I recently got a lesson in how diverse this country is by speaking about my book, Pearls, Politics, and Power: How Women Can Win and Lead on Nantucket, El Paso, Texas, Chicago, Illinois and Greenville, South Carolina.

When I walked into the Nantucket Athenaeum, I inhaled the air of history. The walls were lined with portraits. Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and woman’s suffragist had spoken here; so did Lucretia Mott, a suffragist born on the island, and Henry Thoreau. As one might expect, it was a sympathetic audience, following in the tradition of northern liberalism.

Greenville, South Carolina has a starkly different history. Frederick Douglass, Lucretia Mott and Henry Thoreau would not have been welcomed there. But I spoke at the neutral venue of Furman University, originally a Southern Baptist college, now independent. The faculty, I was told, is more democratic than the student body.

I had been invited by former Secretary of Education Richard Riley, who I had worked with when I was Deputy Secretary in the Clinton years. As a result my reception was warm and cordial.

But nothing could hide the fact that politics in South Carolina is fierce. This is not only the state that produced “You Lie” Joe Wilson, who is revered more than he is rejected, but also Governor Mark Sanford, who refuses to resign after an affair with an Argentinean woman, followed by a tearful public confession. I was told that despite a petition asking for his resignation from a majority of Republicans, they are unlikely to vote for impeachment because they don’t want the Republican Lieutenant Governor to have an advantage in the next election.

It is a tough state for women in politics. South Carolina is at the bottom—50^th—of all the states in the percentage of women in politics. There are no women in the State Senate, in contrast to New Hampshire, which was a majority of women in their Senate. Ever wonder if there are different political cultures in this country?

I wanted to learn more from the women of South Carolina, so in addition to my public address, I met with a group of 25 women leaders. They know they have a problem and they didn’t need an uppity northerner to tell them about it, so I did more listening than talking. The picture of the genteel southern woman has not faded, neither has the power of the church, they said. That day I had read an editorial in the Furman student newspaper, decrying the lingering influence of the southern Baptist church and it’s role in diminishing the role of women. Women are not encouraged to be leaders.

Most significantly, politics is dirtier than in some other places. During our roundtable discussion, there was an empty place behind a name card. The 69 year-old woman could not attend because she was seeing her lawyer to file a lawsuit to refute an anonymous letter campaign that accused her of having had an affair with Governor Sanford. No wonder women hesitate to enter the arena.

I left with one message—sometimes women get elected to be the clean up crew after a period of dirty politics or political violence. The state of New Jersey has moved from around 35^th place in the country to one of the top ten in just a few years. In addition to recruiting and training women to run for public office, Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, told me women got a boost because “a lot of the men were indicted.”

The very qualities that make it harder for women to get elected—not being part of the old boy’s network, gives them the advantage of having fresh, and yes, clean faces.

El Paso, Texas was totally different, not only in terrain, but in how it welcomes women into leadership. As we began to land, I saw nothing but sandy colored ground, and a rim of bare mountains. A few blocks from our hotel we could see the border fence (which the locals hate) and a huge Mexican flag waving in the breeze. Most of the people at the airport and at the restaurant where we had lunch spoke Spanish.

This is the state that produced Governor Ann Richards, Sarah Weddington, who as a young lawyer argued the case for Roe v. Wade, and Molly Ivins, the outrageously funny, liberal columnist. My audience was comprised of 100 women from Leadership Texas, a competitive program that recruits women from all over Texas for leadership training. They were joined by the El Paso Women’s forum. The 300 women were raring to take on the world. When I spoke I could see heads nodding and faces smiling. Like any speaker, I know an audience is in tune with me when the audience laughs at my jokes before I even finish the punch line. I was even introduced to a distant cousin. Now that’s connecting with your audience.

In Chicago I spoke to the National Council of Jewish Women, a social service group which provides funding and volunteer work for many non-profits. I was told that there was not a social service group that had not been touched by these women. The question I posed to them was, would any of them take the next step and jump into the political fray? Chicago politics is not for the faint of heart either. They were keenly aware of the fact that most of their recent governors had landed in jail, and the recent Governor, Rod Blagojevich, has been impeached.

One of the surprises in my travels was to discover a marvelous museum in El Paso, with an extraordinary collect ion of Renaissance art, and to see the new addition to the Chicago Art Institute and the sculptures in Millennium Park.

This is a diverse country, and getting elected in some states is much harder than in others, but the message has to continue to be the same—women can and must make a difference.

 
Madeleine M. Kunin is the former Governor of Vermont and was the state's first woman governor. She served as Ambassador to Switzerland for President Clinton, and was on the three-person panel that chose Al Gore to be Clinton's VP. She is the author of Pearls, Politics, and Power: How Women Can Win and Lead from Chelsea Green Publishing.

Cross-posted on ChelseaGreen.com.

September 10, 2009

When I heard the yell “You Lie!” during President Barack Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress last night, I thought it might have been some rabid outsider who was let into the chamber by mistake.

I was wrong. It was an insider. Joe Wilson is a Republican member of Congress from South Carolina.

Those right wing conservatives who feared that their children would be adversely affected by listening to the President’s speech on education should have other concerns—they should prevent them from watching the Congress in action.

What does a child learn about respect for Democracy, for the President of the United States, and plain good manners when she or he witnesses such an outrageous display of incivility as good old Joe displayed Wednesday night?

Like Michelle, who shook her head in disbelief, I was shaking mine.

Yes, I expect a certain level of rowdiness in the Congressional halls. They had a right to stand up or sit down, to applaud or not applaud, as most of them did during various parts of the speech.

But Joe was clearly out of control. Unlike school children and mature adults, he has not learned beans about anger management. The word respect is missing from his vocabulary.

He did belatedly apologize, and the President, to his credit, accepted it. I’m not sure I could have been that gracious.

What he should do is a stint of community service in a public school, teaching children to work hard, stay in school, and be polite to those who they disagree with.

At the 1980 Democratic Convention I was not pleased with Senator Ted Kennedy. Why was he challenging the incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Presidency, and thereby hurting his chances for re-election?

The convention was deeply divided between Carter and Kennedy supporters. But we sat shoulder to shoulder on the convention floor to hear Kennedy speak.

All was forgiven. I was enraptured by the passion and substance of his words. It was one of the most mesmerizing political speeches I had ever heard, climaxed by the words, “the dream will never die.” And he did not let the dream die after he lost his last stand battle with Carter.

He went to work as a Senator. When I worked in Washington as Deputy Secretary of Education from 1993–1996, I had a firsthand opportunity to experience how Kennedy “worked.” Unlike most United States Senators who are experts at demonstrating their self-importance, Kennedy carried his fame lightly. He wasn’t there to grandstand or issue partisan salvos; he was there to get things done.

I worked with him and his staff on several education issues, including the Direct Student Loan Program and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. When he chaired the commitee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, he worked closely with the Republican Vice Chair, Senator Nancy Kassebaum. When he lost his chairmanship because of the Republican takeover of the Senate, he worked just as closely with her.

The irony of his career is that from the outside, he appeared to be one of the most liberal and partisan Democrats in the Senate. From the inside, he was one of the most bipartisan and constructive members of the Senate. He respected his colleagues and they respected him.

And he understood the process—not only in terms of the rules by which the Senate plays, but also in terms of how people interact with one another, how to make a deal which leaves both sides feeling they have won.

Another contradiction in his life is that he was so obviously flawed as a human being in his early years, and in his later years, became a model of a life well lived. We tend to forget that he was expelled from Harvard for cheating, we remember Chappaquiddick without having to restate the details, and we know about his struggles with weight gain and alcohol consumption.

History, however, will be kind. He will be remembered for his strengths, rather than his frailties. His strength in working all the angles of a piece of legislation to get it through, his faith in the democratic process, his respect for dissent, and his unwavering belief in the dream.

I only wish, as we listen to the accolades that will be given to him in the days ahead, by mourners all over the world, that the members of the United States Senate could give him the highest honor of all by passing an effective health care reform bill. That would please him greatly.

 
Cross-posted on The Huffington Post.

A female Secretary of State who identifies with the plight of women is making a difference. We’ve had two female Secretaries of State with Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice. But Hillary is the first one to spend seven days in Africa and use her time there to put a bright spotlight on an issue that has survived largely in the dark—the massive use of rape as a tool of war.

Such mutilation and violent abuse of women will continue as long as the world turns a blind eye to such massive atrocitities. Hillary Clinton’s visit to the worst war torn areas in the Congo makes it that much harder for anyone to say “we just didn’t know.”

But being a female Secretary of State, married to a former President, continues to burden her with baggage she should no longer be asked to carry. One slip of the tongue, in a moment of fatigue, threatens to undermine all that she has accomplished. Why, after having proven that she is a skilled diplomat in her own right, are the commentators so quick to jump on her?

The issue was a question asked by a student: if she knew what Mr. Clinton thought. She responded in knee-jerk fashion that she was the Secretary of State. Not a big deal, but it became a big deal (the student said later he meant to say Mr.Obama) because the media is still so eager to diminish her role, to see her as a shrewish, jealous woman. Even at her best—going to African killing places like Goma, where few if any Americans have gone to save women’s lives—she is not acknowledged for her courage. Worse yet, the torture, rape and killing she wants the world to see, is obscured.

We cannot allow the old habit of Hillary bashing to distract us from her mission and ours—to create outrage against the targeted, purposeful, destruction of thousands of women’s lives, so that the perpetrators will be punished, or at the very least, shamed into changing their gruesome tactics of warfare.

Cross-posted on The Huffington Post.

“This is socialized medicine!” was the charge leveled by opponents of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, when these two landmark pieces of legislation were being debated.

The debate was a bit more civil then, but the scare tactics were exactly the same as they are today as we debate health care legislation. In the 60’s, I attended a dinner of the Vermont Medical Association and listened to the speaker rage against communism, the importation of Polish hams, and socialized medicine, all in one sentence.

Doctor’s wives—which I was at the time, were expected to be part of the AMA Auxiliary. We were recruited to spread the word about the evils of socialized medicine. They did not ask us to disrupt town meetings. Instead, we were asked to hold teas in our neighborhoods and play a record made by Ronald Reagan. The closing words warned that if Medicare and Medicaid were passed, Reagan’s sonorous voice said: “In your sunset years, you will be able to tell your children and grandchildren what life was like when men were free.”

I was not a typical doctor’s wife. I recruited some of my doctors’ wives friends and we started a counter group, which we tamely called a “study group” to ostensibly discuss the legislation. My real mission was to demonstrate that not all doctors, and not all doctors’ wives opposed this bill.

Our first event was a debate held between the head of the Vermont Medical Society and an official from the agency of health education and welfare, as it was then called. Unfortunately, he was not an effective proponent of the law and a young legislator, named Phil Hoff, who later became Governor, accused us of slanting the debate in favor of the AMA.

I had to set the record straight. At our next event, we would just present one side—in favor of the legislation, I made sure this speaker was well prepared. We filled City Hall auditorium. Unlike today, there was no shouting, but a lot of questioning, and tremendous concern about providing coverage for the elderly.

Ronald Reagan turned out to be wrong. Most of us are so happy, in our sunset years, to have access to Medicare, and yes, we are still free. The lesson here is simple—the hysterical exaggerations that are being blasted from the airwaves are almost identical to what we heard then.

They did not triumph then, and they must not be allowed to drown out the voices of reason and common sense today.

 
Madeleine M. Kunin is the former Governor of Vermont and was the state's first woman governor. She served as Ambassador to Switzerland for President Clinton, and was on the three-person panel that chose Al Gore to be Clinton's VP. She is the author of Pearls, Politics, and Power: How Women Can Win and Lead from Chelsea Green Publishing.

This article originally appeared as a commentary on Vermont Public Radio.

There are few purely joyous moments in the course of daily global events. The homecoming of the two female journalists from North Korea—Laura Ling and Euna Lee was one of these. Hurray!

The sight of these two freed women, stepping off the plane which brought them back, broke through the summer doldrums of the increasingly nasty health care debate, it took our minds off, for a moment, of the tragic demise of freedom in Iran, and it even brought the sun out, after days and days of deluge.

And it was one of those rare times when everybody looked good. Bill Clinton for taking the risk to go to North Korea and to draw on his wildly popular political capital to convince the North Korean leadership let these captives go free. His wife Hillary looked good, because she was not in competition with her husband, she worked in partnership with him. And for the Obama administration which had the self-confidence to let him go and not care about who takes credit for the rescue.

Strikingly, when the two women disembarked, after tears, hugs and kisses, and a few words from Al Gore, Bill Clinton chose not to speak. This said more about the former President, than any of his words could have conveyed.

The death of a famous person is different from the death of a loved one—whether it is Michael Jackson, Frank McCourt, or Walter Cronkite. We didn’t know any of them personally, and yet, we experience a sense of loss.

Fame lends itself to a different kind of intimacy—on one level, a famous person becomes part of the backdrop of our lives. And sometimes, he or she steps into the foreground because we think we know them; we think they know us because they seem to speak to us directly, whether it is with their music, writing or what was once called “The Nightly News.” There seemed to be no other.

It may be difficult for people under the age of forty to fathom what an imprint Walter Cronkite had on my generation. He has been called “the most trusted man in America,” and possibly he was. All I can recall is that what he said seemed sound and sensible. I do remember in the early years of the Vietnam War I was impatient with him because he reported on the war dispassionately with no hint of doubt. I already had my doubts.

But when he declared that this war could not be won, and at best, end in a stalemate, we knew that the dissenters were not only marching in Washington, they had reached Middle America. It was a turning point.

Few people today could serve as such a precise barometer of American public opinion. Lyndon Johnson saw it, and perhaps even Archie Bunker, who had argued with his son about the war on television every week.

The extent of Cronkite’s fame was revealed to me in 1974 when I was a delegate to the Democratic convention in Kansas City. (It was an interim convention that was held between nominating conventions to focus on re-writing the rules). We were attending one of these gargantuan receptions which are the hallmark of national political conventions when suddenly, the word spread through the crowd, necks craned, the crowd moved like lemmings in one direction.

“Who was it?” I wondered. “One of the Presidential hopefuls?”

“No,” the word came back. It was Walter Cronkite. The real Walter Cronkite. We all wanted to go back home to tell our friends and neighbors that we had actually seen him, in the flesh.

His death is a loss, a loss of good reporting, a loss of cohesiveness which he could bring to our country, and the simple loss of a man we felt was a friend.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor has displayed admirable self-control and patience throughout this Senate hearing process. I, on the other hand, found myself yelling at the television screen more than once during the question periods from some of the Senators.

The first time was when they characterized her statement about a “strong Latina woman” as a clear indication that she would rule on cases solely on the basis of her ethnicity and gender.

I shouted, “Hurray! I’m glad that you are a strong Latina woman! It’s about time that women like you had a voice on the Supreme Court.”

Time and again she had to slowly and patiently explain that the purpose of her talk, from which the quote was lifted, was to inspire students to follow her path. Time and again, she had to reassure these questioners that her only guidepost was not her personal experience, but the rule of law as defined by the Constitution.

But what made me raise my voice to a shout was that the more hostile Senators could not stop interrupting her time and again, hardly ever letting her finish a sentence. How many women have experienced the same thing?

Interrupting women is considered normal. Perhaps men are not even conscious that they are doing so, and are not aware that they are treating female witnesses differently from male witnesses. I would love to replay the Roberts and Alito hearings to see how many times they were interrupted.

When a man interrupts a woman in mid-sentence it reveals much about him.

First it shows he hasn’t been listening to what she is saying and secondly, it indicates that he doesn’t want to listen to what she WILL say. Her views are not important. His are clearly more important and that is why he is more interested in listening to himself than to her.

Fundamentally, interruptions are just plain rude and a sign of disrespect. How she kept her cool through these constant interruptions, without once saying, “Please let me finish, Senator,” I don’t know. I can’t help but admire her for her self-control, knowledge, and yes, amazing judicial temperament.

Twenty-six year old Neda Agha Soltan’s face has become the face of the Iranian protest movement. She was an innocent Iranian student, standing on a side street close to the protesters, when a bullet struck her. The video of her collapsed bleeding body, and the posters of her forthright gaze provide some insight into who these protestors are. We’ve seen the blurred footage, most taken with cell phone cameras, of crowds marching, placards held high, and then we’ve seen them fleeing the armed police and militia. Some were shown being beaten and arrested. It is hard footage to watch because these are not violent crowds. The violence is all on the other side. It’s like watching a movie that we know will end badly.

The faces of the crowd rarely have come into focus. But the portrait of one woman, modestly covered with a headscarf tells us more than a crowd trying to avoid tear gas. We no doubt read more into her eyes and her innocent look than we should. But I find it impossible not to do so. Women, under the repressive Iranian regime, have had more to lose and stand to gain more with regime change. They have often been in the vanguard of the marches, refusing to cede their rights to the men who march with them, for good reason.

The courage these women and men have demonstrated is worthy of our shock and awe. We, in the United States, have voted with our feet, we have raised our hands to shout and wave at political rallies, but nothing in our experience can be compared to what we have seen in Iran for the last few nights. These people, young, middle aged, and old, are voting with their bodies. They are, in the true sense of the expression, putting themselves on the line.

Neda Agha Soltan is the martyr, and her visage is the image, which may resurrect the dreams of so many women and men around the world for equal justice.

The cries of distress about "identity politics" which have issued from Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh over the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court make me almost feel sorry for them. Poor privileged white men. Their stranglehold on power is slowly being loosened.

Strangely, they have lost sight of their own identity as white males. Do they not bring their own life experiences into decision-making, whether they serve on the Supreme Court, a corporate board, or in the U.S. Congress? Could it be that the white male model has been the template for so long that any American who deviates from this assumed norm is threatening to bring "identity" politics into their decisions? Or, have they simply forgotten—or worse never considered—that identities different from their own have a rightful place in the power structure of a democracy?

Limbaugh went so far as to call Sotomayor a "reverse" racist for claiming that sometimes a strong Latina woman may be better than a strong white man. Hasn't their assumption been that a white man is almost always better than any woman, indicated by the fact that Sotomayor, if confirmed, would be the third women in history to serve on the court, compared to two black and hundreds of white men?

But what we are talking about is not just ethnicity, which is significant by itself, but more importantly, we are talking about bringing a radically different kind of life experience to the Supreme Court. Her white male critics delude themselves into thinking that they have not brought their relatively privileged life experiences into their spheres of influence.

We see the world through the lens of all our experiences; that is a fundamental part of the human condition. The fact that I was brought up by a single mother, came to this country as a child, has influenced my views.

How could Sotomayor's experience of being brought up by her mother, of being the first person in her family to go to college, of having vaulted over the hurdles of poverty and discrimination to get there not influence her? Better yet why shouldn't it? Life experience is not something to be denied, but to be celebrated. Yes, decisions must be in keeping with the law, but the law has always been, and will continue to be, open to interpretation.

We need only look to Sandra Day O'Connor who was highly respected by both conservatives and liberals. When she left the court she was lauded for her practical interpretation of the law. She had the unusual ability to see what impact legal decisions had on everyday lives.

During a case regarding search and seizure, she questioned the impact of forcing people out of a car if there was a pregnant mother in the back seat who had to get out in the rain.

Who else could imagine a pregnant mother, a poor mother, a struggling student, or understand discrimination, but a strong Latina woman whose parents came to the United States when Puerto Ricans were looked down upon in the same way as many Mexicans are today?

Nothing in Sotomayor's brilliant record indicates that she would rule on a case by ethnic identity alone, but everything in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court indicates that the search for perfect justice will be better served by validating her life experiences—which reflect the life experiences of so many Americans.