THE REPUGNICAN DEBATE

Let me try to sum up the hypocritical, small-minded Republican debate, hosted by CNN and YouTube tonight, and its assault on American values:

On a woman’s right to choose: Roe v. Wade should be overturned so every state can (and hopefully will) pass draconian laws to outlaw abortion because absolutely every human life is precious, even the itty bitty not-sure-it’s-viable-yet embryo.

On the death penalty: Some people just need to die because they are so absolutely awful under the laws of our land that, well, their life’s not so precious after all.

On gays and lesbians in the military: Thank you Brigadier General Keith Kerr for your 42 years of service and for hiding the fact that you were gay all that time because otherwise we would have had to kick you out of the Army that you served so nobly and well. After all, as Mitt Romney pointed out, we wouldn’t want those poor conservative recruits who make up most of the military to be uncomfortable and compromise unit cohesion. Gays and lesbians should be uncomfortable instead — really uncomfortable. And, as John McCain says, all the military leaders he’s consulted say that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is working fine. Why try a more equitable solution true to our deepest American values, like say Harry Truman did when he racially integrated the military in 1948?

DING, DONG, TRENT LOTT IS GONE

Talk about early Christmas presents! Republican Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, announced that he would retire by the end of the year. Lott, who is minority whip, may be fed up with the prospect of an even smaller Republican minority likely to populate the Senate after the 2008 elections. He’s a proud man and he likes his power. Better to get out now, even though he was only reelected last year, and let Republican Governor Haley Barbour name a replacement who can get established in time for the special election for the seat that will likely be held next November.

Of course, there is the little matter of the lobbying rules change that would mean an extra year’s wait (up to 2 years from 1 year) for ex-members of congress to be allowed to lobby. There’s a ton of money to be made over there on K Street, and he who hesitates will be, if not lost, at least wandering in the wilderness for an extra long while. If that’s the reason Lott’s leaving then the Democratic congress should get extra kudos and a bump in its approval rating for passing the new law.

Lott will be remembered best for his remarks, in December 2002, that made him infamous as a modern-day racist, although it wasn’t the first or only time he’d shown his true colors. At a 100th birthday party for Senator Strom Thurmond, who had led the segregationist “Dixiecrats” out of the Democratic convention in 1948 and put himself up as their presidential nominee, Lott said:

” When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.” Four days later he issued a written apology, but it wasn’t enough. He was forced to step down as majority leader. He should have resigned, but even wounded, he wielded too much power to give it up over, as he put it, a poor choice of words.

He’ll be remembered, of course, for far more than accidentally pulling back the curtain on his racist beliefs. Lott is nothing if not a man for his party, which has meant doing the 100% bidding of the Chamber of Commerce and anti-tax groups, and being a principle part of the cheer-leading Bush hit squad that lorded over the Senate until 2006. He also personally ushered the partial-birth abortion bill through the Congress and raced it to the White House for Bush’s signature. He was a proud and vocal sponsor of anti-gay marriage legislation, and a vociferous opponent of hate crimes bills. And Lott was happy to jettison his conservative credentials to cut the deals that brought millions of dollars of porked-up spending to Mississippi.

It’s a good day to celebrate when a vestige of what was worst in America leaves the main stage. Maybe Lott can find a nice niche with the firm where former Republican Senator George “Macaca” Allen is working. If Lott’s lucky Allen might show him the confederate flag from his college dorm room and they can reminisce about an America that only they could love.

Read about Eleanor Roosevelt’s run for the presidency, the Dixiecrats and more in “Eleanor vs. Ike” out in January, 2008.

THE CHESS PIPELINE

This news from the world of chess: 17-year-old Kateryna Lahno of Ukraine, a woman grandmaster (which equals a men’s international master), beat 13-year-old Parimarjan Negi of India, the world’s youngest grandmaster. Actually she trounced him 11 to 7. Then, in Mexico a week ago, four of the top 30 women in the world squared off against four Mexican men, including a grandmaster and an international master. The levels were essentially equal, but again the women ran away with a win of 19 1/2 to 12 1/2.

No one can explain why women continue to lag behind men in chess, but these results suggest that the reason is not that women aren’t as smart, but rather that more of us need to play. A reminder that, as in politics and business, parity will only come with filling the pipeline.

So teach your daughters chess. You can start by the age of five, as I did with my daughter. As Gary Kasparov makes clear in his new book “How Life Imitates Chess,” there’s a lot of learning on that board that goes beyond the game, and who knows, maybe you’ll be training the next grandmaster.

Visit my website!

HILLARY’S AUTHENTICITY TRAP

How will Republicans attack Hillary Clinton should she get the nomination? Karl Rove, President Bush’s political brain and Republican party uber-strategist, offers a clue in his first missive as a writer for Newsweek. He calls Hillary “a Democrat who calculates almost everything, including her accent and laugh,” and advises that anyone running against her will benefit from being “direct.”

Rove apparently believes that the best attack on Hillary is that “authenticity” thing that pundits have been bringing up against her forever. Her supposed lack of “true north.” How vulnerable is Hillary to this attack? The answer is pretty vulnerable, but not because she’s a phony. The authenticity rap against Hillary is coming straight out of the stereotype handbook, and most of the pundits putting it forward probably don’t see their own bias.

For proof, consider what Professor Frank Flynn at Stanford discovered about two years ago. He altered a Harvard Business Case study about a woman named Heidi Roizen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Half his class got the study using the real name of Heidi, and half got the study with the name Howard substituted. Here’s what happened according to Professor Flynn:

“ Before class, I had the students go online and rate their impressions of “Roizen” on several dimensions…the results show that students were much harsher on Heidi than on Howard across the board. Although they think she’s just as competent and effective as Howard, they don’t like her, they wouldn’t hire her, and they wouldn’t want to work with her. As gender researchers would predict, this seems to be driven by how much they disliked Heidi’s aggressive personality. The more assertive they thought Heidi was, the more harshly they judged her (but the same was not true for those who rated Howard).”

Sound familiar? There’s fairly ready agreement that Hillary’s just as competent and effective as her male competitors, but she’s also assertive and aggressive when needed. Of course, for men being assertive or aggressive is expected and unremarkable — and a key leadership trait. But for women, the behavior that’s necessary to reach for any high level position, and certainly needed in the stratosphere of presidential campaigning, is offensive.

Ironically, Hillary’s critics readily agree that she is genuinely ambitious, aggressive and direct, and those behaviors lead them to see her as unlikeable, difficult, unfriendly and not trustworthy in her beliefs. These critics would, no doubt, find her more authentic all around if she came across as self-effacing, indirect and passive, because her behavior would comport with their stereotyped view of women. But no one wants a leader, much less a President, like that.

Those people who have convinced themselves that Hillary is a phony might try a little experiment. In their own minds they should change her name to Henry and see if they genuinely hold the same beliefs about her(his) authenticity.

READ ABOUT ELEANOR ROOSEVELT RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN THE NEW NOVEL “ELEANOR VS. IKE!

FOX FANTASIES

“The Stronger Women Get the More Men Love Football.” That was the name of a book my friend Mariah Burton Nelson wrote a while back. An updated title might read, “The Stronger Women Get the More Fox Loves Smut.”

With Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, and Senator Hillary Clinton not just a candidate for President, but the front-runner to win, the sexist orgy that passes for Fox channel programming has flipped into overdrive. It wasn’t enough that any on-air female had to look like a talking mannequin. Even the brilliant Greta Van Susteren scalpeled her face into compliance before taking over a show that started with promise, but has turned into one more Foxified tele-tabloidization.

Now Fox is going further, using the most objectified, smutty and often inane images of women during the video feed that accompanies stories. Fox producers seem to be following one overriding mantra: no matter the story, illustrate it with lots of (pardon the Fox-y vernacular) tits, ass, thongs and bikinis, the more nubile or pre-pubescent the better. How better to keep women down than to hold them up as objects of sexual fantasy? The message is clear without Fox talking heads saying a word: women are only good for one thing.

Thanks to filmmaker Robert Greenwald, you don’t have to stomach watching Fox to see the evidence of their bias. Greenwald has put together a terrific little film. , championed by Keith Olbermann, (who, like Stephen Colbert, has a keen eye and ear for media sexism). Watch it and fume. Watch it and wonder why women aren’t walking off their jobs at Fox and picketing. Watch it and think about running as a woman for President, or as a small-town mayor, or as a woman trying for a job promotion or being taken seriously anywhere, anytime.

Fox is the channel for people threatened by the idea of gender equality. The people who tell pollsters they wouldn’t vote for a woman for President under any circumstances. The people who are most comfortable thinking of women in one way only — as objects for their sexual fantasies or exploits.

The stronger women get the less willing we are to settle for anything less than the full right to be who and what we choose. And that idea just drives Fox crazy.

THE HAPPY TALK REALITY CHECK

In this second bleak term of the Bush presidency, the Iraq war, health care concerns, immigration and income inequality have continued to push the issue of gender inequality out of the news. When it is discussed, there’s a rotating group of pundits (think Christina Hoff Sommers or Ann Coulter) who insist that “we’ve come all the way, baby.” Whatever do women want? The playing field is level, perhaps even tilting our way goes the happy talk. Why, we have a woman Speaker of the House, a woman major party candidate for President and there must be more women CEO’s, right? Wrong.

The good news for women is symbolic, at best.  Here’s an occasional reflection on the real results of sexism in America, this time brought to you by the World Economic Forum. For several years, the good people at the Forum have been issuing a Global Gender Gap Report.  The Report measures inequality between men and women based on:
Economic participation and opportunity, including salaries and access to high-skilled employment. Educational attainment, both basic and higher level education. Political empowerment and health and survival.

Here are the top ten countries who came out the best in the report: Sweden, Norway,
Finland, Iceland, N. Zealand, Philippines, Germany, Denmark, Ireland, Spain.

What happened to the U.S.A? Well, we’re number 31, down from 23 in 2006. The report summarizes the reasons: “The percentage of female legislators, senior officials and managers fell from 46% to 42% and the scores received on wage equality for similar work fell from 0.68 to 0.64. These two decreases were only partially offset by the increase in the ratio of women and men’s labour force participation rates (this grew from 0.82 to 0.86), resulting in an overall drop in the United States’ score on the economic participation and opportunity subindex, which in turn pulled down the United States’ overall score and rank on the Index.”

Sorry not to sound terribly happy here, but “we’ve got a long way to go, baby!”

Women Surge in New Jersey Elections

A record number of Democratic and Republican women ran for state legislative seats yesterday in New Jersey and after the votes were tallied they made gains in both houses.Two new senators will bring the number in that house to nine. In the Assembly, with nine pickups, women will hold 120 seats, making them 25% of the total body.

It’s a stunning and encouraging turn-around from 2005 when women held less than 16 percent of the Senate and Assembly seats, a low that Women Advocating for Good Government notes mirrored the Assembly in, wait…1927!

What explains the surge? A high number of retirements and resignations opened up seats and made races seem more viable. Political party leadership was amenable, even encouraging, to new women candidates, a critical factor since studies show that women are more likely to run if asked to do so. Campaign training by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers and others certainly made a difference as women often feel underqualified and inexperienced, whether that is relatively true in terms of their male counterparts or not.

Did women help boost more women in New Jersey into office? Data isn’t in yet, but here’s an interesting anecdote from a male voter’s point of view, “James Marrow, 24, of Paterson’s 4th Ward, said he voted for Evans in the 35th District, in part because she is a woman. “Females treat voters like their kids,” said Marrow. “They make sure everything is OK.”

Yes, Mr.Marrow, you’re right. Mothering is a leadership skill.

Now that New Jersey has risen from the bottom rank of states with women in elected office (43rd) to number 15, maybe there’s hope for Mississippi and Virginia, where elections were also held yesterday, to move out of the bottom ten.

Visit my website: www.robingerber.com and read about “Eleanor vs. Ike!”

Political Volunteers 2.0

In 1960, John Kennedy’s presidential campaign manager, Larry O’Brien wrote an historic campaign manual. In it, for the first time, was a section on organizing volunteers for the campaign. O’Brien had an organized mind and management style. His recommendations included organizing all kinds of committees, what we would call ‘affinity groups,’ today. He also instituted practices that came to be common in subsequent campaigns at the national level.

Volunteering in a presidential campaign after 1960 meant working the phones, urging people to register to vote, helping them fill out the forms, dropping leaflets door-to-door and talking to voters who might answer your knock. Volunteering was organizing local forums, being a precinct captain, working the polls on election day or driving voters who needed assistance to the polls.

As media, money and consultants overwhelmed campaign planning by the late 1980’s, individual volunteers were shunted aside in favor of the broader reach, if lower touch, power of radio and television. That kind of campaigning is, of course, still with us, but the potential for reinvigorating individual volunteerism is as close as the internet.

Today’s astounding announcement by Libertarian candidate Ron Paul that he raised $4.3 million dollars on the internet from some 38,000 contributors in one day is the latest example in a trend that Howard Dean’s presidential campaign first highlighted in 2004. The internet is democratizing political fundraising as never before. The question is, will these mostly small donors also lend their person-power to campaigns? Harnessing and using these donors, not only for the traditional political volunteer tasks, but for fast-changing online volunteerism, is the next frontier. The campaign that converts cash-from-clicks into people willing to give time and talent to a candidate will be the real winners.

I hope you’ll visit my website: www.robingerber.com and read about my new novel, “Eleanor vs. Ike,” coming out in January.

The Sisterhood Factor

While Hillary Clinton may feel battered after the pile-on by the male Democratic candidates and moderators at the last debate, some new poll data should cheer her up. Single women represent 26 percent of the eligible voting population, their numbers are growing and they’re galvanized around the big issues of the day. Combine that information with the ‘sisterhood factor’ and the Philadelphia debate starts to look more like an opportunity than a disaster.

Women are already the source of Hillary’s consistent lead over Obama. Even a good number of Republican women have come into her camp. Single women – divorced, never married, widowed- are out there on their own every day coping with meeting rents, mortgages, insurance costs and the general stresses of worklife where sexism still depresses women’s wages and opportunities. They would have recognized a familiar pattern in John Edwards’ and Tim Russert’s hectoring, Barack Obama’s digs and Brian Williams’ polite stabs. Hillary may be running for President, not for a pay raise or promotion at a corporation, but the same sometimes subtle, sometimes overt sexism that seeks to keep women in their place will look awfully familiar to working women.

PLEASE VISIT MY WEBSITE: www.RobinGerber.com