My 17-year-old daughter Scout Opatut and I attended an Obama fundraiser last week. I will not and cannot speak for her so feel free to view her post. Scout had a question at the ready. It was a question she had posed to me a few weeks before. Which bias do you think will be a bigger challenge when voters find themselves in the privacy of a voting booth? Race or gender? Now, of course she didn't ask that question because she wanted (or even respected) my opinion. It was a question of the rhetorical variety - simply an opportunity for me to hear what she thought. And so she answered her own question. Emphatically. Like a teenager who knows that right is on her side (that would be most teenagers). "Gender bias will trump racial bias," she said. My gut reaction was to disagree. Equally as emphatically. But the more I thought about it, the more puzzling the question became.
We revisited her question again this morning. It was prompted by Anna Quindlen's piece in the current issue of Newsweek. Quindlen observes that Hillary may not just have a problem with male voters but that in fact, she may not be the kind of woman that women can rally behind. And that would spell big trouble for Hillary.
So then I asked Scout to make a list of her observation of the personality attributes of each candidate - Hillary and Barack. Her list:
Candidate 1- genuine- caring- optimistic
Candidate 2- seasoned- calculated- dispassionate
I don't need to tell you which set of attributes goes with which candidate, do I? So the two of us absorbed the Quindlen piece and read this list out loud. That's when I figured out what confused me about Scout's question. In the abstract, I disagree with Scout. I believe that race would be a bigger obstacle in the voting booth than gender.
But the debate is not abstract. We are talking about this black man and this woman. So I pose a different question. Will Americans be more inclined to vote for a not-entirely black man with metrosexual tendencies or a woman whose personality attributes would be accepted if she were a man but are attacked as unflattering by both sexes because those attributes should be reserved for men who are not necessarily metrosexuals?
Not an easy question (it helps if you read it twice). No easy answers either.