If you want a female Bernie Sanders, you're going to have to get behind Hillary Clinton first

I'm sick of hearing that white, wealthy, male Bernie Sanders is the 'radical' choice for America

(Reuters)

International politics is a funny old thing, isn’t it? On one side of the world, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spent this week announcing to a women’s association that childless women who “reject motherhood” and “being around the house” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) are “incomplete” people “denying their femininity” and “deficient” human beings. “I would recommend having at least three children,” he added, which I’ll bear in mind if I ever decide to outsource decisions about my uterus to raging misogynists.

Elsewhere, young Americans “feeling the Bern” are up in arms about the idea that Hillary Clinton seems to have clinched the Democratic nomination. We've moved past the idea that having a woman in the White House would be an inherently Good Thing; nowadays we need a perfect woman in the White House.

We need a perfect woman in the White House because symbolism doesn’t mean anything, really. We need a perfect woman in the White House because we’re all gender blind now and we just want to vote for people on the merit of their policies.

Who cares if the only people with radical ideas who manage to claw their way to their top are wealthy white men? We need a perfect woman in the White House because if a less than perfect one gets in, it’d do more harm than good to the feminist cause. At least, that’s what I’m being told.

I’ve heard the arguments for Sanders, and I agree with a lot of what he says. His politics are socialist, compassionate and inspiring. No doubt their implementation would do a lot for women, as well as poor Americans and minority groups.

I hope the rumours about the pro-Bernie Sanders senator Elizabeth Warren – who this week announced, “I’m a superdelegate and I don’t believe in superdelegates” – becoming Clinton’s running mate are true. But I refuse to buy into the narrative that says Bernie is the better choice, the more radical choice, the choice for real change, while Clinton is “boring”, uninspiring, nothing new for America.

Among all this moralising and grand-standing, we seem to have forgotten that the fact that a woman in the White House really is of itself something revolutionary, radical and new. There’s never been one before, after all. Bar Barack Obama, it’s been moneyed white man after moneyed white man, all hailed by campaigners as the amazing new alternative, the brand new flavour, the real deal, all whipping up energy for the next big thing.

In other words, it’s been Bernie after Bernie (yes, he is wealthy – Time recently reported that Sanders is a “de facto millionaire”).

This isn’t a race to lead a country where gender equality has been achieved, in a world where we don’t need to celebrate the fact that a candidate is female. This is a country where the Republican Party is anti-abortion, and many of its members support banning abortion entirely, cutting off funding for family planning clinics and forcing women to carry unwanted foetuses to full term before giving them up for adoption. This is a world where the President of Turkey calls women who don’t want to have children “deficient”. This is a country where a rapist at Stanford University was given a six month sentence because he has 'athletic potential' – and because his victim was drunk.

Where are the women as left wing as Bernie Sanders? They’re stuck at the bottom of the political ladder, unable to progress because they’re “crazy” or “hysterical” or “romantic and unrealistic” or “typical women”. If you think for one second that a woman in America could become a presidential candidate without playing the establishment game, you’re woefully uninformed.

Women come into politics with baggage in the form of expectations about their “emotional” tendencies and the way they “just don’t look right” in the Oval Office. Women don’t have the male luxury of swanning in to politics with radical ideas and being taken seriously enough to become a major Democrat figure, rather than dismissed out of hand as a raging harpy who’s probably on her period. You’ll never see the female Bernie if you can’t get behind Hillary Clinton.

What does Clinton actually stand for? Not women who can’t satisfy their husbands so lead them to sleep with their interns, as Donald Trump suggests. Not unqualified crooks in the White House, as Bernie Sanders suggests, either. In fact, when you look at her prospective policies alongside Sanders’, they’re almost identical – and it’s worth pointing out that Sanders is more pro-gun, more isolationist, and less dedicated to solar power. Both are strongly pro-choice, while Clinton proposes capping out-of-pocket charges for drugs at $250 – costs that are particularly hard on women, especially mothers. Both also support sexual assault prevention courses in colleges and Clinton stated in January that she would continue Obama’s work on immigration and take it further in the case of families, ending family detention and helping to keep family members together in the US. It’s clear that her policies will actively make life better for women.

Hillary Clinton isn’t perfect by a long stretch, but she is left-of-centre (for the US, at least) and a candidate for the Democrats already. Her ideas are solid, compassionate and realistic. Do we have the right to demand perfection of her, just because she’s a woman? Or do we live in a world backwards enough where electing her is the most revolutionary choice by a mile? I think I know the answer.