Young and Pretty

Is it really a sexist argument that a woman should get bumped to the front of the job queue for consideration because she's younger and prettier? Yes. It's a problem that handicaps women just as they get to an age that, for men, would often come with greater appreciation of a person's lifetime of accomplishment and in many cases lead to the assumption of greater responsibilities.

Older men are dignified and respectable. Older women, eh, they're dried up, look like someone's mother, should be kept out of sight.

As linked above, here's blogger and labor organizer Nathan Newman on the fight to organize against age discrimination in Las Vegas casinos:

Fight for Dignity: Early on in Vegas, the casino owners wanted to stick the youngest waitresses on those tables, so if you aged a few years as a cocktail waitress, you often found yourself consigned to siberia in the casino. Or worse, you had the best positions handed out by supervisors based on who would do "favors" for them.

At least they couldn't be fired just for getting old because of the basic union contract -- and this was true before age discrimination legislation was passed in Congress -- but the indignity of sex discrimination in all its forms was harshly at play for Vegas cocktail waitresses.

So they organized.

They first had to kick the butts of their own then-male labor leaders back in the early 1970s to take the issue seriously, but the union took up the cause and forced changes into the union contract. From that day forward, all "stations" in a casino would be bid on based on seniority. The best spots would go to the waitresses with the longest tenure, no favoritism or age discrimination allowed.

That is what unions get you-- the right not to be told you are too old to be presentable in public. The right not to have a supervisor play favoritism and demand you degrade yourself in order to feed your family.

Not for Sale: In unionized casinos, a rich high-roller can buy himself the fanciest penthouse in the hotel. He can buy the fanciest food. He can buy almost anything.

But when he sits at the craps table, the one thing he can't buy is that the woman serving his drinks be replaced by the youngest girl in the house. ...

At the same time, women also face the problem of being dismissed more readily than men of similar accomplishment and age for being 'just a pretty face.' In one workplace, I've heard women discuss being glad when they got old enough to start being treated like a person instead of like a woman.

It might sound, if you're looking for what the feminist position is on women's appearances, that you can't win for losing.

Funny, that's about how it feels to women.

I know it's a hard thing to do, because I even catch myself doing it sometimes, but it's important to try to avoid judging people based on our perceptions of their attractiveness. It's something second nature to all of us. It happens at a level of consciousness we often seem to hardly be aware of. Fight against it, anyway.

When I was a girl, I spent a lot of time people watching with an older female relative. A regular comment of hers was "would you look at that", the 'that' referring to someone she thought was just appalling looking. Sometimes it applied to men, but usually she was talking about a woman. Too ugly. Too slutty. Too attention-grabbing. Too counterculture. Too slovenly.

(Slovenly? Yeah, unkempt, messy, untidy, etc. Consider that there's no popular female counterpart to the icon of the absent-minded professor. A woman who's careless about her appearance is just sloppy. Or maybe gay. A guy who doesn't care might even be considered ultra-masculine, to a certain point. Whereas a guy who cares too much, maybe he's gay. And how horrible. Criminy.)

Her voice is still some part of my running internal dialogue -- judgemental and cruel and insulting -- it has become my own voice. I hear myself thinking those things; her thoughts from so many years ago thinking me, as they say.

I may have to keep reminding myself that it's wrong to judge people that way for the rest of my life, and every time I do, I will feel that I've failed as a person to be sufficiently compassionate. The only thing I have as an option to overcome it is to try my hardest not to give voice to those thoughts so that others won't assume from my example that it's an acceptable way to evaluate and treat people. And I'll tell you, I will feel an incredible sense of accomplishment if at the end of my life I can say that I helped end that form of prejudice with me.

Dan Quayle

We don't live in a society that would tolerate a VP pick from any disadvantaged class of people that would be the (fill in the blank) version of Dan Quayle. It's unfortunately true that the behavior of the first people past the post matters for how the rest are perceived.

That's an artifact of a blatantly bigoted culture: no one thinks that White men are incompetent to run anything because Dan Quayle (or George W. Bush, come to it) was an incompetent schmuck in constant need of an oral pedectomy. He had wide latitude to screw up because there wasn't anyone judging him as a proxy for his race or gender or orientation.

The standard for VP should be someone who's qualified to be president.

Both Clinton and Obama were so obviously qualified that either of them outshine several nominees in my lifetime. A VP pick that was as plainly capable and engaging as either of them would speak volumes of the nominee's confidence. Quayle, on the other hand, failed that test even by the estimation of many in his own party at the time, so if you're suggesting people who drop to the Quayle bar (where many in the party would incline to disqualify them on the basis of competence or issue representation,) expect to irritate people.

We are not Republicans here, who nominate dunces just to challenge the mettle of our political advisors.

If a pick also brings greater diversity to the ticket, that's tremendous, but no one wants to be transparently pandered to. Yes, we're the party that wants greater representation for everyone. Yet the motive for that is a belief that bigotry isn't only immoral and cruel, it's stupid: excluding women, gays, people of color and the disabled from political and economic power also deprives society of valuable talent.

No one wants a candidate that, at a crucial time, takes away from promoting that essential truth. Democrats are a political party with plenty of good talent specifically because of our commitment to inclusion. Let's have our VP pick reflect that.

Not Just About Women

Again, getting a woman, any woman, on the ticket, isn't necesarily great from a feminist perspective. Getting a male Clinton supporter who's bad on women's issues, also ridiculous.

Consider the extremes: Elizabeth Dole isn't a feminist because she's a woman, and Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't a feminist because he's married to Maria Shriver. Other glosses on this are insulting because they ignore the substance of feminist criticisms and concerns.

There were also feminists, to look at it from another angle, who supported Edwards because they consider an anti-poverty, anti-corporate greed stance to be to be important to their larger political aims. And because committed feminists had a more nuanced view of the primary than 'we must support the female candidate,' you can be sure that Clinton's supporters in general had a far greater set of issues than gender essentialism.

Now, Clinton has the benefit of being endorsed by much of the party and many constituencies, which makes her a unique case for consideration. While I don't think this means that she has to be the vice presidential nominee, it means that she has a far more credible claim than many potential picks to be able to bring in votes. Not just votes from one state, or one region of the country, either; she's proven she can get votes all over.

Clinton might not even want the job. I can see a number of reasons why she'd be better off staying in the Senate, and I'm sure you can, also. Considering that she's promised to help campaign for Obama for the sake of the party, without having even been offered the position as far as any of us know, her presence on the ticket might not be needed to secure her voters.

But she also carries the disadvantage of having voted to go to war with Iraq. Even many of us who supported her considered this to be a liability; the war is no longer popular with the American mainstream, and it's even less popular with Democrats. As a running mate for Obama, it runs counter to the message of his campaign.

I think that unless Clinton were the pick, and only then because of the obvious popular support she's garnered, supporters of the Iraq war in 2002 should be disqualified from consideration.

Over at FireDogLake, Christy Hardin Smith also brings up another consideration of many Rust and Mining Belt Democrats who flocked to Clinton, which is that they like to know what they're getting out of a candidate. They want someone they know, and that they feel knows them. They're conservative in the sense of being distrustful of new things.

That doesn't make them bad people. It doesn't make them ignorant. In their experience, change has usually meant more hardship. Indeed, there are a lot of policy areas over the last few decades where the precautionary principle would have served the nation better.

Because it's so recent that disadvantaged groups started winning higher office in any significant numbers, it also means that most of the politicians they feel they know are White. And certainly, all the politicians they feel they know in this contest. As Christy notes, Obama has already started to work to win them over and give them that level of comfort with him. His Appalachia tour was a great start.

It might be argued that a regional pick is absolutely necessary in order to win these voters over, but I disagree.

Take two examples: Clinton hadn't lived in Arkansas since 1992; then she went and became a Senator from New York, a state that's (in some people's minds) infamously blue, and racked up a fairly liberal voting record, but they liked her a lot when she came back through 16 years later. Gore was not only a Senator from Tennessee, but the son of a Senator from Tennessee and a lifelong Baptist; if his own state had voted for him not 8 years after leaving to become the vice president, he might now be in the end of his second term as president.

Regional essentialism is no more useful than gender essentialism. Clinton, for whatever reason, was able to spark a sense of empathy with these voters that Gore couldn't just eight years ago. There was a feel to how she came across that they like, and something about Obama that they weren't willing to try on the first go around. For some of them, it might have been race, though that issue is not confined to any geographic region. But it might have also been that they were looking for a hard to define cultural resonance; the sort that Republicans spend a lot of time faking in order to lie to people about where their sympathies lie.

Obama's got a few months to make his case to Rust and Mining Belt voters, and it might help to have a VP candidate that they can feel more of a cultural connection to.

Who Would I Suggest?

Erm, no one. Certainly not strongly enough that I feel like making a public issue of it. I'm far more interested in laying out a basis for evaluation, though perhaps more accurately, a screen for rejection.

We've been picking presidential candidates on the basis of race and gender considerations for as long as there's been such a thing as the United States. In fact, even farther back, when the thirteen colonies operated under the Articles of Confederation.

Those considerations, until quite recently, were that you'd better be a White guy.

Since, as is true of every other arbitrarily defined type of human being, being White says basically nothing about your compassion, your competence, your intelligence, your diligence, your grace under fire, etc., that's landed us with some real stinkers. The premise of affirmative action has always been that a person's quality isn't defined by their body type and we could prove it if we gave more people more opportunities, the premise of those who'd fight it has been that White males comprise all the talent; which argument looks stupid now?

It's incredibly uplifting that two people who wouldn't have even had the right to vote a hundred years ago, give or take, were the two strongest contestants to be the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party this year. They were both deemed acceptable standard bearers for the mainstream of the party's policy positions over any number of White guys. More, considering all the barriers Obama worked hard to overcome in his life, I'm glad that a man of his accomplishment and worth decided to run for office as a Democrat, so very proud that our party made him our nominee.

For many of us who come from prejudice-saturated backgrounds, it will be a joy to vote for him in November and be able to say, 'maybe it can end with me.'

And on the day I cast my vote for Obama and look at the name beside his on the ticket, I'd like to be, if not necessarily as uplifted as all that, at least not disappointed. I'd guess many of the rest of her voters feel the same.

Update [2008-6-8 1:36:9 by Natasha Chart]: And indeed, electing a Black man president will still not be the end of the story on race relations in this country. Not by a long shot, not least because as Shaker rrp notes, there are more than two races of people in this country. There will continue to be work on that score. And Obama himself will need to be pushed, as any of our candidates would have needed, to take the more progressive stance out of his many choices. It isn't the promised land, and we still have the general election to go, but it's a thing to savor.

Update [2008-6-8 3:41:13 by Natasha Chart]: What Jill said. Doesn't that contradict everything I wrote up above? No. Because as she points out, Bill Clinton wasn't actually the first Black president, something which I think everyone is well aware of at this point. There are ways in which it changes things that Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice served as Secretary of State, and then nothing particularly terrible happened as a consequence except that they helped the Bush administration seem less psychotic. Mmmm, complexity.

[editor's note, by Natasha Chart] I have been informed several times below that other pro-Clinton bloggers have said that picking any woman besides Clinton would be insulting. First, I'm not interchangeable with those bloggers. Second, I just don't understand that line of reasoning, sure as I am that some people do stand by it. Is it insulting to John Edwards if Obama picks another White man? Would it insult Bill Richardson if Obama picked another Hispanic? It seems to me that the feminist position would hold that there's more than one woman in this country qualified to be president, and if Obama's pick happens to be female and seems like a good candidate, why shouldn't I be glad of that?

I think it'd be worse if he wasn't even going to consider a woman besides Clinton, who isn't sure to want the spot. With as many female politicians as we do have in our party, why shouldn't it seem perfectly normal for some of their names to come up in consideration for top jobs? And as I said below, considering the number of women in leadership in her campaign, Clinton doesn't seem like someone who'd pull the ladder up after herself. And that doesn't make sense. Why would someone run an historic campaign achieving an amazing milestone for women's rights and then be mad when the public is introduced to the shocking idea that your party was serious about believing you when you said that women could even do *that* job?

It doesn't hurt women for other women to get ahead, a sentiment I'd think was so obvious it would hardly need to be stated to people who aren't Maureen Dowd; the NYT's in-house, anti-woman, pseudo-feminist, well-if-we-have-to-have-a-woman columnist.