Ladies Love Cool John
Jeff Taylor blogged last week about John Edwards' hiring of Amanda Marcotte, a blogger who'd entered the fight against the accused Duke lacrosse players armed only with her feminism and some expletives. As Ezra Klein discovered, the story got silly very quickly; National Journal's (normally pretty great) blog reporter Daniel Glover accused Marcotte of scrubbing more ugly info from the blog, when in fact it had been lost in a software update.
Whatever. This isn't very interesting. What is: Why John Edwards has attracted such mainstream and bloggish support from feminists. NARAL's former honcho Kate Michelman backs Edwards. Edwards' second big blog hire was Shakespeare's Sister, who isn't explicitly a feminist blogger, but could be lazily characterized as such.
Hillary's run is historic. And there was a certain part of me that said, "How could you not be a part of this given all you've worked for?" And I do think it is really exciting and important and Hillary is a very fine candidate. But, again, for me, John's vision was very compelling. And women are not going to vote only because we have a woman running, but rather look at who will do the most for women and families. That's not to say that Hillary or Barack or Bill Richardson won't do good things for women. I just don't think it's an automatic vote [for Hillary] because you're a woman, though many women [may] feel they have to support the first woman candidate.
So Hillary is having trouble winning over feminists; Obama is having trouble winning over blacks. If the primaries come along and Obama/Edwards win women while Clinton wins blacks, I believe every pundit in the universe will have been wrong.