In a proclamation, Mao Zedong famously said that women hold up half the sky. It was part of his rationale for why women, in communist China, were officially the equals of men. Anyone who experienced or even read about Mao's leadership can tell you that there and then, as well as here and now, that's not the way it works.
Women make up 50.8 percent of the U.S. population. In 2012, the most recent presidential election, about 64 percent of the population bothered to vote — one of the lowest figures in the developed world — and women made up the majority of that. American women work outside their homes an average of 35.9 hours a week and also complete about 16 hours a week of housework or child or other care duties. Men work an average of 40.8 hours a week outside the home and 10 in it.
This recitation of facts brings to mind another famous quote, this time from a Frank and Ernest cartoon: "Sure [Fred Astaire] was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did ...backwards and in high heels."
We say all this to illuminate the factual backdrop, the country in which we all live and work. It is also a place where in a Wednesday Huffington Post article, when asked about vice presidential picks, Donald Trump's campaign chair and chief strategist said this:
The campaign probably won’t choose a woman or a member of a minority group. In fact, that would be viewed as pandering, I think."
So, that's Paul Manafort's view. Here's why that's politically problematic:
1) As the chief strategist of Trump's campaign, Manafort knows the Trump audience. He knows it well. What he said may well be exactly what he believes. But it also happens to be pretty consistent with what large portions of Trump voters think about the distribution of opportunity, the importance of diversity in the country and in leadership roles (or lack thereof), and so on and so forth. Consider the way that Trump voters responded to just these two measures in the Washington Post-ABC News March poll.
Some combination of actual lost income and a lack of economic well-being among working-class whites has fused with a sense that equality — or what they view as preferences for minority groups — is the cause. In using the word "pander," Manafort reduces anyone who is not a white man to someone in whom responsibility is placed and opportunity granted only because of some kind of social goal, goodwill or effort to collect votes. However, what Manafort said is right in line with the thinking that generates the above poll results.
2) There is a long history of presidential candidates picking running mates for reasons that have little to do with their qualifications or the public's actual needs. Lyndon B. Johnson, a congressional vote-wrangler, was vice president to John F. Kennedy because of the regional votes he could deliver. Sarah Palin was supposed to bolster John McCain's standing with solid parts of the Republican base — social conservatives, evangelicals and so on — and provide voters with a compelling, competing opportunity to make history. And the same has also been true of many other presidential pairs. We really could go on. We will just say that Dan Quayle, Richard Nixon and many others, all white males, were also vice presidents at one time.
So what is the basis for presuming white male competence and that anyone else would be a less-qualified candidate or nominating them would be a political maneuver? Perhaps it is that all the nation's vice presidents have, thus far, been white and male? Or, perhaps it's that, at only about 31 percent of the population, white men hold 65 percent of the nation's elected offices, according to data analyzed by the Who Leads Us. White men dominate politics, even while they are a minority, and a shrinking one at that.
For some people, this is sufficient evidence that this arrangement is sound. They fail to see how the long-term effects of race, gender and ethnic hierarchies have worked in this country.
Put another way, it only took a genocide; slavery; the extended disenfranchisement of the poor, women and people of color; a bar on immigration from certain regions of the world; a ban on Asians becoming U.S. citizens; Jim Crow; and the whole constellation of massive continued gaps in income, wealth and other critical measures of well-being along race, class and gender lines to get here.
Now, why isn't the rest of the population more dominant? This is surely the calculus of at least some Trump supporters.
3) Finally, we have to come back to the reality from where we began. Ours is a country in which women and people of color are aware of the ideas described above — and where women and Asians as collective groups have more education than any others. Still, these same groups hold neither the majority of leadership roles nor the lead in pay. So the odds are that if Trump dared to expand his list beyond white men, the campaign might find someone who has done what Trump has done, and done it backward in heels, or with a bag of rocks on their back. Instead, all of these people have been ruled out.
What Trump's campaign manager has said is that we are limiting our search to 31 percent of the population. And, oh, by the way, the person we find in this narrow slice of all of the nation's potential talent, skill and ability will be running mate to a man seeking the White House as his first elected office, vying for votes from the most diverse electorate in American history.
