Donald Trump's antics stoke new opposition

President Donald Trump’s continuing assaults on cherished American ideals, like protecting the environment and providing health care, are having an intriguing side effect. His administration is keeping the outrage at a boil.

For organizations that encourage and train women to run for political office, that has made for a very busy four months since Election Day.

Women, especially, are expressing interest in running for public office.

Activism has spiked in many areas, from demonstrations in airports to raucous town halls to protests at politicians’ doorsteps. But the events of the last few months have fundamentally changed attitudes about politics, particularly among women. Organizers say many more women are embracing the value of running for office.

VoteRunLead, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that offers classes with titles like “30 Things Every Woman Needs to Know to Run for Office,” recently surveyed women who had signed up for the program. In the past, two-thirds of VoteRunLead’s students said they were thinking of running in the next five years or so. When their children were grown, perhaps.

Now, according to VoteRunLead founder Erin Vilardi, 66 percent want to run in the next two years.

“In the past, we heard, it’s on my mind, but it’s not urgent,” she said. “A new crop of women are raising their hands and accelerating the schedule.”

VoteRunLead, which is based in New York, unveiled a website this week under the banner “Run as you are.” An important function of groups like this is matching the skills and passions of individuals with the right offices.

“Probably, the number one question I get is what to run for,” Vilardi says. She begins by asking what policies they want to change. Most will end up seeking school board or local offices, with a sprinkling interested in federal posts.

From September 2014 to the November election, VoteRunLead trained about 5,000 women at conferences and online. Since Nov. 8, another 5,565 have signed up. Organizations like the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, She Should Run and Ignite National are reporting similar surging interest.

Even optimists thought interest might fade after the Jan. 21 women’s marches. But Anne Moses, president of Ignite National, which offers programs for high school and college women, says so far, apathy has been a stranger. “I thought maybe it would slow down,” she said, “but this administration is doing a good job of keeping people angry.”

Cue Hillary Clinton. On Tuesday, she gave a major speech in San Francisco to an audience of 6,000, and she’s scheduled today to address the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security in Washington. On Tuesday, she tried out a new mantra: “Resist, insist, persist, enlist.”

Her timing was perfect. Last week brought the image of a room of men in Congress debating whether to cover maternity care, along with Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts making light of losing mammograms. He was forced to apologize.

Such moments are raising awareness in young women that “sexism is real, it’s not just something my mom is talking about,” said Moses of Ignite National, which is based in San Francisco.

The recent ineptitude of the White House — failing on two travel bans and Obamacare repeal — also demonstrates, like a reality show, that no experience is necessary to try governing. The missteps have been liberating for potential candidates, and especially women, who research shows tend to underestimate how well-prepared they already are for jobs.

Who knew that Trump’s Washington would offer so much inspiration?

Jackie Kennedy was a determined White House mom

As the celebrity press eagerly reports on actor Natalie Portman’s second pregnancy, the buzz around her Oscar-worthy portrayal of Jacqueline Kennedy in 2016’s Jackie is mounting. This intersection of life and art has me musing about the passionate and rule-defying mothering Jackie Kennedy brought to her own two children.

Shortly after John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s inauguration as president in 1960, he asked his chief of protocol, Angier Biddle Duke, to speak with Jackie about her new duties. To follow the model of her predecessors, Jackie would be expected to attend lunches, deliver speeches, host teas and accept honorary degrees.

What she told the protocol chief was that she would do as little of that as possible. “My family, they come first,” Jackie responded to Duke’s advising, according to an account in All Too Human by Jackie’s friend Edward Klein. “The children come first in my life. I’ve got a problem: the kids are young and I just want to do as much as I can within the bounds of my responsibility to my children. And however you want to phrase it, that means I want to do as little as I have to do.”

The White House staff was incensed and embarrassed. Jackie refused one invitation after another. However, after the first couple of months, it became clear that her absence was distributed evenhandedly, and Jackie had set a precedent that would-be hosts could accept without feeling too slighted.

Instead, Jackie and the children spent their weekdays at Glen Ora, a 400-acre estate the Kennedys rented in Middleburg, Virginia. There, Caroline rode her pony, Macaroni, and Mom took the kids on picnics, gave them baths and read to them in bed before they fell asleep. In one journal entry, Jackie noted, these were the “things I have no chance to do in the W. House.”

Jackie’s determination to focus on her role as a mother was apparent even during the campaign. Shortly before the election, when Caroline was three and Jackie was pregnant with JFK Jr., she remarked in a TV interview that she needed to be with her children in the White House. “If you bungle raising your children,” she said, “I don’t think whatever else you do matters very much.”

When her husband was brutally assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, Jackie could have been forgiven for withdrawing into her own grief. Instead, raising Caroline and John Jr. kept Jackie moving forward. She invited friends who had worked closely with her late husband Jack to come and speak to her children about their father. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., presidential adviser Theodore Sorensen and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara were among them. These private seminars These private conversations – seminars, really – continued for years.

Jackie also had her children meet regularly with developmental psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. He served as their therapist in an era when Americans didn’t usually acknowledge children’s emotional pain, much less offer them help.  Jackie stepped outside the norm to make sure her kids were well cared for.

In my time, Jacqueline Kennedy’s reputation has come to me as a fabulous figure of fashion and as a material girl whose subsequent marriage to Greek shipping mogul Aristotle Onassis solidified her presence among the cosmopolitan jet set.

Yet this view of her commitment to a normal life for her children makes me feel as though she and I had at least one thing in common. We both cared, all else aside, to be good mothers.

If you liked this post, please subscribe for future updates here (scroll down). Also, please check out my book, Why They Stay: Sex Scandals, Deals, and Hidden Agendas of Nine Political Wives,published in March 2017.

Loyalty to a cheating spouse helps tank Hillary's candidacy

Huma Abedin is Hillary Clinton's closest aide, and since graduating from college has held no job that wasn’t connected to this rising American political star. At Huma’s wedding in July 2010, Clinton called her a “second daughter.” That’s how close they are.

Ten months after her marriage to Anthony Weiner, on May 27, 2011, Huma’s husband was caught very publicly cheating on her via sext message. Anthony sent photo of himself, erect in gray undershorts, to a 21-year-old sext partner. By mistake, he bypassed the direct message function on Twitter and sent the pic to all 45,000 of his followers. A conservative blogger and Anthony detractor, Andrew Breitbart, got hold of the errant tweet and publicized it further to the world.

And what did Huma do? At first, she believed Anthony’s story that his Twitter account had been hacked. Within a couple of weeks, though, he told the truth. She considered their unborn child she was carrying, and she stayed with Anthony. She tried to resurrect his political career in 2013, as he ran for New York City mayor. Huma used her connection with Bill and Hillary Clinton to raise money and support for Anthony's mayoral campaign.

Such marital stoicism, in the words of journalist Jennifer Senior. And to whom did Huma look for this example? Her mentor Hillary Clinton. “At the end of the day,” Huma has said of the senior woman’s advice, “every woman should have the ability and the confidence and the choice to make whatever decisions she wants to make that are right for her and not be judged by it.”

To whom did Huma look for this example? Her mentor Hillary Clinton.

Huma stayed with Anthony until August 2016, when a fresh leak of sexts showed that he had not only continued virtual flirtations with female partners but was now referring to the couple’s toddler son, Jordan, as a “chick magnet.” At this point, Huma announced that she was separating from Anthony. But was this decision to break with a cheating man already too late?

The following month, in September 2016, the FBI learned that Anthony had been sexting with a 15-year-old girl. Given the girl's age, this was now a potential crime, and the FBI opened an investigation into Anthony's activity.

Then, with less than two weeks to go before Election Day in on Nov. 8, 2016, FBI Director James Comey announced that this investigation had revealed a new cache of emails, forwarded by Huma on Anthony’s laptop during Hillary Clinton’s tenure at the state department. Comey’s revelation reinforced public concern that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was careless. Then, just two days before the election, Comey told Congress that the new emails contained nothing of interest in regard to Clinton—but if he intended to clear the air, Comey’s announcement had the opposite effect. It energized Donald Trump supporters to show up at the polls and vote.

We all know now how that turned out.