16 Ways of Looking at a Female Voter

[DeepModem Mom]

New York Times Magazine: 16 Ways of Looking at a Female Voter
By LINDA HIRSHMAN
Published: February 3, 2008

1. The Female Thing

FOR MONTHS before the presidential primaries began, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was widely held to lead among women voters. That she would naturally appeal to her own sex accounted in no small part for her front-runner status. By the end of last year, national polls showed not only that Clinton was ahead but also that women supported her by 8 points more than men did.

But in the Iowa caucus her lead turned out, to use a Clinton phrase, to be more talk than action: 35 percent of female Iowa Democrats went for Senator Barack Obama while only 30 percent stood up for Hillary — and Obama won. Was Iowa an isolated case? Or had women voters turned their backs on Hillary?

Various explanations surfaced. A WNBC television reporter suggested that “somewhere along the line she lost the narrative of the first female president as a huge change.” A blogger on The Huffington Post decided that what women needed wasn’t change; it was the whole truth and nothing but the truth: “Women are too smart, informed and astute at reading between the lines to back a presidential candidate who isn’t being straight with them — especially when she is a woman.” The snarky Washington-based blog Wonkette proposed that maybe Hillary lacked a certain something and that Barack Obama, well, had it. “I think Chris Matthews said,” the post read, “that we’re all voting for Obama because we want to date him, but they were showing a picture of Obama at the time, and I heard birds singing and bells ringing and missed it.”

Then in New Hampshire, things suddenly changed: 46 percent of women in the Democratic primary voted for Hillary compared with 34 percent for Obama, giving Clinton the victory. Was it the welling up? Was it the specter, three days earlier, of those male candidates piling up on her during a debate? Was it because the debate’s moderator questioned how likable she was? The Times columnist Gail Collins briefly summed up the theories for Hillary’s victory — “Do women Obama’s age look at him and see the popular boy who never talked to them in high school? Did they relate to Clinton’s strategy of constantly reminding her audiences that she’s been working for reform for 35 years?” — and then added her own. Hillary, she wrote, “was a stand-in for every woman who has overdosed on multitasking.” As Collins saw it, women simply wanted to get their own back: “They grabbed at the opportunity to have kids/go back to school/start a business/become a lawyer. But there are days when they can’t meet everybody’s needs, and the men in their lives — loved ones and otherwise — make them feel like failures or towers of self-involvement. And the deal is that they can either suck it up or look like a baby.”

There was one thing the commentators seemed to agree on. Women in Iowa and New Hampshire — whether they voted for or against Hillary — were doing so for the same reason: because she was a woman....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/magazine/03womenvoters-t.html?pagewanted=all

[journalist3072]

1. And Blacks have been voting for Obama because he's Black. And I think it's all wrong.

I don't think we should be voting for people based on race or gender, but it's been happening.

How about voting for who you think best represents your interests or values?

[Captain Hilts]

3. Black voters vote in a bloc to a FAR greater degree than women. Women lean, but don't vote ...

as a bloc. Being married or single, for example, creates huge differences in women's voting behavior. Black voters have no similar fissure.

[BlackVelvet04]

2. I think women have every right to vote for

the person they think best represents them. Everyone does.

Women have seen the right trying to destroy the right to birth control and abortion. I want that trend rolled back and I think a woman best understands that.

[cgrindley]

4. What a disappointment... I was hoping for a Wallace Stevens pastiche

I
From the side as
She walks toward
The booth.

II
Furtively, mouth dry:
The blackbird in the tree
Observing the unseen
Observer.

III
Between the woman voter
And the act
Of voting
Is both performance
And desire.

IV
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The woman voting
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
Of the polling place.
The shadow of the woman
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable chad.

VII
O thin men of Rasmussen,
Why do you imagine an older demographic
Do you not see how the woman
Walks around the polling
Place?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That a woman voter is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the woman left the polling place
She had marked only the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of women voters
Voting in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For women voters.

XII
The river is moving.
The woman must be voting.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
The Republicans were not winning
And they would not win.
The woman sat
In the Greek diner,
Drinking coffee after voting.

[DeepModem Mom]

5. WOW! Just, wow, and thank you! nt