Dear Hillary,

There was a time in my life when I would have voted for you simply because we share the same name. Many women I know are supporting you. One friend told me she wishes you were her mother.

I am compelled to tell you why I cannot vote for you. It’s very simple really, and reminds me of when I was a student in chiropractic college. Friday night would arrive, after a long week of classes, and all the male students would get together and drink beer, while the women would assemble for a study session.

We were women competing in a man’s world. Everything we did was to be competitive–or better– than our male colleagues.

Unfortunately, your presidential bid is the same game. You appear to be a woman in a man’s world with a compulsion to prove you can be better at their game than they are. I’ve thought long and hard about this and, there’s something crucial you’re missing. Women have something men can’t compete with and that’s our ability to bear children. This puts us in an infinitely different game with an entirely different set of rules.

In the utopian paradigm of my mind, I imagine the world being run by women. And, in that fantasy, the most important element is that there is no war.

You claim you’ll be ready on day one. You claim to have knowledge and experience that puts you on top. You tell us you were already in the white house for eight years and claim to have insight no one else has. You watched, along with the rest of our nation, when the towers collapsed. You listened to the rhetoric from our president and the news channels. I never believed that Saddam Hussein had WMD’s, and I did not have the same privileged access to information that you did. And yet, you voted to let mothers around the globe senselessly sacrifice their children in a war over oil.

It astonished me that you voted for a war in Iraq and it astonishes me that you now hide behind the fact that President Bush lied to us.

Maybe the world isn’t ready for the kind of woman president I imagine, because she clearly isn’t running in this election.

Respectfully,

Brett Hillary Aronowitz

Clinton’s most bizarre claim is that Obama is unqualified to be commander-in-chief. Clinton herself never served in the military, and has no experience in the armed services apart from the Senate armed services committee. Her husband had no military experience before becoming president. In fact he was a draft opponent during Vietnam, a stance we respected. She was the first lady, and he the governor, of one of our smallest states. They brought no more experience, and arguably less, to the White House than Obama would in 2009.
We take very seriously the argument that Americans should elect a first woman president, and we abhor the surfacing of sexism in this supposedly post-feminist era. But none of us would vote for Condoleezza Rice as either the first woman or first African-American president. We regret that the choice divides so many progressive friends and allies, but believe that a Clinton presidency would be a Clinton presidency all over again, not a triumph of feminism but a restoration of the aging, power-driven Wall Street Democratic Hawks at a moment when so much more fresh imagination is possible and needed. A Clinton victory could only be achieved by the dashing of hope among millions of young people on whom a better future depends. The style of the Clintons’ attacks on Obama, which are likely to escalate as her chances of winning decline, already risks losing too many Democratic and independent voters in November. We believe that the Hillary Clinton of 1968 would be an Obama volunteer today, just as she once marched in the snows of New Hampshire for Eugene McCarthy against the Democratic establishment.

Zoe’s observation is reminiscent of Audre Lorde’s classic essay on “erotisim” where Lorde describes eroticism as a broad concept, felt in all aspects of the awakened woman’s life, allowing her to be personally and politically empowered by her sensuality.

Zoe draws the link to Hillary and her cohorts who have “betrayed” (to use Carville’s word) a woman’s natural sensuality, compassion, and integrity in favor of dirty politics. How ironic that among the two Democratic candidates, Obama is the candidate owning integrity, compassion, and an appeal to our higher natures. He has emerged as the true feminist in this contest!

Pat Taub,
Portland, Maine