Weekend Focus: Race, Sex and Hillary Clinton

Starting this weekend, a couple of features on the Women's Village and elsewhere across the IMDiversity network attempt to look back at the week's hub-bub surrounding the race-gender split arising in the Democratic Presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

First, we track a series of Clinton-Obama analyses of from the Associated Press that provide different takes on the tit-for-tat between the campaigns, and looking at how race and gender, racism and mysogyny, play into the coverage. It also looks at the impact of women voters, as well as the importance to the campaigns of parsing out that vote by generation, class, race and philosohpy.

In another feature, Hispanic American Village Editor Carol Amoruso reflects on the (false?) dichotomy threatening to divide voters' loyalties in the party, in Race and Gender at Odds Again as Steinem Wades into the Clinton-Obama Fray.

On the African American Village, frequent contributor Kam Williams looks back at the N.H. results and seeks to put the focus elsewhere: on the Diebold Corporation. "For, while the punditocracy has been busy dubbing Hillary Clinton the Comeback Kid and attributing her surprise victory to women rallying to her support in the wake of her eyes welling up on camera, no one’s looking for a more plausible explanation than that overly-publicized Muskie moment.," Williams writes. Suspicious of dubious vote tallying, Williams concludes "we’re again in dire need of U.N. observers during the 2008 primary season, just to give an the democratic process a chance to unfold untainted by fraud."

Additional features will unfold, as our editors and visitors try to interpret the events in what is becoming an unhappily tense time in an otherwise historic election. One reader said that she liked Obama and Clinton "almost equally," and would support either in a general election, but "as a woman, I have to go with Clinton now."

Another wrote that she "resented having to choose" between candidates who each represented a historic political milestone she'd been "waiting for my whole life."

And, should it matter?

We ask in our blog poll for the week: Would you lay issues aside and vote for Hillary Clinton for president for the historic precedent of having a woman in the White House?

What do you think?

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner becomes Argentina's first woman president

Amid the inevitable comparisons with Hillary Clinton, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the 54-year-old wife of Argentina's president, Nestor Kirchner, has become the first woman to be elected president in Argentina's history.

Her election, with some 46 percent of the vote, makes her the second woman to be elected president in South America in recent years, following Michelle Bachelet of Chile.

Additional coverage at the International Herald Tribune.

Chinese politician wins in N. Ireland - Yahoo! News

A fitting story following up on International Women's Day, and for our Women's History Month edition, moving toward St. Patty's Day -- this reported by By SHAWN POGATCHNIK of the Associated Press:

Chinese politician wins in N. Ireland

Anna Lo being called the first Chinese elected lawmaker in Europe

"Lo, a Hong Kong native who has lived in Northern Ireland for 32 years, on
Friday became the first ethnic minority to be elected to political office in
this almost exclusively white British territory. Chinese media reports also
described her as the first Chinese person to be elected as a lawmaker anywhere
in Europe."

and this...

"Lo, the 56-year-old chief executive of the Chinese Welfare Association in Belfast, said many of the approximately 10,000 Cantonese-speaking residents of Northern Ireland have lived here for more than three decades — and had never voted before her candidacy."

WHM and Hillary Clinton

Commentary from Hispanic American Village Editor Carol Amoruso, traveling abroad and mulling over...

Thoughts on WHM and the Candidacy of Hillary Clinton
Since 1940, more than 30 women have been elected or appointed heads of countries, often where one might not expect it. Can it happen here? Maybe it depends on our images and stereotypes of women leaders -- and if we want an alpha or nurturer.

Pelosi Steps Up as Democrats Shift Balance of Power in DC

With U.S. Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1994, Nancy Pelosi is now in line to become the first woman Speaker of the House.

While there remain before her some tricky negotiations within her Party, which in many ways turned toward a more moderate position last night, Pelosi looks forward to a powerful role that can significantly control the country’s legislative agenda. The Speaker of the House is also second in the line of presidential succession, behind only the Vice President.