It took 30 years, and look how far women haven’t come in America.
We’ve gone from shaming Pat Schroeder to shunning Hillary Clinton because they swim in the XX end of the gene pool.
I was a cub reporter in Denver’s Civic Center Park on Sept. 28, 1987 when Congresswoman Pat Schroeder became emotional and cried in front of a crowd of hundreds while announcing her decision to not pursue the Democratic nomination for president in the 1988 election. It was stunning to see one of the most powerful, unflappable and unstoppable women I’d ever known cry as she explained that this is not the time for a woman to run for president.
She was pilloried for the event, only because she was a woman. As a journalist, I’ve seen a lot of people cry in public. I’ve seen people cry when they discover their loved ones are dead from crashes, battles and accidents. I’ve seen people cry when they find out they’re going to prison. I’ve seen people cry when they win things. When they lose things. When they get caught. When they get honored.
Despite what her critics said, she didn’t cry because she was being a baby about not getting her way with pursuing a run for the presidency. I was there, mouth open, hanging on every moment and word. It was so obvious that she was overcome by the anguish in knowing that a woman had no chance at the White House, only because she was a woman. Even her, Chairwoman of the House Armed Services Committee. The woman who told a room full of generals that if they were women they’d always be pregnant because none of them could ever say, “no.” The woman who coined “Teflon President” to describe Ronald Reagan. The woman who told Democrats and Republicans looking to outlaw gay marriage that “you can’t amend the Constitution with a statute. Everybody knows that. This is just stirring the political waters and seeing what hate you can unleash.” The woman who told Congressman Duke Cunningham back in the 1990s, when he attacked her for defending gay rights and told her on the House floor, “sit down, you socialist,” she retorted, “Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Chairman – do we have to call the Gentleman a gentleman if he’s not one?” The woman who led a pack of angry congresswomen to the Senate chambers one day to bust some chops and thwart a plan to squelch Anita Hill’s testimony during the Clarence Thomas hearings, an “Iwo Jima” moment that changed the course of sexual harassment law in this country.
No matter what you thought of her politics, Schroeder was a formidable force in the Congress and by any standards, an immensely qualified candidate for president, except she was a woman.
It was that unchangeable and irrelevant thing that pushed Schroeder to the point of tears. She’s said that she’s since then been ridiculed for her emotional speech that day, only making the case that women have one standard to live up to men, even men like cry-baby former House speaker John Boehner, who seem to cry sometimes because it was Thursday, enjoy a very different set of rules.
So almost 30 years later, things are very different, and very much the same. Hillary Clinton is besieged by critics, not for her politics so much, but simply for whom she is. My problem with Clinton is her politics and not her gender. She’s too fast to defend Obamacare and too slow to offer realistic ways to fix it. She’s too fast to insist on policies that sound a lot like massive defense spending and too slow to offer ways to ensure a tsunami of aging Americans don’t end up living in cars and eating out of landfills.
But for years, anticipating this very moment when Hillary might break free of the gravitational pull of sexism that kept Schroeder from reaching for the stars, Hillary’s critics have been building a propaganda case against her, first intimating criminal behavior and intent, and then outright demanding her arrest for atrocities that no evidence shows ever happened.
I’m not saying that Hillary isn’t guilty. But she’s guilty of the same arrogance, sense of entitlement and pomposity that just about every presidential candidate in my lifetime exhibited. LBJ was a self-centered and ruthless jerk. Reagan was a dismissive tyrant. Dubya’s sense of entitlement knew no bounds. But they were men.
It’s not 1987 any more. Most of America has caught up with places like the U.K., India, Israel and Germany. But not everyone.
Hillary may be the first woman to lose the race for U.S. president, partly because of her politics and partly because of her sex. But she’s the first woman in U.S. history to even have that opportunity.
If she loses this race based on smoke-and-mirrors nonsense just because she’s a woman, then we all lose and that would be a crying shame.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Facebook and Twitter or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com.