Thanks to Snopes.com

Hillary Ronen plays the gender card---again

Of course uber-prog Tim Redmond likes Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who apparently fancies herself a revolutionary: “I want to use my position to fundamentally shift the wealth and power from the super-rich to the working people of this city.”

Ronen also said “This has been a sexist process.” She made that argument on Medium.

Chronicle columnist Heather Knight plays the gender card for Ronen:

But overall, Ronen is clearly ambitious, smart, confident and determined. Oh, wait. Those are only good qualities in male political leaders. “The only reasoning I’ve heard from my colleagues is I’m temperamental, passionate, emotional, that I don’t get along well with my colleagues and might have a hard time bringing both sides together,” Ronen said...Sound familiar? It’s the kind of wording used again and again when women dare to seek higher office.

Bullshit. True, misogyny is a political factor in the Land of the Free. It surely helped defeat Clinton in 2016, but so did a long campaign of conservative anti-Hillary slander that goes back to when she was first lady, not to mention racism and the anti-Hillary Russian campaign.

Supervisors Fewer, Mandelman, and Peskin are sexists for voting against Ronen for board president? The same Rafael Mandelman (aka, Roboprog) who Knight threw a big bouquet earlier this year?

Maybe Ronen is just a pain in the ass.

Redmond was impressed by the number of people who spoke for Ronen before the vote:

Ronen was clearly the underdog, from the start. But she didn’t accept the likely outcome quietly...For more than two hours, Ronen supporters---at least 100, from community groups, neighborhood groups, and labor---spoke in favor of her candidacy. Perhaps half a dozen spoke in favor of Yee...It was by far the longest public comment on a board president election I’ve ever seen.

But this kind of "activism" is not the same as politics, which requires forming coalitions, not to mention getting along with the other supervisors.

Knight enlists Rebecca Solnit in the battle on behalf of the Sisterhood:

San Francisco writer Rebecca Solnit, a supporter of Ronen’s work, called it “infuriating” that female politicians must be likable — that usually means deferential and nonthreatening — while nobody ever talks about male politicians’ likability. “Here in our town that’s supposedly so progressive and woke, we still have that. Excuse me, San Francisco, do you remember Chris Daly?” Solnit said, referring to the former supervisor who notoriously vowed to use the f-word in every meeting and was known for his temper...

Chris Daly? Ah, those were the days when giants strode the streets of Progressive Land! 

Actually, a lot of us guys didn't find Daly particularly "likable." I blogged critically more than 90 times about Supervisor Daly.

Unless you have clear evidence to back up the sexism charge, it's a bad idea, like playing the race card (Playing the race card in San Francisco).

Supervisor Peskin is quoted in the Examiner about the sexist claims:

Peskin said before the vote that “There are many narratives. There are narratives around gender, there are narratives around race, there are narratives around age and experience,” he said.

There are "narratives" and there are also truths. Sherwood Anderson put it best in Winesburg, Ohio:

There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful. And then the people came along...It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

See also Hillary Ronen's PC muddle.