Now that Barack Obama has more or less sewn up the Democratic nomination for President, you are going to start to hear a slew of stories about the next big dramatic event in the Presidential race - selection of the Vice Presidential candidates. Already, you might have caught news stories about John McCain inviting potential VP candidates to his house for a Memorial Day barbeque. As the last few Democratic primaries play out, you'll hear more and more stories speculating on whether Obama will offer the VP slot to Hillary Clinton as part of a deal to get her to leave the race. Regardless of what you hear, you should keep in mind that it doesn't matter. As this post at The Plank says: "[T]he evidence indicates that running-mate selections usually have zero impact on election outcomes, even in the running mate's home state." So feel free to ignore all the news stories that breathlessly speculate on all the possibilities, typically illustrating their points with bar graphs and poll data and quotes from inside each campaign.
Speaking about Vice Presidential candidate speculation, I read a story about Jim Webb, one of the leading Democratic VP possibilities, that made me not just enormously disappointed but also repulsed by someone whom I had admired until quite recently. One of the major knocks against Webb as a VP candidate is that he has made questionable comments about women in the past. I didn't quite realize the extent of his questionable comments until I read about the specifics of them in this post on Matthew Yglesias's blog, by guest poster Kathy G. In a 1979 article arguing that women don't belong in the military, Webb declared that no senior female in a leadership position at the Naval Academy won her rank by merit, thereby impugning the accomplishments of every female midshipman and throwing fuel on the smoldering resentments of a vocal minority of disgruntled midshipmen. This article had a very real effect on women at the Academy. Kathleen Murray, a 1984 Naval Academy graduate, said, "This article was brandished repeatedly. [Men] quoted and used it as an excuse to mistreat us." More recently, Webb has tried to minimize the sexual abuse of women by Navy and Marine officers in the Tailhook scandal, placing the blame on "social engineers" who were insistent on ever-increasing sexual mixing in the military and on feminists who seized upon the Tailhook scandal to attack military culture.
I hope that, for everyone reading this, I'm merely stating the obvious when I say that the time has long since passed when it was questionable whether women should be in the military or whether women should be officers in the military or whether women should have equal status to men in the military. It's amazing to me that people still argue, quite vociferously, that that's not the case. I have a feeling that 25 years from now, long after openly gay people will have been allowed in the military, there will be similar situations where hardline military folks, typically from traditional military families, will make ludicrous arguments about how much better the military was when the gays weren't messing everything up. Just like 35 years ago, I'm sure there were people arguing about how much better things were when blacks and whites were separated in the military. Like I said, it's discouraging that these things have to be fights. I don't claim to be more enlightened that anybody else, but when you're doing dangerous, difficult, stressful work, then it seems to be that anybody who can get the job done should be welcomed and accepted whether they are a person of color or whether they have boobs or whether they share their bed with a person of the same sex.
