Sex, Gender, and the Democratic Party

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Former Vice President Joe Biden hasn't announced that he's running for president, but in 2020 polling, his name is consistently at the top.

And this week, the undeclared frontrunner is already performing damage control for his unannounced campaign.

In recent days, three women have accused the former Vice President of inappropriate contact.

On Wednesday, Biden announced in a video that he is going to be mindful about personal space going forward, that he hears what these women are saying, and that he gets it.

While a number of prominent women have come to Biden's defense, there are plenty of critics who have said he has no place representing a diverse, empowered, progressive electorate in the coming presidential race.

When it comes to gender, have the politics of the Democratic Party passed Joe Biden by?

What happens now to the Biden proto-candidacy?

And most urgently, what does it all mean for the Democratic Party of 2020?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Joining me to discuss all of this is Jennifer Palmieri, former communications director for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

She also spent two years as communications director for the Obama White House and was deputy press secretary in the Clinton White House, where Monica Lewinsky was her intern.

Jen joins me from Palo Alto, where she is an advisor to the Emerson Collective, which we should mention, owns a majority stake in the Atlantic.

Jennifer Palmieri, it is a pleasure and an honor to have you on Radio Atlantic.

Thanks, Alex.

I'm very happy to be here.

We have a lot to get to, and you have a wealth of experience.

For people who do not understand, you have been effectively like the forest gump of democratic confrontations over sex and gender.

It is uncanny how many of these conflagrations you you found yourself in the middle of.

So there is really no more expert voice about this, and I know you've been thinking and writing a lot about these issues in recent months and years.

And I really want to just get your thoughts on how the Democratic Party has evolved on those two issues of sex and gender and where you think it's going.

So let me first start out with the Biden question.

And as we talk about Democrats and Biden in particular, I think it's important that we start with what some women see as his original sin, which is Biden's chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Anita Hill made allegations that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her.

At that point in his career, Biden was criticized not just for the tenor of the questioning of the hearing, a 14 all-white male panel asked some very difficult, tough, and some people would say overly critical questions of Hill, but Biden also allowed Thomas to testify after Hill, which some people thought helped discredit Hill's testimony.

And Biden did not subpoena an additional three witnesses who might have substantiated Hill's claims.

A few weeks ago, Biden was asked about Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, and this is what he said.

To this day, I regret I couldn't come up with a way to get her the kind of hearing she deserved, given the courage she showed by reaching out to us.

So, Jen, my question to you is, in a post-Kavanaugh, post-Me Too world,

does Biden's statement, I wish I could have done something, is that a mea culpa?

And do you think it's enough?

It's not going to be enough.

I mean, he is going to have to, this is

any politician that enters a presidential race with decades of experience in the public arena is going to have to reconcile where they were 30 years ago or sometimes even 40 years ago with where America is today.

And he seems to have understood that he needs to express some regret about how Anita Hill was treated by his committee.

But it's not going to be enough.

You can't just leave it at that.

You're going to have to be specific about, you know, well, he wasn't, he was chairman of the committee.

He was in a position to have done more.

And I think he's going to have to be specific about what he would have done.

And, you know, that's not a situation that candidates love to be in.

It's very hard.

You know, whether it seemed, I think to the candidates, it can seem unfair to be held to a standard in 2020 for behavior that happened 30 years ago.

But that's the game.

And I think that's why when you look at who the Democrats usually nominate to be their party's nominee, it's not someone with decades of experience.

It's usually somebody who's a little fresher to the scene.

You know, 76 was Carter, 92 was Clinton, 8 was Obama.

You're noting all the ones that won.

Yeah,

the ones who won.

Yeah.

So that is, you know, but it's like he's, it's not, it won't just be Anita Hill where Joe Biden's going to have to say, well,

what I, you know, what I should have done or what I could have done better.

You know, that's going to follow him around the whole time he's running.

I do think it's, you know, it's worth mentioning, though.

You know, we talk about, well, what Biden could have should have known in 1991 versus today.

But even at the time, there were women who were up in arms.

I mean, there is widespread understanding that the Hill hearings or the Clarence Thomas hearings and the treatment of Anita Hill in 1991 inspired the year of the woman in 1992, when a record number of women ran for congressional office and won.

So Joe Biden may not have been in on the jig, which is that

the way she was treated was seemingly a miscarriage of justice in the eyes of many who watched it.

But a lot of other people were, and a lot of women were.

I guess I wonder when you look at the field in 2020, the Democratic field, there are an historic number of women who are running.

And as we talk about Joe Biden and we look at all these women who are looking to get the presidency, do you think there's some sort of irony or maybe worse, poetic injustice in the idea that Biden might potentially take the mantle from those women to become become the nominee?

Deep breath.

I think it's, you know, it's going to be really hard for anyone.

Democrats are capable of a lot of dissonance, right?

So on the one hand, Democrats will be celebrating the rise of, you know, numerous female candidates and some, including women of color.

But then there's something about, you know, I think there's something, part of Biden's appeal, I think, is

it's like a return to normalcy, right?

It's like, I just want things to go back to normal.

And there's nostalgia for Biden as part of the Obama-Biden ticket.

I think there's nostalgia for Biden in his sort of old-fashioned, folksy, and even courtly manner.

That even though by sort of definition, that precludes women leaders, right?

Because we can't feel warm and fuzzy about a woman candidate as being something nostalgic, right?

Because we've never seen it before.

We haven't had a female president, right?

So Kamala Harris can't compete with that with Joe Biden, right?

She can't make you feel like, oh, we're going back to normal.

Like President Joe Biden can wash away President Donald Trump.

It'll all be like a bad dream.

And, you know, and I think that's the same with someone like Beto O'Rourke, who people will say, there's just something about him, you know, that's just so, that I just, I was like, I know what it is.

I know what it is.

It is, he's a fresh face in a very familiar role

of a, you know, noble, seeming man in the Democratic Party who's young and aspiring.

You know, that's John Kennedy.

That's Bobby Kennedy.

That's Barack Obama.

It's something that we recognize.

So I think a lot of the obstacles that were in the way of female candidates have been removed, but these intangible

biases and preferences that we hold on to are really entrenched and really

difficult.

That's a great point.

This idea that this nostalgia for the way things were necessarily precludes women

from becoming the nominee.

There has been no time

in which a woman was president and shepherded America through a golden era.

Yeah.

You know, I want to stay in the past to talk more about how Democrats have grappled with these issues.

Right.

And you were on the front lines of another seismic event in the 1990s, the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Clinton White House.

I want to quote some of your thoughts from Time magazine, a piece that you wrote earlier where you said, I see that Monica Lewinsky was treated as collateral damage in a fight that was all about men and power.

I knew the relationship President Clinton pursued with her was not just inappropriate because he was married, but represented an abuse of the power dynamic.

He was President of the United States and she was a young intern.

But you go on to say, I didn't then and I do not now think President Clinton should have been impeached.

What in retrospect should have happened?

What would have been a better way for the Democratic Party to have handled the Lewinsky scandal?

I think to keep her out of it,

to

identify it as what I see it was, which was a power struggle, the Republicans were not sincere in in expressing concern about her welfare.

It was like, aha, we finally got him on something.

You know, they've been trying to get Bill Clinton on Whitewater and Travelgate and, you know, any number of trumped up, so to speak,

scandals, you know, some of which is self-inflicted.

Sometimes, you know, things in the Clinton White House were a little sloppy and could have been handled better.

But largely, it was they were looking for something to get him on and they settled on this.

And

I think that

Democrats could have treated her better with more respect and also tried to protect her and keep her out of this.

And that's, you know, she was seen not as

a victim.

And I don't think that she to this day wants to be seen

wholly as a victim.

You know, she was a woman with agency, made some choices.

But, you know, she was treated as like the as a

with she was not treated with any kind of respect.

And

that's what I think would have been different.

Yeah, I still don't think that he should have resigned, though.

I don't, I don't,

um, it's also hard.

You know, this is like the, we, what should you have done differently is really hard still.

It's a really hard question because

let me, let me, let me, let me take a slightly different angle, which is, are you confident that the Democratic Party of today would handle the Lewinsky scandal differently if it played out in 2019?

No, it'd be very, it would be very different.

No, Yeah.

I don't think somebody would survive that now.

But I don't know, Alex, you know, I don't know how it, because it would, it's hard to predict how these things are going to play out.

It's hard to predict how what the reaction to Biden's, you know, Biden made a statement today about the women who've come forward and said that they were uncomfortable with how he, you know, with like his physical interactions with them.

And

I think that in this case, you know, if a president today had an affair with an intern, I mean, I don't know if Donald Trump had an affair with an intern.

I don't think anybody in the party would care.

So

well, we're going to talk about the asymmetry between sort of Republican responses to sexual and gender issues versus Democrats in a second.

Right.

But in general, I think that you couldn't, that today a Democratic president would not survive that.

Let's talk about a sort of leading light in the Democratic Party who in the early 2000s saw his career effectively end over scandal relating to sex.

John Edwards, you were working, helping sort of the emergency communications in and around the Edwards campaign after it emerged that Edwards had had an extramarital affair.

Why do you think John Edwards' political career ended?

Was it about gender or was it about scandal?

I mean, Edwards initially lied about the paternity of his child.

He was married at the time.

Elizabeth Edwards was a very sympathetic character in the story.

She was battling cancer.

What was the thing that ended Edwards' aspirations?

Yeah, so like why did Bill Clinton survive that and John Edwards didn't?

Exactly.

Because I think that when America signed up to support President Clinton and, you know, voted for him even in 92, you had some inkling that he had a less than pristine past when it came to fidelity in his marriage and other women.

He basically admitted as such.

We understood that.

That was not what we liked about Bill Clinton, right?

We liked Bill Clinton for other reasons.

But I think John Edwards' family, Elizabeth, the fact that they had lost a child and stayed together and had two more,

that was very much John Edwards' story.

That's why we liked him.

And when

that turned out to not be who he really was,

he couldn't survive it.

And I think that was the difference between the two.

You think it's when the character, the leading man, as the case may be,

when the sort of sex scandal

eclipses what we thought or changes our idea of who he fundamentally is, that's when he is in trouble.

Yeah, that's when he was.

That wasn't the case with Clinton, but it was the case with Edwards.

Yeah, with Edwards,

that was, you know, and I told him that, I was like, you will not, you will not survive this.

You know, it's like, if this is true, which, you know, you,

the thing about that experience, which was just to refresh everyone's memory, was that

the accusation was that he had fathered a child with a woman who was in her 40s and had this, had this baby and was keeping this baby a secret.

And it just, honestly,

at some level, it seemed so unlikely to me that the woman, you know, I was a woman in my early 40s at the time, it was like that a woman in her early 40s was going to get pregnant.

Like, it just,

it just, it all did

plausibly not true.

But I do remember saying to him, like, if this is true, you will not survive it.

Do not think you are Bill Clinton because you are not.

That, you know, we understood that Clinton had some trouble in this arena and people were willing to vote for him anyway.

But this,

your family, that story, that is the core of what people like about John Edwards.

So, you know, don't, you know, and I said,

you know, I don't, I don't believe you.

I don't believe you're telling me the truth.

So don't go on television and lie about it because that's going to be apparent to everyone.

It's fascinating to hear that, Jen.

I mean, one would, it sounds like he was defiant behind closed doors, right?

I don't see why he was.

I think he didn't have anything to lose.

I think he thought he had nothing to lose.

And we had

myself and then two other friends that were close to both John and Elizabeth, we said, we're

we're each going to go to John on our own and tell him privately, I don't believe you.

This was before he did a television interview.

He did an interview with 2020, and he was going to address

the charge that he had had an affair, not just had an affair, but that he had fathered a child.

And, you know, I said, I don't believe you.

Like, you need to understand, like, me, Jennifer Paul Mieri, who was really close to you, like, I don't believe you.

And

if you think doing an interview and lying about it is going to get you like part of the way to redemption, like you are wrong.

And he just said, he was like, you know, I was on the phone and he said, okay, you know, didn't say anything for a moment.

And I said, okay, I hear you.

I really do appreciate that.

I like appreciate your telling me that.

Fascinating.

But I, but I think that Alex, in that case, you know, he's probably thinking, what does he have to lose?

His political career is basically over.

Maybe he can take a shot at lying and not get caught and end up in a better place.

But, you know, obviously

that's not what happened because he did lie.

The truth did eventually come out.

The truth usually does.

And,

you know, I don't think that's something that he was ever going to recover from it.

He didn't have anything to fall back on either.

You know, not like a long body of work

in the public

that had made people have faith or find that he was worth the trouble, right?

Biden has a long record to fall back on for better or worse, and there's,

you know, there's much in there that's going to be a problem for him, but there's also people who have felt warmly towards him for decades.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, right.

And it goes back to your idea that part of the handsiness, the intrusion on personal space, which is probably the most euphemistic way we can describe it, that's a known quantity with Biden.

And if the sort of standard we've established in the podcast holds true, which is politicians are most screwed effectively when behavior goes against the grain of who we think they are.

Biden has a certain exemption there because we've known he has a handsy problem, again, a euphemism,

for a while now.

That's part of who he is as a political animal.

I do want to ask you something contentious, maybe not contentious, but controversial about Edwards and Clinton as we sort of talk about the lessons that the Democrats learned.

The National Review, not known to be a liberal publication,

had this assessment of Edwards.

They basically said, but for the labors of the National Enquirer, which first broke the news about Edwards having the affair with his videographer, Riel Hunter, Edwards might have been president.

Democrats having learned in the 1990s how to make their peace with such situations.

Do you think that's true?

Did the Clinton years teach Democrats that the party can sort of simply move past female troubles?

Aaron Ross Powell,

I don't

I just don't think that people experience it that way.

I think that

you know the conversation that you and I are having about looking at the scandals from the past that politicians have had to overcome.

It wasn't like women were its own sort of group to be considered.

It was like politicians face scandals.

Sometimes they're about women.

Sometimes they're about money.

Can they survive them?

And what was interesting about the question was, can the man survive this?

And the woman was like somehow collateral damage.

Either, you know, sometimes a scandal might be about sex, sometimes it might be about money.

And so I don't think that, you know, Republicans have like a lot of nerve to suggest that Democrats don't treat women as well as Republicans do, which is sort of implicit in that.

But I think that the lesson people took from Clinton was

you can hang in there and fight if you're, you know, if you have made the calculation that I did, which was that the support is there for you because of other things, not because of whatever the scandal is about.

But I think we look at it differently now, right?

Now we don't look at it.

It used to be like, what does the woman say about him, right?

What does the fact that he had an affair with this woman say about the candidate?

And now the concern is, well, how did that affair impact the woman?

And I feel like that's what changed.

So it used to just be the concern, there was not concern for how the woman involved felt and how she was treated and what her experience was.

It was just, what does this say about the guy?

So I think that now it's like, well, how did that?

Well, we need to go back and think about how did that really impact Monica Lewinsky, how that ended up defining her life in a way that it didn't define Bill Clinton's life.

He went on, you know, continued to be president of the United States, continued to have, and she got defined by that.

And like, that's, you know, plus it was unfair and wrong of him to pick on a 24-year-old from the first place.

And, you know, now we're like saying, well, how do these women feel about the fact that how, you know, Joe Biden invaded their space and touched them?

And that's different than before.

We have more.

much more to talk about on this topic, but we're going to take a quick break.

When we come back, we will talk more about current day democratic concerns as it pertains to sex and gender.

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Okay, we are back with the great and all-powerful Jennifer Palmieri.

Jen, we're talking about how Democrats have grappled with sex scandals, scandals relating to gender, women, men, the battle of the sexes.

The most recent sort of Democratic

scandal that it resulted in, I think, the end of someone's, or at least a pause, serious pause on maybe would have, could have, should have been a presidential bid is Al Franken, the senator from Minnesota.

At the end of 2017, eight allegations of sexual misconduct were lodged against Senator Franken.

Initially, he stood his ground, but with a lot of pressure on him, especially from fellow Democrats, including Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who not coincidentally, perhaps, is running for president herself, Al Franken resigned.

Jen, Democrats are still talking about Franken now,

and I'm especially reminded of him in the context of Biden.

A lot of liberals loved Franken.

They felt like he was a star in the party.

They felt like he might be a 2020 nominee, and they felt burned by his departure.

One of his staffers told the New York Times in the wake of his departure, the moment Franken was targeted, they decided to eat their own, they being the Democrats.

And we, Democrats, do this to ourselves all the time.

I think there's a sense of hyper-political correctness and that we're holier than thou.

With Biden, a lot of liberals and some part of the establishment are angry about the controversy.

and they see this once again as Democrats eating their own, taking down a good guy who just happens to behave differently than average politicians.

Do you see parallels between Biden and Franken here?

And do you think Franken is in some ways a cautionary tale for those people who would otherwise be calling for Biden to not run for president?

I'd say and relatedly, I mean, one thing that really irks me is when people blame Kirsten Gillebrand for Al Franken resigning.

It's like, you know what?

Al Franken is a grown-up.

Al Franken resigned on his own.

He is a grown man.

And yes, there were calls for him to resign and it would have been hard for him to hang in there, but he could have done it.

I mean he he could have, I was kind of surprised that he did resign.

I think he could have, it would have been uncomfortable and

senators would continue to get asked about it and he would hear all day his colleagues saying he should have resigned.

And then they would have proceeded with

a hearing through the Senate ethics about it and he would have had his day in court, so to speak.

And,

you know, and he chose to not take that route.

I do think that

there's, I just think it's people, you know, for all of human history, women have been abused and either not believe that what they said about their abuse was true or worse, maybe, I don't know,

conditioned to believe that it was an abuse or didn't matter.

And, you know, we're pushing against all of human history there, right?

So in this moment now, when we're trying to deal with what's forgivable, what's not,

it's hard to sort that out.

And Franken was like in a riptide of some of the, you know, in the early days of that.

And

I think people appreciate now, I think Biden

may, he may be, he may be a beneficiary of

you think there's maybe some more pause because of how quickly the Franken thing unfolded and ended ended his career in the Senate.

No, I mean it's also it's just

different circumstances, right?

I mean the

thus far, I mean, you know, thus far what we've heard about women coming forward about saying it's like, you know, they felt uncomfortable about, you know, him being so just familiar and feeling the right to touch their bodies in these ways.

But it seems like it's different than Franken.

I I think that most people are,

you know, are like really just trying to figure it out.

And there was just such a preponderance of the history of women not being

told that

their

unease was their problem.

Right.

Well, it's not hard to consider it.

It's hard.

Yeah, not considered at all.

Their problem, not an issue.

So

it's rightfully hard to find nuance here.

And I know that makes for uncomfortable situations for a lot of men, but you know, this is like, this is what happens when you make progress.

You got to reconcile someone.

It's messy.

Right.

And super messy.

It's super messy.

And there's no good, there's no right answer.

And good, you know, you know, good people get caught up in hard stuff.

And, um, but it is.

And, and Democrats are, um, we are harder on each other than how Republicans treat each other.

Um, but I'm, you know, I, I'm sort of proud of that.

I don't want to be a Republican, right?

I like that

my party

tries to hold our own leaders to a higher standard.

I expect more.

I do expect more from Democrats.

That is a perfect segue to my next question, because as we talk about all of this, this is in the context of politics, right?

And there are winners and losers in politics.

And there are two adversarial parties here, Republicans and Democrats.

As much as Democrats may want an all-like Democratic general election, that's not going to happen.

The Democrat is going to be running against the Republican.

And you point out the asymmetry here between the two parties on the subject of gender and equality and sort of fairness in the Me Too era.

Al Franken pointed out the sort of irony that he was leaving and Donald Trump was still in office on his way out of the Senate.

I, of all people, am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office

and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for the Senate

with the full support of his party.

Jen, when you look at it in the context of what Franken's talking about and in the broader landscape of American politics, are Dems, I mean, I'm not going to say say shooting themselves in the foot because, as you point out, there are a lot of residual benefits to holding your party to a higher standard of conduct.

But really, when it comes down to politics, President Trump this week felt emboldened enough to make fun of Joe Biden at a Republican congressional fundraising event.

People tell me two years.

What do you think?

One week, sir.

I said, General, give me a kiss.

I felt like Joe Biden.

But I meant it.

See, I meant it.

Big difference.

Jennifer Palmieri, Donald Trump, who has an inarguably much, much worse record of allegations and history on the subject of straight-up sexual predation, he feels unleashed enough to be able to make fun of Joe Biden.

So what, I guess from a political strategy point of view, what is the point of Democrats sort of wringing their hands to the degree that they are when the other party is so brazenly ignoring the basic ground rules.

Yeah.

But see, the way I, and that, you know, that reveals itself in Trump making fun of Joe Biden about women, that reveals itself in,

you know, and Trump attacking Democrats over the Russia investigation, right?

This is like what he does all the time.

And I worry that the very Republic

is under threat here.

And I think that the reason why Donald Trump ended up hijacking the Republican Party and becoming the nominee is because the Republicans were willing to play a lot of games, that they were willing to, you know, foment some amount of racism in

their party and tolerate that because it helped them with certain voters.

And they had, were sort of bankrupt of ideas.

And, you know, their only economic plan was about helping rich people lower their taxes while they expected working class people to vote for them.

And they're just sort of bankrupt of any sort of

true principles and policies.

And so, Donald Trump comes in, he hijacks your party, becomes president of the United States, and he puts the entire country in peril.

Yeah, that's what happens.

That's what happens if you let the party leaders not operate with any sort of integrity about what your party actually believes in and what principles they hold to be true.

You know, so yeah, politically, you know, could you argue some tactics for like how we shouldn't tolerate that and we should all

jump on board to defend anything Joe Biden does?

Like you could argue that, but then, you know,

that I think that's contributing to the disintegration of the democracy.

I really believe that.

And I think it's important that Democrats in this moment fight the urge to you know, play the political game or do the short-term political tactic that might help them because there's a bigger um charge at um issue here

well one would say you were looking at the a big picture perhaps around

i believe that like it is and you know when i was on the 16 campaign it um

you know and even before we lost just the whole experience i felt like donald trump was disruption come to politics to prove it is broken the way uber came came to the taxi industry and proved that the theory of taxicabs doesn't work anymore.

And I thought, right, like this is what the guy, you know, somebody, you know, someone who's been working as a coal miner.

Right, well, no, but it's just like, no, but it's just like it was, this is, this proves it's all broken.

This proves we have to rebuild that we just treated politics like a game.

And Donald Trump came in and said, I see how to play your game.

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to break every single rule.

And because I'm willing to break every single rule, I can shoot the moon and win.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So do you think it's incumbent on if Biden does actually officially announce his campaign and he's on a debate stage with several thousand Democrats starting this summer, do you think it's incumbent upon them to challenge him on some of these issues around personal behavior, personal space, and harassment?

I don't know that they will need to.

I mean, I don't, I don't.

Joe Biden is going to get this question every single time he's in public from now until the election day.

You know, like it's like emails that way with Hillary.

You know, it started in March of 2015 and it did not end ever.

And I think this kind of question, you know, treatment of women or Anita Hill hearings, other policy positions that he might have to reconcile with having a different position now.

And

I can't predict how voters are going to react to this.

It may be fatal for him,

his treatment by this, it, I mean, treatment of women.

Or it could be he's the guy that says, I need to listen and learn and listens and learns and shows and, you know, manages to convince enough Democratic voters that he has.

And he may be the guy that can pull that off.

No one else has yet, right?

No one else in the Me Too era has been able to do that.

It is going to be part of the DNA of this nominating race, I think, probably no matter what.

It is.

It's definitely.

Treatment of women is going to be part, it's going to be,

it's difficult to predict things, but I feel confident that's going to be an undercurrent throughout the race.

Let me ask you one last big picture question.

As someone who has lived through, I mean, I mean, really, like, it's just, you understand how, you know, the Democrats have grappled with the questions of gender and sex and femininity and power

in a really visceral way, right?

Stepping back from just talking about it through the lens of American politics, I want to know what you think of this.

Biden,

in the year after the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, he spoke to the Washington Post and he said that hearing was not about Clarence Thomas.

It was not about Anita Hill.

It was about a massive power struggle going on in this country, a power struggle between men and women, and a power struggle between minorities and the majority.

And it's a reflection of the schizophrenic personality of the American public now with regard to both of those issues, feminism and race.

We're going to leave race for another conversation, but on the question of feminism, do you feel like the political struggle about feminism over feminism, where it sort of belongs in our national dialogue, do you feel that struggle and that debate has gotten more visceral as time has gone by?

Yeah, I think that this comes in, I think it comes in waves.

I think it's about their sort of 20-year cycles where it has consistently over, you know, going back 150 years from when Seneca Falls first happened, a group of women got together and decided to try and do something about women having a voice in the country.

And it took a really long time, but 70-something years later, they got the right to vote.

And then it subsides, and 20 years on, you have World War II and women playing a bigger role.

And then it subsides, and in the 60s come, and then there's another power struggle.

And you know, then we got to the 90s, and you talked about how Anita Hill brought about that trial, sort of helped initiate the year of the woman the following year in 92, when we were so excited because seven women were elected to the United States Senate.

Like, that was a big deal.

It was a bonanza.

It was a bonanza.

And you saw it like in music.

Like, I was an enormous Hull fan, Courtney Loves band.

I was like a huge, you know, Slater Kinney and like PJ Harvey and El Seven.

And Riot Girl.

Right?

Like, all of this.

And then I remember thinking at that moment, oh, okay, we're here to stay.

This is it.

It's political power and, you know, and power and culture is just going to grow from here for women.

And that's not what happened.

It sort of subsided.

And now it's back.

And I think that what's different this time is with the Clinton election, I think for a lot of women, it was like, okay.

She it was like her her losing proved to us it's not that we're playing the game wrong It's that the game is set up for us to lose and we just need to play a different game, right?

Because Hillary did everything that someone's supposed to do to be elected president.

She's the most qualified person ever and she ran against the most unqualified person ever and she couldn't beat him.

So it's like, okay, if we needed to be hit over the head to show that this game was, this world that we operate in, all these power systems that we live under were created by men for them, for it to be a comfortable place for them and their skills.

And like that served me pretty well for a while, but now I have had to leave the man's world and I am creating my own because that was not built for me.

And I feel like that is the big difference now is that it's like I don't need to play by your rules anymore in the man's world and you know believe that what happened you know how I felt when Joe Biden touched me or Al Franken tried to kiss me was my problem.

It's like, no, I was uncomfortable with that and I'm going to say it.

And that's going to we're going to create some new power systems here.

And that's what I think is the big change in the last two years.

Jennifer Palmieri, thank you so much for your time and perspective on a complicated issue that keeps getting more complicated.

Thanks, Alex.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

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