The William Morris Agency was run for many years by Abe
Lastfogel, who stood only five-foot-two. He didn’t want his
employees to tower over him, so he only hired agents his height or
shorter. One year at the annual company party for the agents and
their families, one of the men introduced his young son to Abe.
“Mr. Lastfogel,” he said. “I’m hoping my son could join the firm
after high school. He’s only fourteen, and look how short he is
already!”
This business of hiring someone for the right job for the wrong
reason has been very much on my mind. A poll, than which no greater
intellectual authority in our culture is conceivable, has declared
that it is high time for a woman to accede to the presidency. The
mensuration of temporal height is not a discipline I have mastered,
but I have scored a high mark or twain in political science. And in
that field the time had grown to its full height almost four
decades ago.
In 1966 Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister of India and served
for fourteen of the next seventeen years; Golda Meir became her
counterpart in Israel in 1969, Thatcher in England in ‘79. When
Geraldine Ferraro ran for vice president alongside Walter Mondale
in 1984, it was a familiar refrain among Republican types that “if
Margaret Thatcher would be heading our ticket we’d vote for her in
a heartbeat.” Although it was kind of lame and pathetic that they
felt the need to buttonhole everyone with that information, lest
the chauvinist stereotype prove too adhesive, it had the homely
virtue of being true.
Bottom line, the story is a phony, the poll is a fraud, the
issue is a phantom and the conflict is a mirage: you can’t get me
to believe that there is one American in the last thirty years who
would refuse to pull the lever for a candidate he agreed with just
because she is a woman. Stuff and nonsense. The press needs to set
up a straw man to prevent the story of the first woman president,
whenever it materializes, from becoming anticlimactic.
YET, PERVERSELY ENOUGH, there is a heightening problem with a
female presidency. A brand new situation that never existed in the
past. And its provenance is in the tortured, tortuous byways of the
liberal mind. Because they have begun to promulgate in various
media a new paradigm for feminine governance. They are working to
persuade the society that women bring a new hormonal cocktail to
the party. Women as a group govern differently; this is their
claim.
Nowhere is this pernicious doctrine more overt than in the
recent television show, Commander-in-Chief, featuring
Geena Davis as President. Right from the get-go, the producers put
us on notice that we would encounter a new vision of government
that is informed by the essence of womanhood. Sure enough, we were
immediately treated to a scene of Davis on the phone in the Oval
Office, threatening to invade Nigeria if they go ahead with the
planned execution of a woman adulteress. The message in Ms. Davis’
commando performance is clear: here comes a woman-based
politics.
This represents the purveyance of an agenda masquerading as an
analysis. Whatever we call it, it is a horrific subversion. There
has been a consensus of long standing — albeit often unspoken —
that there is no intrinsic difference between having a man or a
woman in office. In Mrs. Gandhi’s fourteen years of rule, in Mrs.
Thatcher’s eleven years, and during the tenures of Benazir Bhutto,
Corazon Aquino, Violeta Chamorro, Golda Meir, Kim Campbell, et al.,
we never once heard that they were pursuing feminine policies. Nor,
conversely, that they were being exaggeratedly aggressive to
overcompensate for lack of masculinity.
Even the voting habits of women are fairly similar to those of
men. Whenever we look closely at the stats undergirding the
much-ballyhooed “gender gap,” we find variations of two to four
percent between male and female polling behavior. It used to be
said that women voted for John Kennedy and John Lindsay because of
their good looks; I’m sure that was true, but I’m equally sure that
the good-looking women who run for office get plenty of male votes
on that basis. When women gained suffrage by men’s sufferance,
there was no proviso that Susan be Anthony. Still, the voting
tracks are roughly parallel.
We are witnessing a cultural effort to undermine our national
consensus. Under the guise of promoting a female presidency, they
are injecting a poisonous perception of women as a group with
identifiable political characteristics. Not only is that idea
verily absurd, it’s even ridiculous to think of women as a group to
begin with; our women do not reside in feminist collectives on the
Amazon. Women and men still live together in this country,
sometimes even in families, and men will vote for a woman President
if her political views comport with theirs. High time maybe, but
this is a low blow.
