Man, I mean Woman, up!

The front page of the March 6 edition of The New York Times contains a ‘news analysis’ entitled “A Two-Man Race? Women Aren’t Surprised.” The essence of this isn’t a surprise either coming from the NYT; “It’s a situation that has left some prominent Democratic women frustrated to still be fighting battles they had hoped had been settled years ago.” Further, “…a view shared by many of the female candidates, who struggled to explain how, after the year of the woman, no woman remained a serious contender for the nomination.”

Hmmm. How soon we forget. It was less than four years ago that a woman was the nominee of the party. It was less than a couple of weeks ago that two women were on the short list for the nomination. Let’s go back to 2008 when we had not only a serious black contender but a two-term president of a partially non-white race.

I don’t think there is any reason for frustration let alone anger. The latter suggests that women were being somehow discriminated against by the party, by the country. Likewise, demands for a female vice president or a brown or black person (acceptably PC terms apparently) seem to go hand-in-hand with a ‘must’ for the Democrats to prove themselves unbiased. And this after Obama and Hillary.

At the of the end of the day, only one person will be the nominee. We cannot have, well maybe these days we can, an amalgamated candidate who is at once male/female/black/white/gay/straight/rich/middle class/poor/hispanic/ protestant/catholic/jewish. There are only so many Unitarians in the world, and only two in Congress.

That is to say only ONE person can be the nominee with all the baggage of being a ONE person, which is to say unique. There has never been a Jewish nominee for President just yet, but I don’t hear much frustration on that score, and I don’t hear a lot of Jews, who are stereotypically rather loud, clamoring for Bernie at the moment.

I offer myself up with the burden of being a straight white male, in a Jewish-Unitarian-Church of England household, with the only African input stemming from someone leaving that continent about 100,000 years ago, and perhaps a tad of Hispanic DNA between El Cid and the Inquisition.

But am I upset that someone more like me is not likely to be the nominee? I am not. Nor was I upset that no one quite like me has ever been a nominee! Perhaps some day in the future that will change, but for now the goal is to get the best viable candidate to face off Donald Trump. A woman would be fine if she met my political criteria. Or a black or brown person. Or a gay person. Or a doorknob for that matter if said knob was in line with my politics and agenda.

That Elizabeth Warren didn’t make it isn’t an issue of her being a woman, but of being herself; I thought she was obnoxious and doing more damage to the Democrats than she was to Trump. I don’t care much for Bernie for similar reasons. But the acid test for any voter should not be what category the person falls into but rather what their policies are and whether those are achievable. Warren fans blaming whomever for bias against her gender are misguided; at the end of the day she wasn’t the candidate that most Democrats want and most Democrats fall into the ethno-gender diverse category (blacks, hispanics, women, gay or Unitarian). Where’s the bias?

I suspect that the nominee will choose a politically appropriate number two, especially since, in their late 70s, Biden and Sanders have to be realistic about the age thing. Would the NYT whine if it’s a woman, but not a black person Would there be a news analysis about offended blacks, or browns, if it’s a white woman?

Keep your eyes on the policy prize; WHO is in the White (oh my, is that offensive?)) House and WHO sits in Congress are vehicles to the objectives to which I note that Speaker Pelosi is very much a woman as is the Supreme Court Justice, RBG, we hope can retire soon enough with a comparable replacement.