the feminist librarian reads

Of course, an insistence on policy purity as the only respectable measure of presidential worth is conveniently blind to one of the factors that has shaped who in American politics even gets to present themselves as, you know, a candidate who would dismantle systems of oppression. It lacks any acknowledgment that figures already perceived as disruptive based on their identities alone have far less freedom to adopt or run on radical policy platforms. Hillary Rodham, the public defender who filed a brief in 1976 to save a mentally handicapped man on death row and worked for years for the Children’s Defense Fund, was never going to be president; America practically suffered a collective aneurysm when she became First Lady. That neither excuses nor fully explains her contortions since then — and I respect those who find them simply too unpalatable to justify a vote for her — but let’s not pretend that they were undertaken outside of a gendered context. Dynamics that restrict the progressivism of non-white-male candidates are real; they’re why John Edwards, who, with his unassailably white-guy claim to presidential plausibility, was able to run a far more progressive campaign than either his female or black opponents in 2008.