Reply to Why are white American men so afraid of a female POTUS?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I agree that it's this particular woman.

I am not a white male (I'm an American-born Asian guy), but I know and have discussed American politics with a lot of friends, colleagues and acquaintances who are like minded Caucasian men.  Many of us supported Geraldine Ferraro.  As a moderate, I have been supportive of a number of female politicians in the past (from both sides of the aisle):  Connie Morella, Barbara Mikulski, Jean Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright.

However there are a number of female politicians, I cannot conscientiously support including Hillary Clinton.  Another one was Sarah Palin.  I notice that there were far fewer cries of sexism or that people were afraid of voting for Sarah Palin because they didn't want a female vice president.  Clinton's gender may be historically significant but I believe that it is far less significant as to why people who are not voting for her are voting against her.  She carries a huge volume of negative political baggage.  Just because her supporters discount the baggage, does not mean that the baggage is a more signficant factor for her detractors than her gender.  But apparently because her supporters can cast her political baggage as unimportant, everyone else must and therefore the only real reason anyone would vote against her is her gender.

Your argument is overly simplistic.  Yes there are some men who are voting against her because they don't want a woman president, but I think there are far fewer of those than you think.  There are probably more white men who are voting against her this year because they have just been through 8 years of a non-white male president and want to come back to a white male president (since that's all we've ever had prior to 2008), but I think the number of people who are actually voting this way is highly overestimated.[/quote]

PP I can understand pretty much everything you have said, even if I don't necessarily agree, except when you place Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton in the same sentence. Or context. Or discussion. Beyond the fact that they are both women, there are absolutely no parallels to be drawn between them. Sexism wasn't the issue with Palin, in fact it worked in her favor since she was seen as hot. Her undeniable and inexcusable stupidity is what people were afraid of. She would have been an even scarier proposition than Trump. And that, to me, says a lot.[/quote]

My point is that people automatically characterized votes against Sarah Palin based on various issues, including the ones that you cite.  And the arguments against voting for her have nothing to do with gender.  Too many blind Democrats, ignore the fact that moderate and conservative voters may have the same attitude towards Clinton.  There are many, many polls that cite that very large groups of people are not supporting Clinton because they question her integrity and her truthfulness, her ability to follow rules and regulations.  If you want a list of issues for why she is scary to many people, just Google "hillary rodham clinton scandal" and see how many billions of hits you get about the many, many questionable incidents that have occurred over her long political career.  She has a huge amount of baggage.  For many of us, she has far more baggage than Sarah Palin ever did.  I would never vote for Palin, but I would also never vote for Clinton.  And in both cases, it has nothing to do with their gender.  But for some reason, people who are willing to discount Clinton's political baggage, cannot accept that others are not so blind to her political history and they simplistically characterize the opposition to her as only about her gender.

Sexism is again not the issue.  Or it if is, it is a minor issue.  I would guess that the number of people who are voting on gender is a relatively small and not particularly significant percentage of the voters.[/quote]

There are indeed some who discount her political baggage, but clearly not a significant number or she would be running away with this election. I do not agree with the OP that gender is the [b]main [/b]issue voters have with Clinton (male or otherwise), but the visceral hatred for her, as opposed to simply disagreeing with her politics or any questionable practices, does suggest to me that there is far more than just this baggage weighing her down.[/quote]

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