Opting out

Linda Hirschman continues throwing bombs at women who quit their day jobs in order to raise the kids/support the careers of their ambitious husbands. It does feel a little like twisting the knife in poor Silda Spitzer (also, why does Hirschman keep cattily calling her a "blond upper East Side mother" when she's clearly not blond??), but it also re-raises the old critique of well-educated, smart, successful career women who opt out of the working world to have a family. I'm secretly sympathetic to the claim that it's bad for women when opt-out "revolutionaries" exercise the "choice" to stop working and start breeding, for a few reasons: it makes it seem like working and raising kids have to be mutually exclusive if you're going to do a good job at either (a terrible message to send your daughters); it reinforces to employers that it's stupid to invest lots of money in training females when there's a guy available for the same job who's not going to leave the workforce in three years; and it absolves men from sharing family responsibilities by forcing them to be primary breadwinners.

But I also wonder if Hirschman's argument isn't a generational/class thing that doesn't apply in such force to the middle-class, well-educated group of young professionals I'm familiar with. This group was raised with more of an ethos to do what they want for self-fulfillment as opposed to supporting a family; as a result, the men aren't more likely to have well-paying jobs (or greater earning potential) than the women. And that means that more subtle planning has to go in to the calculation to have a family--plans that include more shared responsibilities and compromise in terms of who works and who stays home that have more to do with the stage of career each spouse is in than with whether they are male or female.

The Politics of Hope as unilateral disarmament

I think that's the thrust of the Clinton campaign's implicit (or maybe explicit) argument--that the Republicans aren't going to play nice just because Obama has galvanized a movement to reinvent politics, and that you need someone as dirty as they (the Clintons) are to advance a progressive agenda. That's what bitter partisans like Paul Krugman are on about too. You kind of have to admire someone who is able to capitalize on Americans' cynicism about the political process so effectively that she's been able to convince people that liberal ideals can only be achieved through a knife fight.

Thing is, for process-obsessives like me, Obama's promise of a better, cleaner, more transparent, more deliberative process of governance is pretty much the only reason to vote Democratic. I don't really want Bush-style tactics in the service of hugely problematic policies like universal health care. If my taxes are going to go up, I'd at least like to know that it's for a policy that comes out of a good process--one that balances the concerns and interests of people on both sides of the aisle. I don't want a policy that comes out of a process that looks anything like the way the Clinton campaign has been run--i.e., through secrecy, backstabbing, a total lack of discipline and, ultimately, reliance on shady and anti-democratic tactics.

I mean, if Clinton wins, it's a victory for the school of Rove and an affirmation of the Bush years, because she's basically promising us the same old crap, but with a higher price tag. She's repudiating the take-away message from her husband's years in power, which was, "a coherent political philosophy works." Until I see some evidence that she stands for more than just petty partisanship on behalf of short-sighted Great Society-style policies, I think I'm reserving my general election vote if she wins the nomination...