Undervaluing Hillary?

I looked forward to going down with Dennis Kucinich's ship. I never guessed the Texas primary would matter and I thought Kucinich would at least be on the ballot. After the choice became Clinton, Obama, Edwards, I moved on to Obama. The Clinton's were too far to the right for me and I did not trust Edwards' born-again class warrior image. Also, just like many voters take a mindless position in favor of the tallest candidate, I have a mindless preference for a candidate who can give a speech.

I liked Huckabee better than Romney, Jesse Jackson better than Dukakis, Everett Dirkson better than Barry Goldwater.

I never heard Edwards give a good speech. Maybe television doesn't do him justice, but all I heard was monotone and platitudes. It is hard for me to see him as a trial lawyer, but I know some good coaches who can help him.

Clinton's speeches grated on my ears (more on this perception later), but I expected less of her because she was a big-firm lawyer and they are not supposed to be able to talk.

Obama, by contrast, can talk. He is a hot Billy Sunday preacher, a cool Walter Cronkite commentator, a Salvation Army heart to heart peddler of charity, a Laurence Tribe constitutional professor. Pick the crowd and he has the words.

Does this mean he can talk his way out of the half a billion dollar sludge machine that will slam him this Fall? I don't know, but if he gets the nomination, at least I won't have to listen to rank amateurs shouting at the television monitor ad nauseum.

Now let's get to the beef. Kathy says none of this matters. I might as well be asking how tall candidates are and I always undervalue the women candidates.

In fact, she says, everyone undervalues women in leadership, men and women alike.

There is support for this position. An op-ed columnist, Nicholas Kristof, made this argument in the New York Times last month:

In one common experiment, the “Goldberg paradigm,” people are asked to evaluate a particular article or speech, supposedly by a man. Others are asked to evaluate the identical presentation, but from a woman. Typically, in countries all over the world, the very same words are rated higher coming from a man....

Female leaders face these impossible judgments all over the world. An M.I.T. economist, Esther Duflo, looked at India, which has required female leaders in one-third of village councils since the mid-1990s. Professor Duflo and her colleagues found that by objective standards, the women ran the villages better than men. For example, women constructed and maintained wells better, and took fewer bribes.

Yet ordinary villagers themselves judged the women as having done a worse job, and so most women were not re-elected. That seemed to result from simple prejudice. Professor Duflo asked villagers to listen to a speech, identical except that it was given by a man in some cases and by a woman in others. Villagers gave the speech much lower marks when it was given by a woman.

I don't have any reason to believe I'm immune to the Goldberg Paradigm. On the contrary, I'm old enough to remember when women in power were unusual and I saw that world as normal. We said about the girl debaters, they were like dogs who could walk on their hind legs; we were impressed, not because they could do it well, but because they could do it at all.

There was not a single woman senator when I graduated from High School in 1969. Nor was there a single woman governor. The only women who had ever been governor replaced their husbands and they were the ilk of Ma Ferguson and Lurleen Wallace.

We had Sarah T. Hughes, but she was a novelty.

By the time I got to law school women were a pretty large minority, but when I started practicing law, there were still almost no lawyers in the courtroom. Docket call was held back in the judge's chambers where the lawyers smoked and told blue jokes (and racist jokes, for that matter, but that is another story).

So can I open the mind to the possibility that I should value and like Hillary more than I do? That she will be a better president than I can perceive because I am suffering from this syndrome? That I should have liked Ann Richards better than I did? And Molly Ivins? And for that matter Sappho, the Brontes, Dickenson and Angelou?