Take your latest bit of verbal diarrhea -- please:
Kathleen, I'm thinking about a woman who lives in the suburbs; she may not work outside the home. They're talking around election time -- the husband and the wife -- you know, she says, "I sort of like this Hillary, the first woman president. She's pro-choice." And the husband says, "You know, dear, you know, this is going to kill our tax bracket. You know that tuition thing we pay every couple of years for the kids, every year, we can't do that if we get a higher tax bracket. We have to pay more money." So, could the tax issue -- Hillary's threat to raise taxes -- throw a lot of women and men from the suburbs back into the Republican column? Am I being too tricky here?
I mean, where do we even begin?
Is it the idea that you think women don't pay any attention to anything political that bothers me? The fact that only the man of the house knows how much money things cost? The fact that these "typical suburbanites" evidently think it's hunky-dory for their little Madison and Caden to pick up the bill for the Iraq war?
No, what really bothers me is the way you casually dismissed the very idea that the suburban mom could be persuasive. The way you assumed that her position on abortion was subordinate to her position on taxes, so much so that she would be willing to cast aside Hillary Clinton in favor of Mike Huckabee. The way that you walked us right back to 1917, when people said with a straight face that there was no reason to give women the right to vote, because they'd vote the same as their husbands, anyhow.
I can see your conversation happening in real life, Chris, and I can see it ending this way:
Wife: Well, given the high level of debt, the lousy handling of the Iraq war, the strong anti-choice rhetoric from the right, and the fact that our country seems to be going to Hell in a handbasket, I think that it's probably okay that we turn things over to a woman for once. She couldn't do much worse, and I'd really like our kids to live in a country that doesn't completely suck.
Husband: But she'll screw up our tax rates!
Wife: Well then, at least you'll get screwed by someone.
After that cordial ending, the wife and husband would go forth and vote their own consciences at the polls, just like millions of other men and women do. Maybe the wife votes for Ron Paul, maybe the husband votes for Chris Dodd, but since they each get to cast their ballot on their own, they get to do that.
So Chris, really and truly, I mean this from the bottom of my heart: shut up. This is not 1917, or even 1987. Women have actual brains and the right to use them, and while it's lovely that you think that they're just going to defer when their man tells them what to think, it's offensive, and it's simply untrue.
