Commentary: Great, There’s a Woman on the GOP Ticket – Too Bad She’s the Wrong Woman for the Job

By: Deborah Mathis

For all their controversy, identity politics may be the most natural, the most instinctive politics of all. And, oddly, the most complicated, misread and mismanaged, as John McCain has proven anew.

There is no real intrigue behind it. The reason you want a person of your gender, your race, your religion or your economic standing in a position of power or esteem is because you assume that person shares your sensibilities, your experience and your interests and will act accordingly.

You assume it because the country’s social structure has a history of divisions along race, class and religious lines, and those segregated enclaves produced collections of experiences and perceptions that are in many ways peculiar to each subdivision. Only someone who’s lived it -- whichever “it” it is -- can really get it, goes the thinking. Then, you expect them to represent.

But, when a person entrusted with that presumption proves that he or she, in fact, does not share your interests, he or she bears no more attraction for you than anyone else and, perhaps, less. The allure -- the advantage -- of identity vaporizes.

COMMENTARY....