DNC Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is a virtual motherlode of stupid. So when she was interviewed by Ana Marie Cox for New York Magazine, you could be certain something would happen that either beggared the imagination or offended the conscience.
Hillary Clinton and Wasserman Schultz are close allies. Wasserman Schultz used her position as DNC chair to warn off potential challengers (Bernie Sanders didn’t get the memo), deter donors to challengers, and create a debate schedule that was calculated to minimize the audience that could watch Hillary stumble through choreographed answers to questions presented by the tamest moderators in the history of modern political debates (see here | here). Even with Wasserman Schultz’s intervention, Sanders is running unexpectedly strong and Hillary either loses to or is tied with every GOP candidate when, by virtue of name recognition alone, she should be beating them handily.
Oddly enough, for someone running on the unique selling proposition of “I have a vagina”, Hillary is surprisingly weak with women. Over a third of Democrat women say they will not vote for her:
And not only is she weak with women, she creates a devil-and-holy-water reaction with men. As the poll above shows, over half of Democrat men say they will not vote for her. And her unfavorable rating with men may be a record (if you want to see the level of disgust Hillary and her fangirls provokes among otherwise “progressive” men, you have to read this):
The point of this is that if Hillary is to win she has to open up a massive lead among women in general and Democrat women in particular to offset her toxic negatives.
Now back to the interview.
Do you notice a difference between young women and women our age in their excitement about Hillary Clinton? Is there a generational divide? Here’s what I see: a complacency among the generation of young women whose entire lives have been lived after Roe v. Wade was decided.
There are two points here where Wasserman Schultz goes off into Bizarro World. First, it really infantilizes women. In Wasserman Schultz’s world women don’t care about war, the economy, job security, illegal immigration, education for themselves and their families, financial security, government overreach, crony capitalism, the trashing of the health care system. Nope. They pretty much care about killing babies. She essentially goes along with the most misogynistic view of women held by young men: women=vagina.
Relatedly, she is actually wrong.
It is older people, in particular older women, who are pro-life.
What is dampening enthusiasm for Hillary has nothing to do with abortion — though I would be happy to see it a central issue in 2016 — and everything to do with the fact that the more you learn about Hillary the more likely you are to decide that she does not have the talent or temperament to be a den mother much less the president of the United States.
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