“Omigod, Mom; I just voted for the first woman president!”

Voting on Identity: Time for A Change

My daughter is 27, married, a career woman and a political activist. On the day of the Massachusetts primaries, I got an early morning call. She was on the other end, sobbing­; it took me a moment to figure out who it was. All my mom-emergency alerts went off and I was suddenly completely awake.
“What’s wrong? Are you all right?”
“Omigod, Mom; I just voted for the first woman president!” Sigh... relief.

Lost amidst the reports of the extraordinary rise of Senator Barack Obama is the way women, both young and old, have come out for Senator Hillary Clinton. I have been to a couple of rallies here in the Northeast and I have seen women there in numbers I have never seen since the Equal Rights Amendment campaign. Yes, Obama is drawing an extraordinary number of people but this is also a historic race for women.

Is it a clash of identity politics? The Black Man vs. the Middle Aged White Woman?

Many voters decry the focus on gender or race. The campaigns should be based on issues; it’s a form of racism, they say, to vote for Obama because he is a black man, or sexism if one votes for Clinton.

That’s one way to look at it, but as a Latina who has watched generations of white men making all the decisions, I’m ready for a change because politicians do bring their genders and their races to the legislative table. We should not be lulled unto thinking that white men have anyone else's interests in mind.

Who can doubt that Hillary Clinton will have fresh perspectives and ideas about issues that are invisible to the generations of men who preceded her? Women are disproportionately affected by the issues of poverty, Medicare and Social Security. Yes, everybody should have Social Security but women outlive men by a considerable number of years. Women, more than men, nurse elderly husbands and then are left alone. There are many true horror stories about elderly women eating canned cat food or living in impoverished conditions after their husbands’ deaths.

I remember lobbying the California legislature for disadvantaged women and their children. We had a very tough time getting a bill passed that mandated pursuit of “deadbeat dads.” We were perplexed by this difficulty until someone explained that there were many divorced men in the legislature who would never agree to it. Even in that setting, the Old Boys stuck together.

Senator Clinton has already demonstrated her command of the issues pertaining to medical insurance. President Clinton would finally resolve that problem. Then she’d need to help another group of women disproportionately affected because of their gender: single mothers with dependent children. President Bill Clinton made a muck of welfare; she can set right what he compromised on. And that’s just to start with. It makes perfect sense to me that women,­ knowing the impact of one’s gender on the issues, would choose her to lead the nation.

Senator Obama’s presence in the White House would also make a huge difference. There is no question that recent administrations have had a devastating effect on African Americans. Take, for instance, the Civil Rights Commission. In the last eight years, it has quietly shifted its focus from racial and sex-based discrimination to cases of discrimination on the basis of religion. You can always count on George W. Bush to neutralize or pervert a government agency that was actually doing good for the people of this country.

According to Diverse Issues in Higher Education, 9.7% of all black men are unemployed. The rate of unemployment overall is 4.5%. There are three times as many black men languishing in prisons than there are in our nation’s colleges; 40 % of our 2 million prison inmates are black. What kind of sense does it make for the government to spend more to incarcerate than to invest in education and job training? But have our traditional leaders paid any attention to the impact of these things on the black community? No, they just keep appropriating money for prisons and mandatory sentencing laws, spending money on the “War on Drugs” instead of going to the root of the problem.

Some 5.4% of Latinos are unemployed; 19% of the prison population is Latino. Una quinta, ­one-fifth: that is a heavy price to pay. Latinos have the lowest rate of high school graduation and the highest rate of teen pregnancy; more than 3 out of 5 Latina girls become pregnant before age 20. Those traditional politicians in Washington have not paid any attention to this problem except to condemn them and move on.

So, as a Latino, who should one choose? I am drawn to Hillary Clinton because her life has been spent trying to fix the problems related to women and poverty and because she has a history of working with Latinos. Barack Obama does not have the history of working for women or Latinos but if he gets the nomination, I will vote for him because even though he does not have a demonstrated history of attention to our issues, he will bring a fresh set of eyes to Washington and a demonstrated capacity for empathy and conciliation.

As for John McCain, he may be better than his GOP comrades on immigration but otherwise, he might as well live on a different planet.

http://miapogeo.com/main/content/view/205/778/
published on MiApogeo.com, June 2008