Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Dana Goldstein, a good candidate for GFR commenter Dion and mine infamous blogger breeding program, has a column up at TAP discussing Hillary’s appeals to women based on her being a woman. The data is pretty striking about Democratic women’s support for Hillary:

According to the Harvard Institute of Politics’ survey of voters between 18 and 24, although Obama leads Clinton by 6 points among young Democrats, she bests him by 6 points among young women. Democratic women of all ages and races favor Clinton over Obama by a stunning 25 point margin

Being a libral minded dude, I have some issues with this apparant “affinity voting.” Progressives and Liberals should vote for the candidate that best maps their preferences about policy and think would be the best president, and concerns about her Iraq War vote and chumminess with Mark Penn, rightly give many liberals pause. How do you then put her gender into the equation? It’s immediately apparent that no matter how far to the center Hillary is, liberal and progressive women will support her. Obama and Edwards, for example, will never have this said about them:

0-year old Anjali Chavan, an Ohio State University student interning in D.C. for the summer, said she had no qualms with voting for Clinton because she’s female.”I honestly feel that no man can understand what it’s like to be a woman and represent half the population unless you go through the same issues we go through,” she said. “It’s nice to have a viable woman candidate.”

This isn’t necessarily the type of identity politics many white male liberals like myself find so tawdry; a female president, and the corresponding icnreasing power, influence and representation are all surely liberal goals, or at least something liberals should be happy about.

There is, of course, a contradiction here. Female politicians can be plenty centrist and moderate, and male ones can be as far to left as any liberal would like. These fault lines were best explored by the GFR vs Yglesias/Rosenfeld TAP throwdown. Yglesias and Rosenfeld relentlessly focused on Clinton’s centrism and perception of leftism while the lovely and talented GFR started from the premise that Clinton would be a good choice because she’s a woman and then put out a whole bunch of polling data and very nuanced takes on her positions to justify her liberality and electability.

Surely Yglesias and Rosenfeld support more women involved in all levels of government, as do nearly all liberals. And surely a female president is something that all liberals would like to see sooner rather than later. The problem comes with which female president the Democrats come around to nominate, or for that matter, Republicans. We shouldn’t be held up to feminist blackmail on Hillary, there should be a fair, gender-neutral evaluation of her positions and electability. The guess there’s something of a compromise for liberals and progressives. Shouldn’t Hillary being a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination, for now, be enough. If the leftier wing of the party revolts and picks say, Obama, and he wins where Hillary couldn’t, that would be a bigger victory for liberal ideals than Hillary getting nominated and losing. This will always be a tricky line to navigate, but I think liberals and progressives needn’t be blackmailed into Hillary support and all the candidates should get as much a gender neutral hearing as possible.

Of course, Newt Gingrich and Ali G explored all the real reasons Hillary wouldn’t make a great president well before any other pundit.