I’m moved by this is a certain sort of way.
I can appreciate how someone who grew up black in the USA of 90 years ago would feel a sense of triumph when voting for a black presidential candidate. I understand how that creates a symbol of rising above the muck that has entrapped your culture for centuries.
But I can’t shake the fact that I’m disturbed when people are more excited about voting for someone because they are a black person or an estrogened person or a left-handed person than whether or not that particular person will be the best leader of the Executive Branch of the United States of America.
I’m torn because I really want to feel like this is some grand moment where we as America move ahead and into some brave new world that has such people leading it. But I can’t help feeling more like we are in some sort of adolescent proving ground where surface characteristics like skin colour and gender matter more than policy. It’s wanting to date the quarterback so you can wear his letter jacket. It’s wanting to drive a BMW when you go down to Brentwood so you don’t feel out of place in the parking lot. It’s wanting to prove to the rest of the planet Earth that we aren’t just a bunch of naive gun-loving upandcomers and we ARE cosmopolitan enough to pick a black president.
I know a lot of people like the policies proposed by Obama. Good for them and I hope they get what they want. (I say that knowing ahead of time that they won’t. High Office politics are an ugly business that corrupt the most earnest. Three years from now when the Democrat Idealists become as business as usual as the corrupted Republican incumbents I fully expect that those who rejoice at this proposed Democratic victory will be as damned disappointed in the dregs they’ve got as the fiscally conservative among us are right now. The White House is painted in the blood of the better angels who were slaughtered on the path to residence there.)
I personally will cry after leaving a voting booth when I get to vote for a third party candidate who has a prayer of dialing back the power game in Washington. Who isn’t owned and owing to special interest groups. Who didn’t have to barter for his presidency with corrupt preachers and worldly wise men and photographers. Who didn’t have to trade his character for his chance at leadership.
That’s when I’ll cry. Now I just look for the new boss resignedly. You know what they say about him…
Just Another Pretty Farce 
Kat, I think you either don’t believe “the personal is the political” or you are ignoring it in this instance to stamp your feet a little. Many of us think that identity (and I’d go on and say personal history or position within a society) does make a difference in the way one approaches policy. Sometimes, but only sometimes, a shared identity characteristic correlates with policies one endorses. Other times, not so much. Sarah Palin is a woman, but you would be hard put to find a woman who embodies less of what I want in terms of policy direction. However, Palin’s identity as an evangelical mother has been a significant factor in forming her political vision and in shaping her political appeal to both men and women. I get how the fact of her sexual identity matters to her policy-making, even if our shared sex doesn’t lead me to want to vote for her. Likewise, though I wasn’t a Hillary supporter in the primary, I could see how she arrived at her positions as a liberal feminist coming to political consciousness in the 1970s. Ideas come attached to bodies and it’s no accident that most of the governing bodies are still white and male.
Everybody’s got their set of things that they want to see happen — you want a particular kind of government, I want another, and neither of those are absolutely ideal for the advancement of the common good. I guess I’m not seeing why your desire to vote for a viable third-party candidate (who has a particular policy viewpoint that goes with a set of historical and personal experiences and who, through the cruel trick of English lacking a neuter gender, you have to characterize as male) is somehow less tainted ideologically than my desire to vote for a woman who embodies the political values I prize.
Kat, I think you’re missing something pretty big in your take on this. And that is, that most of the people most excited about voting for Obama based on his race (whatever their own race[s] happen to be) would likely have voted for the Democratic candidate no matter what. If the candidate had been a white man (as, golly, it has been in every presidential election since the party was founded), they would have voted for that white man, because the party’s policies would still have been most attractive to them. But if the candidate happens, after all those elections, after a lifetime full of being The Other, to look like them, that’s an extra charge of pleasure, excitement, enthusiasm.
Look, I’m no particular fan of Nancy Pelosi. My intellectual reaction to her becoming Speaker of the House was “it’s about time a woman was recognized as having the skills, and accumulated the seniority, to get that job.” Nothing more, certainly no personal attachment to her. Yet when I watched the clip of her being sworn in, I was in tears. I was shocked at myself, to be sure, but there it is: not the person, but the fact that such a thing — something was felt like an inalterable given — could have changed.
Kat, I agree with bridgett and nm (hurray!) People are not simply logical; we are not computers. Most of the time, it’s impossible not to personalize these things.
I have the same connection with Palin. Obviously not gender-wise, but culturally. Her recent story, that of a supposed rube, thrown into the spotlight of a cultural class that obviously holds her in contempt, opens wounds I will never be rid of.
Now, they are making fun of the fact that she didn’t have a closet full of campaign-ready clothes at a moment’s notice. This sympathetic quote from Lisa Schiffren explains it better than I could:
My whole life has been a struggle to prove myself my betters, a striving to be taken seriously regardless of my background, jumping into situations “without blinking”, and yes, for a while, being the humiliating object of scorn because I couldn’t afford the clothes that were standard for the group I had been forced into.
When I see someone on the national stage who seems to be the personification of my own life story, (and happens to agree with me politically 95% of the time to boot) how could I not personalize her candidacy?
I do not begrudge those who personalize any of the candidates (especially Obama and Palin). Although I agree with you that we will see much disillusionment in 3 years, I still will not say that voting with the heart is any less legitimate than voting with the mind.
But I can’t shake the fact that I’m disturbed when people are more excited about voting for someone because they are a black person or an estrogened person or a left-handed person than whether or not that particular person will be the best leader of the Executive Branch of the United States of America.
Thank you for saying, eloquently, what I have been thinking.
This election is almost like watching people cheer for sports teams. I’ll be glad when it is over. 11 days to go…
I think you either don’t believe “the personal is the political”
I don’t quite know if any of you other than Beth got where I’m going with this.
You guys are all politically informed, astute and driven. I’m sure that if there’s ever a fat white Mystical Christian Libertarian childfree woman who runs for president as a limited government fiscal conservative I’ll feel a special thrill.
I’m harumphing at all of the people I see who are gushing over Obama for no other reason than that he is black. Who gushed over Hilary for no other reason than her femaleness. Who gush over Palin etc.
That bugs the crap out of me.
But, Kat, I’m saying that I don’t consider Nancy Pelosi representative of my politics (I mean, yes, she’s a Democrat and not a Republican, but there are lots of Democrats, including women, in the House who I would rather have as Speaker than her — she’s waaaaaay too centrist for me, naturally :-)), but I cried when she was installed as speaker just the same. It meant that much to me to see a woman in the job. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing, that identification, so long as it’s not the only thing. And I question whether there are all that many Obama or H. Clinton or Palin supporters for whom race, gender, or religion genuinely is the only thing. Most of them were going to vote for the same party no matter who the candidate was (within reason) and the ability to identify with one of the candidates in an essential way is the icing, but not the cake.
If it is wrong to vote against someone for no other reason than the color of their skin, is it not also wrong to vote for a person for the same reason?
I agree with nm in questioning just how many people are voting for Obama just for the color of his skin.
Things like skin color, gender, religion, sexual orientation (maybe some day), effect voter enthusiasm more than voter choice. I think there may be folks who decide to vote this year only because they’re excited to vote for a black man, but their choice of who the best candidate it is informed by policy. In other words, they prefer Obama to McCain based on policy, but it’s the excitement about the progress his skin color represents that might actually get them to the polls.
Отличная статья, спасибо!