10:24 am
A Foreshadowing
Posted by Garance ()The Huffington Post Off the Bus project this morning has a great run-down on the gender distribution of presidential campaign staffers, which I believe can fairly be viewed as proxies for what their administrations would look like. Despite his willingness to challenge Republican orthodoxy on reproductive rights, Rudy Giuliani would likely set back the cause of women’s equality significantly if he took office and created a government that looked anything like his campaign, which was the least gender-integrated of the Republican or Democratic fields.
October 26th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Very cool stuff, but, isn’t there some interplay between the campaigns? I mean, if Clinton were not in the race, some of her advisors would be working for other candidats, right? Likewise with men and Giuliani?
October 26th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
[…] Read the whole thing here. Via The Garance. […]
October 27th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
The Creepiness of DC as a Unifed Theory
I remember the ‘94 election and seeing the young Republicans so full of themselves wondering Cap. Hill. They were annoying and full of themselves, but largely buffoons. Then I left DC, and when I came back it was different. Part of it was that Dems lost control, so there were just fewer of us around. But there was something else. After Sept 2001, DC became a creepy place. Suddenly the presence of security and the clear line of who was important enough to get that security became defined. Those dweeby policy wonks and political hacks suddenly felt like the center of the universe, like they were sitting next to Churchill’s bathtub for war cabinet meetings. The immaturity of Republican males I think is specific. It is thrwarted at around 12 years old, when you know enough to make jokes about sex but aren’t readdy to handle it, and you still want to dress up and play army running around pretending to kill Nazis or Charlie, but mom still cleans your clothes. (Dems are all over the place from infantile to sophomoric).
Now suddenly those men got to play army for real, and they got to be cool and they got to be heroes in the stories they tell about the sudden descent into Baghdad airport, the vests, the time they had to evacuate the White House. And they are creepy because they are the same hacks and wonks who wrote papers at Heritage 10 years ago, but now they get to go to briefings about war, and make cost/benefit decisions about national security. They are the same buffoons but now they talk about killing people.
The morning of the London bus bombing I called my friend who lived in NYC as we both were about to get on the subway to go to work. I said that I didn’t want to be a hero just because I have enough courage to get on a subway that day.
But the creepy guys love that. They are part of the struggle. It is more like Mussolini than Hitler, but it is the same mix of hyper-nationalism and identification with the struggle. It is no coincidence that Kristol et al called their movement “national greatness” and idolized TR, the rough rider from Oyster Bay. They get to be heros for going to work.
And then what makes the creepy tragic is to run into real people that have come back from the wars. They don’t seem to brag about how cool it is. And they have a maturity forced on them beyond their years. If it hasn’t hit already, then you realize that those dweebs who are still playing army (how else can you explain the arrogance and disregard for real military experience in the run up to the war? It was as if Cheney, Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld were all saying to the Shinsekis of the world “you are not the boss of me!”), but it is with real people and real lives. And the returning warriors only seem to encourage the dweebs more, because it makes them important, and the entire city has become trapped in this attitude.
Looking ahead, it seems Rudy not only embraces this ethic, he revels in it and wants to take it further.
Hilary represents the contrast because she is the mature mom. She doesn’t have to be part of it to be cool, and she (and I would argue Obama) represents sanity.
But of course I’m probably just a thwarted 17 year old trotskyite.
November 4th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
[…] TheGarance suggests that this data “can fairly be viewed as proxies for what their administrations would look like.” Matthew Yglesias expands on Garance’s point: Indeed, my bet is that one of the most important legacies of a Hillary Clinton administration would be bequeathing to the Democratic Party a network of powerful plugged-in insiders that winds up containing substantially more women in senior roles than we have right now, along with perhaps a higher number of men comfortable working with power female colleagues and superiors. Given that the party’s voting base is composed mostly of women, this is a transformation that’s going to have to be made sooner or later, and the progressive coalition will definitely be stronger once it’s done. […]