Editorial: Remembering That the Prize is the Presidency

[The Straight Story]

Editorial: Remembering That the Prize is the Presidency
By Becky O’Malley (01-18-08)


Let’s build our dream candidate, shall we? Experienced, smart, African-American, from an immigrant family though born in the U.S.A., and female.....wouldn’t we all be proud to support that person, don’t we wish she were running this year? Well, folks, I’ve been there, done that, in 1972, no less. I was one of the core group (non-hierarchical, of course) who ran the Michigan primary campaign for Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, and it was a huge success: We got 5 percent of the vote. It was an enormously satisfying experience, right up until Richard Nixon was re-elected in a landslide vote. It’s all been downhill since then.

Elections, unfortunately, are about more than self-expression. That’s why it’s profoundly depressing to see people who should know better expressing themselves loudly in public places (e.g. the New York Times op-ed pages) about how various candidates make them feel. Some women and men who should know better are reviving the pointless old debate about whether women or black people have been more oppressed in this country. One of them, Gloria Steinem, was part of the Chisholm campaign like me, yet she leaped into the arena at the first hint of a controversy between the Clinton and Obama campaigns over whether gender or race counted for more sympathy points in the contest for the nomination.

She and Melissa Harris Lacewell, African-American and Princeton professor, locked horns on Amy Goodman’s show in an embarrassing exchange of postures that did neither candidate any good. Luckily Amy Goodman viewers don’t swing many elections.

What’s most annoying about the media’s attempt to build up a few tense words between the candidates or their followers is that Hillary Clinton is not the Average White Woman, and Barack Obama is not the Average Black Man. Oppression in this country and many other countries has always been as much about class as it has been about gender and race.

All over the world throughout history, certain women attached to the ruling class (and every society has one) have had a kind of free pass from some forms of gender oppression. That was true in Renaissance Britain, where rival queens Elizabeth I of England and the Irish pirate queen Grace O’Malley once took tea. Elizabeth would have been no one without Henry VIII, and Gráinne Ní Mháille (the Gaelic version) learned everything she knew about sea-faring from her father. Benazir Bhutto is the most obvious contemporary example of daughters learning from fathers how to get ahead.

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?issue=01-18-08&storyID=28956