Finneran: I Am Woman…...Hear Me Roar, 2016

Friday, July 29, 2016

Tom Finneran, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Eleven years after Angela Merkel, thirty seven years after Margaret Thatcher, and forty seven years after Golda Meir, America has finally done it. For the first time in our history, we have a woman as a major party nominee for the presidency. May saints be praised.

The glass ceiling lies shattered in a million shards.

Truth be told that glass ceiling was smashed years ago as women streamed into every major industry and profession, demonstrating grit, brains, and ability even to the most hidebound of men.

Here’s a curiosity---my wife and her contemporaries are excited by the actual event of Hillary’s nomination. My daughters, only one generation removed, simply yawn and see it as an obvious everyday fact---women can do anything they choose.

Experience is instructive. Women of a certain age endured a lot of hostility when they entered the workforce. Genuine doubt about their abilities beyond secretarial duties abounded. Raw and vicious sexism surfaced. Pornography was often left on their desk or circulated through their offices. Unequal pay was the rule rather than the exception. Snide and suggestive comments were the lingua franca of the age. They were tough and hardy pioneers.

Fast forward to today and if a single instance of that tawdry behavior surfaced my daughters would probably punch the lights out of the dated dinosaur involved. They stand on their own two feet with no attitude of entitlement but rather a basic human desire to be judged and treated fairly.

It’s a different world today, and a better world as well.

And yet, there is a clash on the horizon.........................

Securing the nomination is one thing, winning the election is another. I do not subscribe to the feminist school of thought that the election is the true test of the glass ceiling. To be judged and treated fairly involves an acceptance of the grim rule that politics, particularly presidential politics, is a rugged business. In fact, anything less than a rugged and robust evaluation of Hillary’s strengths and weaknesses would do her and the country a grave disservice. She is not a dainty delicate creature. And the presidency is a very tough job. Thus the entrance exam is equally tough.

It will be interesting to watch the media’s treatment of Hillary. Eight years ago, and then again four years ago, the media completely embarrassed themselves by carrying a woefully inexperienced Barack Obama on a pallet into the White House. The shame is theirs not his. He simply took easy advantage of them.

Even then, with the gift of media rapture buoying him along, Barack only won when McCain and Palin melted down during the economic crisis of October. And Mitt Romney, nice guy, was not the best candidate to take on an incumbent President in a polarized America. Romney may have been right about Russia, right about Libya, right about Syria, right about North Korea, right about Isis, and right about Iran but he was not able to deliver the goods. He was not Ronald Reagan.

Will the media capitulate once more to the “historic” aspect of Hillary’s candidacy? In 2008 and in 2012 the paralyzing “history” was the issue of race. In 2016 the “history” will be the issue of gender. Whither the media?

Ironically, Barack Obama himself, way back in 2004, right here in Boston, delivered a theme that carried him all the way to the White House:

“There is not a black America and a white America. There is not a red-state America and a blue-state America. There is only a United States of America.” Might we build on Barack’s theme by adding the thought that there is not a male America and a female America?

There is only us---all Americans, some black, some white, some male, some female, but all Americans.

What a radical thought.

Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio.