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The Republican Mens’ Club

By The Seminal

I finally wised up and switched over to C-Span tonight.  The Democrats did something interesting–they had a segment in which members of the House of Representatives who are women read letters from voters.  As one congresswoman after another spoke, I wondered: do the Republicans even have enough women in the House to do something like this?

To answer my question, I went through each congressional delegation (counting senators as well), and counted the number of Republican women who are members of Congress.  There are more than 240 Republican members of Congress, and just 26 are women.  The Democrats can beat that if you just count the delegations in two states: California and New York.  (California, with 21 almost does it singlehandedly).  Women are equal partners in the Democratic party, evidenced by their role in leadership, including the fact that the Speaker of the House is Nancy Pelosi.

This ought to be a national embarrassment.  It is certainly very telling.  The Republican party is not a party for all Americans–it is a party for the privileged few–mainly white men.  88 years after women won the right to vote, the Republican party still hasn’t found a way to make women a real part of their power structure.

Why not?  They don’t care.  That’s not what the Republican party is about.   It is most certainly not what John McCain is about.

Media elites have breathlessly gossiped over their manufactured controversy, wondering whether Hillary supporters would object that the impressive senator from New York didn’t get her due.  They should be asking how many years it will take before the Republican party can even conceive of getting to this point.  They should point out, at the Republican convention next week, that women are barely recognized by the Republican party.

Democratic primary voters can put 18 million cracks in a glass ceiling.  Republican women are still trying to break into the ground floor.  Next week, perhaps Chris Matthews will tell us what place the Republican party offers to women.

By Pookie2112 August 28, 2008 - 9:36am

It should be pretty funny watching the RNC convention next week - while watching the Dem convention, the camera pans over the audience and the diversity is astounding! With that in mind, watching the RNC convention next week, you know, that party that 'works for ALL people", will be like watching a WASPconvention ... let the fun begin!
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Heh. Sure it's comical and enjoyable having fun at their expense. But there is also something not funny at all about a political Party in America that has an obvious problem with diversity.

I watched the past few nights with absolute pride, as young and old, black and white, man and woman, gay and straight, etc. etc. joined together as one to make progress for our future.

Did you ever find yourself in the situation where others are able to more clearly put to words the feelings, thoughts, and emotions swirling inside of you? I'm not the most artful or poetic writer, and I often find myself in such a situation.

That was the case in reading billmon's diary on DKos last night.
I'll let billmon take it from here:

...I have had a long and conflicted relationship with the Democratic Party -- one that generally ranges between reluctantly supportive (on the really good days) to utterly disgusted (most days).

To compare it to a bad marriage would be an insult to unhappy couples everywhere.

My discontents are probably shared by many of you, maybe most of you:...
[...]
But there are loyalties that go deeper than policies, deeper than ideas, deeper, even, than folly and cowardice. When I turn on the TV and see the crowd at a Democratic National Convention -- black and white and every shade in between, Anglo and Hispanic, gay and straight, old and young, Jew and gentile, I know somewhere deep down in my gut that those are my people, the Americans that I want to be my fellow Americans.

Maybe that emotional loyalty is why I've never quite been able to throw in my lot with the Greens or the Democratic Socialists or Ralph Nader (in the latter case it also helps that the guy is a complete asshole), even though their beliefs and positions are probably closer to mine than the Democratic Party's will ever be...
[...]
For better or worse, the Democratic Party is the rock; all else is the sea -- to steal Frederick Douglass's old line about a different (very different) Republican Party. It's the only political organization in the country that offers even a remote prayer of advancing a progessive agenda.

But that's pretty weak beer most days: More of an apology than an argument.

This evening, though, I watched something happen that I was solid sure would never happen in my lifetime, or probably my children's lifetimes: A major American political party just nominated an African American as its candidate for the presidency of the United States...

Watching it on C-SPAN, I saw a closeup shot of an African American delegate after Nancy Pelosi banged the gavel down. She was hugging the delegate next to her (a white woman) And the tears were pouring down her cheeks.
[...]

In the interest of full disclosure: I found myself tearing up as well.

[...]
I dunno, I guess that's when it hit me -- the enormity of what I'd just seen. It may not mean as much to you youngsters (get off my lawn!) but for someone of my age, who grew up in the dying days of segregation, who still remembers the colored and white drinking fountains and the monochrome lunch counters, who saw Washington DC burn the night Martin Luther King was killed -- who, in some sense, has essentially spent his whole life living in the shadow of American racism, it was completely mindblowing. The party of Jefferson Davis and George Wallace (but also of FDR and Bobby Kennedy) had just chosen a black man as its standard bearer...
[...]
I know there are those who will say I'm making too much of this...
[...]
I don't care. I know I shouldn't make too much of this, but I sure the hell am not going to make too little of it, either.
[...]
Maybe the old lie that anyone can grow up to be president is still just that -- an old lie. But now we know that any child (man child at least) can grow up and become the presidential candidate of one of the country's two main political parties -- because the Democrats just proved it.
[...]
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/27/185922/893/893/576781

A-fucking-men.
____________________
"We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can't bomb it into peace."
"Power to the peaceful..." --Franti

By SJerseyIndyAugust 28, 2008 - 9:27am