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| BOXER'S GLASS JAW |
| Tuesday, January 16, 2007 |
| Boxer's glass jaw
Sentator Barbara Boxer is trying her best to demonstrate that women are too soft to lead. In a testy Senate hearing last week on the President's new Iraq plan, the U.S. Senator from California grilled Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families. And I just want to bring us back to that fact."
Rice didn't take offense immediately, but later suggested that Boxer had "set back feminism." She told the New York Times, "I thought it was O.K. to be single. I thought it was O.K. to not have children, and I thought you could still make good decisions on behalf of the country if you were single and didn't have children." White House Spokesman Tony Snow took the same view. "I don’t know if she was intentionally tacky," Snow said in an interview on Fox News. "It's a great leap backward for feminism."
Others have characterized the comments as Boxer bullying Rice, which is both an exaggeration and an insult to Rice, because it suggests she needs someone to rescue her. She doesn't, and certainly not from the likes of Boxer.
But Boxer's comments should cause concern among women, who want to be judged by their abilities, not by qualities frequently assigned to their gender. Boxer may not be unique in her approach to judging the war, but it does expose her feminine, not feminist, side. She is using the pain of war to judge the plan, rather than analyzing the plan's potential for success. When it comes to war, she has a glass jaw.
After the controversy erupted, Boxer dug herself deeper into the emotional hole. "What I was trying to do in this exchange was to find common ground with Condi Rice," she said. "My whole point was to focus on the military families who pay the price."
Yeah, that's the problem. It may sound cold, but if leaders in wartime allowed themselves to "focus on the military families who pay the price," they would never win a war. They would always quit too early. No one wants brave young American soldiers to die, but commanders in chief have to be willing to accept that sacrifice. They have to stay focused on victory, not on the pain that accompanies victory.
Boxer's emotional outburst should not be used to disqualify all women from leadership positions, but women who want to be leaders should be quick to distance themselves from Boxer's line of reasoning, lest we judge them all to be similarly disadvantaged. Ralph Bristol |
posted by Jack Mercer @ 1/16/2007 08:38:00 AM   |
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| 1 Comments: |
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Politics ahead of principles. Boxer for years led the femminist movement. Isn't it funny that Condi has succeeded where Boxer failed? Condi makes decisions on the world stage. Boxer is stuck in obscurity.
Larry
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Name: Jack Mercer
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Politics ahead of principles. Boxer for years led the femminist movement. Isn't it funny that Condi has succeeded where Boxer failed? Condi makes decisions on the world stage. Boxer is stuck in obscurity.
Larry