Have We Feminized the State Department?

When news broke that President-Elect Barack Obama planned to nominate Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State, analysts instantly latched on to the tired narrative of the Obama/Clinton primary wars while simultaneously wondering what kind of damage, or assistance, Bill would bring to the nomination process.  What has been missing in the dissection of the Clinton nomination is to what extent her gender may have played a role in her nomination.  For all the talk of gendered politics in the election season, I'm a bit surprised by the silence on this point now.

Assuming Clinton gets confirmed for the post, and that is a pretty safe assumption, then three of the last four Secretaries of State have been women with Colin Powell the lone exception.  The Secretary of State, in partnership with the Secretary of Defense, coordinates the execution of American foreign policy.  Importantly, the Secretary of State is the "face" of US foreign policy, the lead diplomat and the go-to person for US foreign interests.  

Now, Clinton is no doubt a good choice for this role-- she is the ultimate pragmatist and an outstanding advocate.  She will push the Obama Administration's foreign policy with grace and zeal.  She brings instant credibility and a hawkishness that should appease some of the more centrist of the Obama constituency.  As a Senator she's proven she can craft compromises and get things done.  All of those accomplishments would also make Clinton an excellent Secretary of Defense, but that possibility, or the possibility of any woman taking the reigns at Defense, is apparently non-existent.  Why is that?

I can't help but think we've developed a gendered default for the roles of Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense.  The skills that make one a good diplomat seem to skew female and may inform our presumptions about who would be a good fit more than we realize.  Clearly this country is comfortable with a woman as it's lead diplomat, but I wonder when it will be comfortable with a woman in charge of it's armed forces?

It’s Our Time: Gen-Xers and the Election of Barack Obama

As a member of Generation X, my generation has been defined and categorized by others: boomers and millennials in particular. Boomers labeled us lazy and disaffected while doting and hovering over lazy and disaffected millennials who did little else but just show up.

With the onslaught of campaign post-mortem and the gearing up for the 2010 election, boomers and millennials are once again at the center of this analysis, while Generation X, my generation, the generation coming of political age in the Obama administration, continues to get passed right on by.

Xers have the unfortunate luck to be situated directly between two population booms.  We are, by sheer fact of our numbers, incapable of matching the self-aggrandizing of the boomers and their lauding of the millennials.  Our collective voice, no matter how strong, just cant shout loud enough.  Thankfully for this country we realized there was no need to compete.  And once the rest of the world took notice, things began to change.

That's right.  I'm doing something very un-Xer like.  I'm taking credit for the vision of change promised by the Obama administration.  You see, we Xers gave up long ago trying to play by the political rules crafted by the boomers.  I'll admit, we flirted with them briefly during the first Clinton administration, but once we saw that administration as the same old same old boomer crap we checked out.  But if we checked out, how then could the election of Barack Obama possibly be about, let alone driven by, the slacker generation?

For starters, one great benefit of consistently being overlooked by the boomers meant the creation of our own political counter-insurgency in the private sector.  My generation are the business leaders of the green economy.  We created those private sector models designed to tackle the looming environmental (and related geo-political) catastrophes.  Same goes for poverty eradication, education, and finance.  Those industries that have remained in the boomer charge-- I'm looking at you auto, airline, and banking -- have come crashing down under the weight of their own avarice.  We know how to tackle the big issues of the next decade and will lead that change.

My generation has now fought in three wars- Gulf War I, Afghanistan, and our current debacle.  We can throw in Somalia and the Balkans as well, just for good measure.  We know the human toll, the human sacrifice.  We can talk about war other than Vietnam.  As a product of divorce and custody battles we are natural diplomats.  We spent a lifetime negotiating with warring parties.  This perspective, these skills, will get us out of Iraq and usher in a new era of global diplomacy.  Sound crazy?  Just watch.

Being on the front end of the technology boom, teenagers and college students at the advent of email and the World Wide Web, means we are rooted in the actual world as we branch out to the virtual.  Unlike our little brothers and sisters the millennials, we remember a time when life was not digital.  That realism will serve us as we advance the goals of equality in this digital age and assist developing nations.  We will keep the human in humanitarian.

We are a post-identity politics generation and have laid the foundation for the awakening of a new age of liberalism.  But this is not your father's liberalism.  No.  Living through recessions, war, divorce, and raised in the shadows of Vietnam and Watergate made us inherently skeptical of bold institutional promises of anything, let alone substantive change.  We know that government cannot do it alone so we will not expect nor demand it to.  

Our heroes and peers in the chattering class have set the tone for the critical, engaged, but ultimately still hopeful political rhetoric of this new age.  Through the lens of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Rachel Maddow we will keep our institutions honest.

And by now we are used to the millennials getting all the attention and taking all the credit.  That's fine.  Go on boomers-- keep applauding your legacy and praising the millennials simply for showing up.  This is our time and we've got work to do.

Voter Suppression and the Thugs Who Support It

Patriotism is about as close to a defined religion as I get.  I do believe that at our best, this country is a beacon of light for the rest of the world, proof that idealism mixed with hard-work can break down any barrier.  The foundational texts of our democracy-- the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, these are my versions of the King James, the Torah, the Koran.  The principles they espouse- liberty, equality, common good- form the core of my morality.  The idea that our government is simply an expression of our common consciousness, a realization of communal aspiration rather than a power derived by god moves me every election.  This is not jingoistic love.  This is romantic love.

That's why I geek out over voting.  I'm not going to preach about how people all over the world still die for the chance to live in a participatory democracy, and I'm not going to scold you for not participating because I also believe there's power in abstaining as much as their is power in participating.  

But abstention is a far cry from suppression, and this is after all a post about suppression.  About coordinated efforts by the Republican party to disenfranchise US citizens.  Not black voters, not latino voters, not women.  Just voters.  And I'm sorry, but its a disgusting, un-American practice and needs to stop.

My previous post mentioned my experience as a poll watcher-- a position only made necessary by the phenomenon of the GOP's use of "challengers" set up to delay, intimidate, and obstruct the voting process.  GOP challengers are only one weapon in the arsenal of GOP voter suppression tactics, but they are a powerful and particularly odious one.  They sit in the polling places and literally identify who they believe to be legitimate voters.  If they don't think you are a legitimate voter, they notify the election judge who then decides whether or not you can cast a ballot.  In Minnesota, thankfully, the basis for a challenge is extremely limited-- you must be a Minnesota resident, your challenge must be based on personal knowledge that a voter is ineligible to vote in that specific precinct, and the challenge must be reduced to writing in the form of a sworn statement.  This is a change from the previous election and a result of the GOP sending in legions of attorneys from Texas and D.C. to man the polls and challenge voters.  For real.  In order to be a challenger, or a vote protector, one must go through a training session and receive a certification from either the GOP or the DFL that they are that party's official representative.  My point is, if you volunteer for either of these tasks, you are well versed in election law before the voting actually begins.

Heading to the polls at 5:45 am on election day I was the crazy combination of tired and wired, and when I got to my precinct and saw a line of voters an hour before the polls opened I knew it was going to be a big day.  For twenty minutes I sat there, chatting with election judges and thinking, for just a moment, that my presence was going to be a waste.  There was no GOP challenger in sight and the election judges were psyched for high voter turnout and to be part of a historic election, irrespective of outcome.

And then he showed up.  The challenger.  A Vietnam veteran living on acres of land in booming Dakota County.  The basis for his support of the GOP comes from his evangelical roots.  Here we were-- a feminist and an evangelical.  Sitting side by side at one table.  For the next 14 hours.

Election day got off to a bang.  Right as the polls opened and the voters started streaming in we hit our first issue.  Mr. Challenger tried to set up shop at the new voter registration table because he was intending on validating the identification of every new voter that registered that day.  That's right.  He was checking id.  I realize I've said a lot, so if you need to go back up and look at the extent of his authority as a challenger on I understand.  You will not see on that list "verify identification."  That is what the election judge does.  Not a partisan representative.  And he knew this.  

He knew he wasn't allowed to check id's.  But he also knew that starting a fight with me and the election judges would delay the vote.  Most people were trying to get to work, and if the line stopped moving, they'd probably leave and not come back.  For the challenger and his party it was not about winning that particular battle, it was winning the war of voter turnout.

Well, I was not taking any of that shit, and thankfully, neither was the election judge.  Rather than debate the law which we knew he was versed in, we called the city.  They sent down a city representative who let our challenger know that any more stunts like that and he'd find himself on the curb.  Cudos to the city for not putting up with any of that crap.

For the next 13 hours I saw him bristle at every minority voter that registered, particularly those who spoke with an accent.  I overheard dejected calls to GOP headquarters that turnout was high and that he had been pinned.  I heard him have conversations with election judges about the dignity of civic service and his pride in his country.  

And, had the statute not prevented me from doing so, I would have asked him how on earth he reconciled those feelings with his role as voter gestapo.  How he could call himself a patriot while he sneered at the 200 new voters that waited in line for the chance to have a say in the governance of this country.  

I just don't understand it.  Sure, we could stereotype the voters he'd challenge as likely DFL voters, but we have no proof of that.  I was stationed in a heavily republican district- wouldn't you think it was possible that some of those new voters would vote GOP?  If the past eight years have taught us anything it is that people do not always vote in line with their economic or cultural best interests- they often just vote for who they'd like to go drinking with.  Why would a veteran, a self-confessed patriot, strive to undercut the basic foundation of a country he could have died for?  

It really makes you wonder why the GOP is so scared of a fair fight.  I guess we will see if these tactics continue as the republicans work to rebuild their party and what place these extremists hold in the new republican brand.  But so long as the intolerant right serves as foot soldiers of the election they will have to tangle with Hegemommy because even one vote suppressed is a crack in the foundation of our democracy, and something I just can't sit back and watch happen.  So in the meantime, bring it on boys.  Until you are willing to go voter for voter in a clean, fair fight I will sit at the polls, 14, 16, 18 hours an election, as will my own army of hegemommies to stop your treasonous strategy.  Bring it on.

 

 

What I Saw

So I know I'm off schedule with posts, and I'm going to do my damnedest to make up for lost time in the next couple of days.  This may not be a traditional Hegemommy post, but I'm just overcome with a sense of immediacy and I don't want to over-think this experience, so I'm breaking a rule and just putting it out there.  

Last night I worked as a vote protector.  I was an official representative of the DFL and my job was to make sure every eligible voter who showed up to vote got the chance to.    There was also a GOP representative there, except he had a different job and a different title.  He called himself a "challenger" and his job was to challenge voters' eligibility to vote.

I promise in the next post I will get into what happened at the polls, and the nitty-gritty of voter suppression tactics (and how they were SQUASHED! by the way), but for now I just want you all to catch a glimpse of why the Republican strategy of voter deterrence is tantamount to treason in Hegemommy's world.

At 6:00 am there was a line that wrapped down the hall and around the corner of my assigned poll.  Polls open at 7:00.  This particular polling place was in the basement of a nursing home.  None of the people in line were nursing home residents.  

Yesterday I saw an African immigrant cheer and almost cry when she turned in her ballot after voting for the first time as a citizen.  I saw parents come with their adult children to cast ballots together.  I saw hoards of senior citizens, some from the facility and some not, wait with oxygen tanks, in wheelchairs, and some with helpers to read or write for them, just to vote.  I saw  group of young African-American men proud to show off their "I VOTED" sticker.  I saw people who had come to register that day COME BACK with neighbors, family members, friends, to register them as well.  I saw voters who had waited in line for an hour at a polling place only to find out they were in the wrong precinct wait another hour to vote at mine.  At 7:57 I saw a single mom running down the hall with her toddler to get to the poll by 8:00.   Her son was in his featie pajamas, and as I played peek-a-boo with him while she filled out her registration card, I heard the Election Judge comment that this was the first election where this mom was eligible to vote.

Yesterday over 1200 people voted at my polling location.  We registered over 200 new voters.  My side didn't get all 1200 votes, but all 1200 people who showed up to vote were able to.