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Daily Archive for August 6th, 2008

Megan Gamble: McCain: Sexist presidential candidate, or really sexist presidential candidate?

Published on August 6, 2008 at 9:50 am
, filed in White House '08
. 2 Comments

The laundry list of reasons why John McCain is unfavorable and/or downright unqualified to serve as the U.S. President is fairly familiar to most of us…

…but his relationship with his wife might be the most interesting of all! And by “interesting”, I’m sure I must mean something more like “disturbing”.

Monday, John McCain and his wife Cindy McCain made an appearance at the motorcycle rally in Sturgis South Dakota, where McCain’s speech was welcomed with applause as well as the revving of Harley engines. According to CNN “[John McCain] was surrounded by scores of beer drinking men and scantily clad women, many of whom were as thrilled to see the war hero candidate as they were to watch Kid Rock perform later in the evening.” In this fun environment, what presidential candidate wouldn’t think to volunteer his wife to participate in the debaucheries of a bike rally beauty pageant?

As reported by CNN and revisited by Ben Smith of Politico.com, John McCain is quoted as saying: “I encouraged Cindy to compete. I told her with a little luck she could be the only woman ever to serve as first lady and Miss Buffalo Chip.”

This pageant is apparently, “an infamously debauched event that’s been known to feature topless women” (and, according to an ESPN.com columnist who visited the rally, “occasionally bottomless”). Say what you will about topless women, my own concern is the beauty pageant aspect (unrealistic body image expectations, pitting women against other women, gender stereotyping and encouragement of unhealthy competition), the husband-volunteering-his-wife aspect (one should be able to make their own choice as to whether or not they wish to flash a crowd) and the questionable class commentary aspect of implying that no other woman at the rally is in any way qualified to be in the running for First Lady.

Frankly, this is just another example of John McCain’s disrespect for the woman he is married to. As brought to light by Cliff Schecter’s book The Real McCain, in 1992 McCain called his wife a “cunt” in the presence of several reporters. Yep. That’s right. Nope, he didn’t say “bitch” or “hoe” or any other of many offensive slurs, he went all the way to the end of the scale.

Here is a funny take on the incident, by the comedy writers of the “Public Service Administration.” You may want to wait until you get home from work to watch this one.

While a dialogue about sexism in politics was brought to the forefront when Hillary was in the race, it is important to remember that sexism is a very real social structure and these incidents are mere examples of its prevalence. These incidents are not uncommon, and nor should they be treated with the apparent indifference that some of the media is showing.

Jeff Rosenberg: Precinct by precinct: CD4 would be better with McCollum’s help

Published on August 6, 2008 at 8:58 am
, filed in Uncategorized
. Closed

Editor’s note: This has been promoted to the frontpage; as such all comments should be made there. This is the fifth of nine articles in Jeff’s Daily Liberal Mapping Project. These articles examine Minnesota’s voting patterns precinct by precinct, with data from the 2006 election. Perhaps you missed Jeff’sanalysis of CD7, CD6, and CD5?

In this edition of the Daily Liberal Mapping Project, we look at the other central-city Congressional District, CD4. CD4 is the home of Betty McCollum, who has served the district since 2001. The district is pretty much a guaranteed Democratic vote, and it has a lot of similarities to CD5, which we discussed on Monday. However, because the 4th also encompasses a handful of suburbs to the north, it is less overwhelmingly Democratic. It still has a high Cook Partisan Voting Index of D+13.

The 4th not only has a very strong Democratic vote, it generally has party-line voters. Volatility is a measure of variation across races. Precincts with high volatility are those that see a lot of ticket-splitters. As the map below shows, there are only a few districts with volatility higher than the state median.

However, like CD5, CD4 has poor turnout throughout the district, with only a handful of precincts where over 75 percent of eligible voters actually voted. This low turnout seriously harms the DFL’s chances in statewide races. The final map illustrates the above point clearly. This map combines voting percentages and turnout into a single measure, the percent of eligible voters that voted for the winning party. Looking at this measure, it is clear how Democrats’ majority in CD4 is diluted: only a smattering of precincts had a Democratic vote of over 55 percent of eligible voters, despite the fact that over 85 percent of votes cast were for Democrats. Fixing this problem could provide a huge boost for Al Franken in November.

Unlike in CD5, however, the problem may be less easily fixed in CD4. Keith Ellison is running a major voter registratraion drive in the 5th. In the 4th, not only is there no such thing, but McCollum has not showed any particular desire to help Franken. Without help from McCollum to increase turnout in CD4, Franken will need to launch his own Get-Out-The-Vote campaign there.