Marie:

I'll confess myself slightly confused. Is it your contention that women are, by virtue of some ineffible aspect of their gender, better qualified to lead our nation than men, because they're more likely to negotiate than to embrace conflict? Or that voters who choose male candidates over their female rivals because they don't trust women to be sufficiently aggressive on national security issues are prejudiced?

Let me put it this way. If women are less likely to exercise force, and men more likely, then it's perfectly reasonable for an electorate that favors the use of force over diplomatic negotiations to elect, on average, more men than women. If they're equally likely, and only unfair stereotypes are at play, than any electorate should eventually learn to split its votes fairly evenly. And if the electorate favors diplomacy over force, one would expect that, eventually, more women would hold office than men.

(All of this ignores the fact that in the end we're dealing with individual candidates, who offer voters far more than their gender. But indulge me.)

In other words, I think you're conflating two different arguments:
1) Women should be winning more elections, because if they do they'll talk to our enemies instead of fighting them, and then we'll all be better off.
2) Women should be winning more elections, because they're indistinguishable from men on national security issues, and only prejudice holds them back.

If you'll forgive me, which is it?

You study focuses on women and delivers some obvious truths. The Clinton-Obama race includes issues of race. Are there more women Senators or African-American Senators? Are there more women Governors or African-American governors? More women in the House of Representatives or African-Americans? An "It's our turn" approach can backfire.
Both groups who have faced barriers to higher elective office. Women and African-Americans have faced bias. At various points in history African-Americans were literally invited out of both political parties.
We have to choose the candidate we feel will best represent our issues. Choosing one over the other does not make a person a sexist or a racist. Just as voters have demonstrated that they are ready for a female POTUS, they have also indicted that they will vote for an African-American POTUS.

Someone on Air America said today that we've spent $460B on the Iraq War so far and that would hire 7M elementary school teachers.

Now, I sure the heck do wish that I had a woman I could vote for who did not vote for and continue to fund the war in Iraq. Security begins at home in our communities. I don't want a "Commander in Chief". I don't want to be commanded. I want a President who represents the American people and I don't care if it is a man or a woman. I just know that the woman who may get our nomination has failed that test.

You write that attitudes have changed with lightening speed. I don't think so.

First of all it has been more than two generations since the most modern incarnation of the womens movement began. Before I was born. Second, 2000 to 2007 is hardly lightening speed.

Unfortunately, most of the women who have advanced to high positions in foreign policy circles have embraced hawkish positions to prove their toughness. This certainly applies to Rice, Albright, and Jeane Kirkpatrick before them, and many defenders of Hillary Clinton say that she felt constrained to vote for the Iraq war, as well as for aggressive moves in Iran's direction, because she felt the need to demonstrate her toughness.

Albright had a role in the US/British insistence on language in the Rambouillet Agreement that guaranteed a war between NATO and Serbia over Kosovo. How could a government of any country accept terms like these:

"NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY including associated airspace and territorial waters. This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, maneuver, billet, and utilization of any areas or facilities as required for support, training, and operations."

FRY = "Federal Republic of Yugoslavia". Milosovic was being asked for unconditional surrender followed by military occupation, not of Kosovo but of the whole country. He was an evil man, but this is the kind of language an aggressor uses when war is a desired outcome.

Samantha Power doesn't seem to suffer from this problem, so it's far from universal.

I was tough on you yesterday, I didn't realize that it was all about gender all the time. I apologize as my comments were probably off topic in regard to your unique and boutique interpretation of the world.

But what of women who lead in all areas of life? Lead in medecine, lead in business, are undisputed experts in their area of focus? Why is it that they never seem to dwell upon doubts and judgements? Why is it that those women who create fashion seem to be the least of slaves to it?

I guess my gut reaction in defense of women is this, a self-actualized woman has that capacity to lead without the obsessive self refloection. It is as if, an effective leader is focused on the sentient moment, the opportunities at hand, and that the indulgence of how others judge their gender is secondary to their passion and drive that is the genesis of their unique capabilities.

I don't judge a womans capabilities and leadership by her gender. I really do not. And I don't think that self actualized women in any field think as you do.

I find it laughable that people who do make those external assumptions miss the obvious.

I sort of get the feeling that you project upon these women who do not suffer a low-self esteem and subjective judgements, the appeal to scientific reasoning in the guise of a poll, with numbers, that they should be insecure of gender as well.

Well if you want to redo the Billy Jean King thing and focus of gender well, that is your boutique.

But if Venus Williams or Serena Williams loses the match to a man, whom has an equal passion and excellence to the game, then that does not diminish their excellence and leadership.

The appeal to science, "70% of respondents believed that a male president would perform better on foreign policy than a female president would" would not diminish the self esteem of a champion.

Women should stop telling women of their limitations, stop selling that idea that the game is rigged, and instead focus on the areas where women compete and win. Most women whom are succesful have an intrinsic drive, a genuine affinity for what they do, and that is what makes them experts.

Ask men if the world's expert in prostrate cancer was a woman, and if they had access to that resource, and if they had cancer, would they choose that woman as a doctor if they had that option?

You keep putting competency secondary to gender.

"We assume that women will have a hard time being seen as competent in the area of national security because it is traditionally regarded as a masculine domain."

Don't speak for me.

"Some assume that women will have a hard time being seen as competent in the area of national security because it is traditionally regarded as a masculine domain."

Quit carry the swill bucket for the ideas that you claim to dispel.

And for the reocrd, I would never under estimate a women in any endeavor, never make assumptions, and don't allow facts to stand in the way of opinions.

I don't think that a succesful woman puts as much emohasis on opinion as you do. If Hillary was crippled by emotional poverty, incapacitated by disagreement, or crumbled under adversity, I doubt that she would have became a Senator, passed the bar, and endured as she has the benefits and the trials and tribulations of public life.

Is your message to the professional woman? Is your message to men? Who is your message directed at?

Or is it instead your musings of low self esteem and searching for empirical data to substantiate it?

I don't deny that there has not been a pre-existing fetishization of 'Commander in Chief' and militarism in America before Bush came along.

Clearly Bush has found fertile soil, and there's lots of precedent. But then again, Hitler and the rabid trappings of Nazism didn't spring out of nowhere either. There was a pre-existing Prussian martial tradition, as well as an anti-semitic tradition, that would be escalated to appalling degrees.

I take some exception to your historical account:

The writers of the constitution evidently thought this was an extremely important fact, given the prominent position they gave to it. It is very significant that they invested the president with command of not just the Army and Navy, but the state militias. This put all armed forces in the United States under a unified command, with the president at the apex.

And what was the alternative, that they'd divide up military power among various political units? They'd just fought a protracted guerilla war with the 'Hyperpower' of the age. They had no intention of writing the constitution as a suicide pact, nor of endorsing a civil war.
The principal threats to the young Republic were very real. Beyond the sea Britain, France, Spain were powerful colonial Empires with resources and will to quash a handful of struggling colonies. Inland, there were potentially powerful Indian nations. They were democrats and republicans in the original sense of the words, but one thing they were not was suicidal. The constitution was not a suicide pact. Threats were real and required realistic, not idealistic responses.

In this sense, you're simply taking an ad hoc practicality and investing it with a kind of near mystical retrospective significance.

Balanced against this, among the founders was a general distaste for standing or permanent armies of any sort. They saw it as a recipe for tyranny, and so their award of centralized powers was not without reservations. Important powers were withheld from the 'commander in chief'. The authority to declare or initiate war was reserved to Congress, ensuring that the 'Commander in Chief' was to act only defensively or as the agent of Congress. The power of the budget was reserved to Congress. The second amendment eroded the Commander's power over militias and the unilateral use or control of military power.

You're also ignoring the practicalities of the historical context. The United States was not in its first century and a half a military society. It was predominantly, overwhelmingly civilian. Militias and levies were the rule, even at sea, where the war of 1812 was fought with fleets of privateers.

The militia model fell apart under the pressure of modern warfare in the Civil War, but despite this, the United States remained a strongly civilian society. The massive military apparatus of the Civil War was largely dismantled after that conflict. Large scale militarism burst out in WWI, and was just as quickly dismantled.

Small scale peripheral military adventures in the Spanish American War, the Mexican War, the Indian Wars, Central America and Caribbean adventures were penny ante in scale. Brutal, violent, evil, yes.

But compared to the European conflicts of the era, which featured orders of magnitude more troops, and societies militarizing to the point of universal conscriptions, it was almost trivial. In many cases it wasn't warfare, but piracy. Raiding forces out raping relatively helpless victims. Slaughter indian tribes, knock over corrupt and ineffective, technologically and socially backward latin states.

Militarism was a miniscule investment for much of America's history, a relatively small part of budgets, an even smaller part of 'real' foreign policy, merely an unsavoury mix of piracy and theatre.

The sort of universal conscription, the rabid militarism and obsessive glorification of military virtues and technology that we saw in the late 19th and early 20th century Europe was utterly alien to the American sensibility.

It's only with WWII and the ensuing Cold War that American society changed radically, and not without resistance. Eisenhower railed against it. McArthur's Presidential campaign fell flat. In the 60's and 70's a major anti-war movement broke out.

The good thing about making the President the head of the armed forces, we all learned in school, is that the democratically elected head of the executive branch of government is in charge of the military, not some autonomous and democratically unaccountable general, and so the military is under "civilian" command. But perhaps a bad thing about it is that it had the perhaps unintended effect, especially once standing armies became the norm, of militarizing the executive branch of government. Is the military run by civilians, or is the civilian government run by the military? This goes right back to the beginning of the country, and is not some new-fangled Bush Era affectation.

Actually, it is a new-fangled Bush era affectation. If you suggested to any American in the Nixon, or Kennedy, or even as late as the Reagan or Clinton eras that America is a 'civilian government run by the military' they would have simply vomited at the thought.

Now, under the Bush regime... its a real question. I can't think of a better example of the corrosive effects of Bush on American society, and the runaway fetishization of the 'Commander in Chief' position.

Ten years ago, you couldn't have imagined saying what you've just said. The very notion would have made you ill. It's a seminal marker for the corruption and degradation of American society.

That the corruption has roots is no surprising. Even cancer has roots. But make no mistake... right now, America has metastized big time.

The song 'Hail to the Chief' is an interesting example of the evolution of the phenomenon.

According to Wikipedia, the music dates back to 1790, and quite different lyrics.

Soldier, rest! thy warfare o'er,
Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking,
Dream of battled fields no more,
Days of danger, nights of waking.

Quite anti-war, isn't it? No adulation of Chiefs and triumph, merely a lament for common soldiers, unmarked graves, danger and nightmare.

According to Wikipedia:

"On July 4, 1828, the Marine Band performed the song at a ceremony for the formal opening of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which was attended by President John Quincy Adams. The song was first played to announce the arrival of the president at James K. Polk's inauguration on March 4, 1845."

It doesn't really seem appropriate for Lincoln, for instance. Or for Woodrow Wilson. Or FDR. One might imagine the bombast appealing to Teddy Roosevelt. But dour Calvin Coolidge or Herbert Hoover would retreat from its raucous call. Ulysses Grant would offer it contempt. And Warren G. Harding...

It's not until 1954 that the song becomes the official anthem of the President. If it takes 109 years to catch on as the official song, we can assume that there's a fair bit of diffidence or ambiguity in the reception to it.

And get this - its the department of defense that does it in 1954, that designates it as the Presidents music. Yikes. Since when is the DOD in charge of that stuff?

The historical context is interesting. We're at the height of the cold war, the frustrating end of the Korean war, around the time of the elevation of Eisenhower. Militarism in America has reached an all time high.

It was in form and content a bombastic psychopathic song, to be fully embraced and made official in a psychotic a bombastic psychopathic era. I'd argue, as Eisenhower before him argued, that American society was poisoned by runaway militarism. Definitely, its the signature of a sick society. A sign of things to come. Rogue cancer cells working their way into place. A tumour, benign at the time perhaps.

That said, its Bush who has made "I'm Commander in Chief" the answer to every question, the overruling response to every objection. It's Bush who has elevated this duty to a pageant, who dresses up in pseudo-military garb, who assumes the mantle of a warrior, who announces "I'm a WAR PRESIDENT", who carefully drapes his photo ops almost endlessly with soldiers, who chooses to make many of his public appearances disproportionately to and in front of soldiers.

So its OK for a woman to claim that they are superior to men and can do a better job. However, if a man says that men can do a better job, the wrath of the feminists showers down as a toxic rain. Seems like those who shout loudest against sexism are actually those who are the most sexist. A double standard.