"Trolling For Votes In The Tampon Aisle"

An especially insightful entry at Hullabaloo. It's a bit long, but definitely worth reading. Below is just an excerpt.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/

Trolling For Votes In The Tampon Aisle
by digby

I just watched a round table on Meet The Press discussing whether Hillary Clinton is, and should be, trying to appeal to the woman vote. It seems this is quite bizarre and freakish and worrisome to many people. Last week, Tucker Carlson and Cliff May tackled the same subject by suggesting that "Vaginal-Americans" who vote for Hillary because she is a woman should be denied the right to vote. (No word on whether the men who say they would never vote for a woman should lose theirs.) I find all this angst about Clinton's alleged strategy to appeal to women a little bit confusing. Am I misremembering something, or have we not just spent the last 20 years rending our garments over how to appeal to the white male voter? Was I hallucinating all those times that gun-toting politicians put on a hunting jacket and threw a football and drove a cigarette boat at 100 miles an hour to underline their macho bonafides for the boys? These were not attempts to appeal to men? A recent book that seems to be sweeping the Village book salons is this one called: "THE NEGLECTED VOTER White Men and the Democratic Dilemma". The insiders are ecstatic, as if they've never heard this amazing insight before.

For as long as I can remember, the Democrats have been desperate to "recapture" the white male vote and nobody thought it was illegitimate to appeal to a constituency on the basis of their race and gender. But when Clinton is said to be appealing to women, it's as if she's breaking some sort of taboo --- that she's being narrow and opportunistic and cheap.

I frankly think it's smart for her to appeal to women, and not just because she's a woman. It's smart because, for Democrats, that's where the votes are. They should all be appealing to women. Women make up more than half of the electorate and have an equal claim to the attention of politicians as "white males" do, who, as the vaunted book mentioned above details, have been voting true blue Republican for a generation. Women are far more likely to vote for Democrats than men are, particularly unmarried women who make up a majority these days. It's completely rational for any candidate, much less a female candidate, to appeal to women. It's certainly more rational than the endless parade of Democratic men spitting pork rinds and driving pick-ups to appeal to men has been over the last couple of decades.