Rhetoric Race and Religion
Led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Republicans are reprising the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, as an odd reaction to Democratic charges they are waging a war on women. The conservative Washington Times sees it this way:
The Kentucky Republican and likely 2016 presidential candidate is making a habit of ripping former President Bill Clinton, dubbing the 42nd president a “sexual predator” and suggesting that it is hypocritical of Democrats to cast the GOP as anti-women when they celebrate someone who preyed on women working under him in the workplace.
At the Washington Monthly, Ed Kilgore has a theory<
There is, however, a meta-message here that is worth thinking through. Many conservatives sincerely believe that abandonment of a stoutly patriarchal society has been a disaster for women: they’ve lost the stability of “traditional marriage,” the presumption men will be held accountable for their material welfare, the chivalric accommodation of their weaknesses, the ability to concentrate on child-rearing and home-making, and most of all, the exemption from the terrible burdens of bread-winning, decision-making, and sexual autonomy. In exchange they have obtained all sorts of empty tokens of independence—some actively unnatural, like the “right to kill their babies”—while men have been liberated to act out on their true nature as perpetual children and sexual predators.
My theory is a bit different, and, like Kilgore’s, requires forgetting for a moment that Rand Paul’s favorite new-old thing is to go after the Clintons. That’s so horse race! Think instead about the GOP’s strategy to portray its own elected women as virtuous patriots who put family and Christianity first—making them not just better exemplars of biblical womanhood, but better exemplars of political leadership.
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