Baby Daddies

Sat, 01 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Secular Feminism’s Path to Power

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500

In 1968, Hillary Rodham was little more than an outsider in the Democratic party. Rodham was a member of a meritocratic elite in a mass party; a white-collar, mainline Protestant, suburban woman in a national party run by blue-collar, Catholic, urban men. In fact, her ties with the party were thin. She had campaigned in 1964 for Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater and interned in the summer of 1968 for GOP representative Melvin Laird, who became the secretary of defense in the Nixon administration. Her switch to the Democratic party had less to do with a commitment to the party’s cross-racial, working-class agenda and more to do with the growing university-based elite’s opposition to the Vietnam War. She volunteered in the winter of 1968 for the insurgent presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy, who ran against the war and the party bosses. In an act of bravado difficult to imagine today, McCarthy compared John Bailey, the national party chairman, to the "Wizard of Oz. When you pull the curtain back, there is only a voice." Rodham’s view of the Catholic bosses was equally dim. As a spectator at the party’s convention in Chicago, she watched in horror as protestors clashed with the police and the National Guard.

Continue Reading »

First Things RSS Feed - Mark Stricherz

Baby Daddies

Secular Feminism’s Path to Power