I decided to skip the election. Not the recent midterm balloting but something called the White House Project. Affiliated with the feminist Ms. Foundation, its backers are "dedicated to changing the climate of American politics so that in the future women will launch successful campaigns for the U.S. presidency," according to its mission statement.
As the first step in this ongoing project, a ballot of 20 women, chosen by the project in concert with a group of outside scholars, was nationally distributed largely through women's and news magazines. By Nov. 30, we were supposed to return our ballots with the five we'd like to see as presidential contenders. (Men could vote, too, but the effort was clearly targeted at women.) The winners will be announced.White House Project backers bemoan the low numbers of women in Congress and running for national office. But why not bemoan the fact that too few women do their homework when it comes to national issues?
"What Americans Know About Politics and Why it Matters," by political scientists Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, points out that while the public is generally ill-informed about national issues, women are particularly so. Three-quarters of women score well below the male average on tests measuring knowledge of national politics, even when education and income levels are equal.
While polls suggest that women are more concerned than men about the poor, the federal safety net and education, they are far less likely than men to know the size of the national budget, the unemployment rate and the level of federal education spending. College educated men, for example, are much more likely to read a daily newspaper than their female counterparts.
But even if they are qualified and knowledgeable, isn't it a bit condescending to suggest that a woman president will automatically better represent women, as if we are some monolithic group? But since, according to our elites, we women are all supposed to think alike, it's no surprise that tothe White House Project the term "woman" seems to mean someone of the female persuasion who holds certain politically correct views.
Consider their ballot of 20 candidates, supposedly chosen because of their "demonstrated leadership qualities, not their political beliefs." Oh really?
The list included, of course, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Apparently she showed "leadership qualities" in trying to nationalize America's health-care system, a power-grab overwhelmingly rejected by Americans of both sexes. The list includes Environmental Protection Agency head and big-time government regulator Carol Browner; big-government activists Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund and Linda Chavez-Thompson of the AFL-CIO; feminist Sens. Olympia Snowe, Mary Landrieu and Dianne Feinstein and their colleague, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman; a number of upper-level Clinton White House officials and appointments and some liberal academics, among others.
Perhaps for good measure, there's a corporate president, an Army general and Elizabeth Dole.
But generally this list could be titled "I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar." For with few exceptions, the women on it pass the litmus test of what a real woman must believe according to today's elites: that is, she must be totally pro-choice on abortion (or quiet about it if she deviates at all); for big activist government and sticking the American family to pay for it, particularly in education, health care and the environment, and most important, to some extent she must believe that women are the victims of men -- whether in society, families or the workplace.
Absent from the list are women like former anti-communist crusader and United Nations Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick (talk about leadership skills); economist and Congressional Budget Director June O'Neill, though she had the audacity to show that there is virtually no wage gap between men and women when variables like children, education and experience are factored in; Kay James, former Secretary of Health and Human Services for the state of Virginia and a high-level Reagan and Bush Administration official who is (gasp!) outspokenly Christian, pro-life, pro-choice in education and black; former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities Lynne Cheney, who fought for traditional standards of learning in higher education instead of rejecting them as patriarchal; or prominent academics Christina Hoff Sommers and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who have undermined many of the intellectual tenets supporting feminism and the idea that women are typically victimized by men.
Funny, these and similar names are absent from the ballot of The White House Project. Perhaps most telling, there are no opportunities for write-ins (surely any logistical problem this presented could have been overcome). It seems elites want only those they deem acceptable to be women leaders.
Well, like I said, this real woman and, I'm sure, millions like me, decided to skip this election.