Intelligent and engaging political analysis.
A Capitol Hill correspondent for NBC News examines why the U.S. still has not elected a woman president.
As Vitali, who followed the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns across the country, points out, 2020 produced the most female presidential candidates—all Democrats—in American history. The six women who ran were “qualified, competent lawmakers with heavy policy portfolios,” and they all “attracted top staff and notched key endorsements.” Yet no woman was selected to face incumbent Donald Trump. The author argues that women—even those like then-Sen. Kamala Harris—did not have the name recognition of male candidates like former Vice President Joe Biden. They also had to work far harder than male candidates to build a “national campaign infrastructure and a national donor base to pay for it.” Vitali suggests that because the experiences of women are not discussed enough, or dismissed as irrelevant, voters who fail to do the proper research (a discouragingly large section of eligible voters) may feel like women are agenda-driven unknowns unable to take on important issues. In turn, this makes them appear unable to offer the same “reassurance” that a (White) man could. This was especially significant at a time when fear levels—largely stoked by Trump and his enablers and followers, abetted by Fox News—caused voters to avoid anything remotely uncertain. On the positive side, Vitali shows that because Joe Biden has made it a priority to elevate women like Kamala Harris to high-level government posts, he has helped bring much-needed visibility to women leaders in a way that even Hilary Clinton could not. This will help women continue to build voter credibility, making them not just viable, but electable candidates. In this hopeful and well-documented study, Vitali clearly shows the importance of a truly level playing field. “It’s the job of the candidates to run,” she writes, “but it’s on us to ensure the track is uniformly flat for all of them.”
Intelligent and engaging political analysis.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-063-05863-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
