Make me a sandwich

Shh. You might’ve heard this already.\nBut there’s a woman running for president.\nA recent Facebook group asserts a poignant social commentary on this matter. “Hillary Clinton: Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich.”\nI had a good laugh. It’s a funny group, no doubt. Also returning as a search result was its brother-in-arms, “Hillary Clinton Shouldn’t Run For President She Should Just Run The Dishes.”\nAnd I laughed at that too.\nBut while my politically incorrect amusement is my own subjectivity’s business, the mere presence of these groups speaks volumes about the “shake-it-up” factor of election 2008. \nOver-the-top, anachronistic jokes can always be funny – but where are they stemming from? And while I have a sneaking suspicion the two high-schoolers who created the group aren’t being entirely serious, can we be so sure that sentiments along these lines don’t persist within older generations?\nI’ll even go so far as to give society the benefit of the doubt – I don’t think any explicit anti-woman inclination still plagues individuals. The remnants of TV dinner-eating, remote control-throwing, Darlene-there’s-a-damn-woman-trying-to-take-over-our-country-esque lines of thought are either gone or waning fast. \nBut what about more deeply-ingrained conceptions of society? It’s the more subtle, implicit cultural biases that one has to look for before tossing any possibility of their persistence. And joking Facebook groups aside, the current construal of the Democratic side of this election is shaping up to be a fairly apt indication of lingering hints of chauvinism.\nTake a look at our main Democratic candidates’ platforms thus far. They’ve spent their time trying to convince the public how different they are from one another – which is necessary, of course, if the Dems are to pick a favorite. But the fact is (indeed, right in line with normal party politics) that at this stage in the game, their platforms are more alike than different. The nature of contemporary campaigns slaps an enormous normalizing effect on candidates, be it through sound bytes, high accountability, or up-to-the-second media coverage – these people can’t move without the world knowing. While it’s probably not best for the country, no one elects an outlier. \nAnd yet all we hear is about how much of a crazy liberal kook Hillary is. Where’s the variable? Any particularly left-leaning facets of her platform are netted out by equal anomalies in her main opponents’ agendas.\nBut for some reason, there’s just something inherently outrageous about Hillary Clinton. (Notice the amount of books published against her relative to any other frontrunner, red or blue.) And while no one’s trying to end women’s suffrage anymore, I’m not entirely convinced it’s not a deeply rooted incredulity at something so new and different. The way she is construed as so terribly left-leaning relative to her colleagues is flat-out fallacious, and is in no way instantiated by her political actions. She’s hit with the normalizing machine like every other serious national contender.\nAnd honestly – her sandwiches can’t possibly be any worse than Dubya’s. I actually hear they’re pretty good.