belief that the system is irreparably broken and compromised,” saysSanderista Jonathan Tasini. Actually, only the second half of that sentence is true. As anyone who has attended a Bernie rally can tell you, there’s plenty of animosity toward Clinton.

So what does Hillary Clinton do if she wants to win?

She’ll have to sell out some of her big corporate donors – and she’ll have to do it in a big way. If she goes big, she could appoint Bernie Sanders as her vice president – a sure path to victory – or as an economic czar, like giving him both the secretary of the treasury and the head of the Federal Reserve Bank.

Failing that, she’ll have to adopt at least a few of Bernie’s major platform planks. But here’s the rub. Even if she does, are Bernie’s supporters naïve enough to think that she would follow through?

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Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net, is the author of the book “Snowden,” the biography of the NSA whistleblower.