Latest / FROM THE INSIDE OUT by BETH ARNOLD / #62 THE POLITICAL YEAR OF THE WOMAN

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#62 THE POLITICAL YEAR OF THE WOMAN · FROM THE INSIDE OUT by BETH ARNOLD

0:23
SPEAKER_00: Hey y'all, pull up a chair.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: I'm Beth Arnold, and this is from The Inside Out, where American life, politics, and memory meet as we tiny specks in the cosmos try to make sense of it all.
0:37
SPEAKER_00: It's October 1st, 2026.
0:40
SPEAKER_00: Today's piece is the political year of the woman.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: It's about Southern women, political power, and several races the national press ought to be paying far more attention to.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: It also grows out of many of the same questions I'm asking in my new book, A Modern Declaration, about power, democracy, accountability, and what we are willing to stand for.
1:07
SPEAKER_00: Here we go.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: The political year of the woman.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: Will the Democrats come through?
1:14
SPEAKER_00: It is midterm election season in the political year of the woman.
1:19
SPEAKER_00: As usual, the national political press has basically ignored the South, writing us off because we're red states and thinking they know better than we do.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: Bless their hearts.
1:33
SPEAKER_00: But across the South, women are at the center of some of the most consequential races of this election cycle.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: This alone tells you how the times are changing.
1:45
SPEAKER_00: Nothing would be more joyful to me than to see Dr.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: Annie Andres beat the socks off of Darlene Graham Nordone, or even win by hair here in South Carolina.
1:57
SPEAKER_00: Does Trump's little puppet have a mind of her own?
2:01
SPEAKER_00: I expect not.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: In Nordone's disastrous August primary runoff debate, when asked about rising geopolitical tensions regarding Taiwan and the South China Sea, Nordone stumbled and openly stated, I'm not that informed on national security.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: National security is not my thing.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: In the rally Trump threw for Nordone to try and minimize the damage, he told the crowd that she was simply being very honest and didn't need to be a foreign policy expert because national security was his purview, not hers.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: He'll take care of the thinking for that little lady, like he ever took care of any lady except in the very worst way.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: What I really want you to do, he said to the crowd, is pretend, please, that I'm on the ballot.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: Just come and vote, it's so important.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: And there you have Darlene Graham Nordone in a nutshell.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: Darlene will not change any world.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: She'll help Trump keep ruining ours.
3:09
SPEAKER_00: Remember the Epstein survivors.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: During a February 2026 press briefing at the U.S.
3:15
SPEAKER_00: Capitol, Democratic Congressman Ted Liu of California, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, explicitly stated that the recently released Jeffrey Epstein files contain highly disturbing claims that Donald Trump raped children and threatened to kill children.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: When Lindsey Graham dropped dead, I took it as a sign from God that Dr.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: Annie Andrews was divinely crowned to take his Senate seat.
3:45
SPEAKER_00: I could hear celestial bells announcing this serendipitous opening for a Democrat, a woman, and a most promising candidate who is already giving the senator who sold his soul to Donald Trump a run for his money in South Carolina.
4:01
SPEAKER_00: Graham's reputation would be ground into the excrement of history.
4:06
SPEAKER_00: He had become a caricature of the man who was a friend of John McCain, who would never have bent his knee to Donald Trump.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: After all, whether you agreed with McCain's conservative viewpoint or not, he was a man of honor.
4:22
SPEAKER_00: Besides a handful of members of Congress who've done the right thing on more than one occasion, Representative Thomas Massey, Republican Kentucky, shout out for his work for the Epstein victims, Senator Tom Tillis, Republican North Carolina, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican Pennsylvania, and the erratic Senator Rand Paul, Republican Kentucky, the rest of the honorless congressional men and women who've done the same as Lindsey Graham will live in eternity with shame branded upon their names.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: As Liz Cheney prophetically put it, there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: A little digression.
5:12
SPEAKER_00: Kentucky's deeply read political energy is interesting.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: From Massey, one of the last Republicans with integrity, to Paul, to the now vegetable-ish Mitch McConnell, wheeled out for show but unable to do anything but smile and wave.
5:29
SPEAKER_00: That would have been so much handier in 2021 when Trump led the coup against his own country.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: And then there's Democrat governor Andy Bashir in this heavily Republican state.
5:42
SPEAKER_00: As Nicholas Christoph more or less said about Bashir, Kentucky voters have a longstanding historical comfort with electing individual Democratic governors like Andy Bashir.
5:54
SPEAKER_00: However, voters treat these races as localized evaluations of personal trust and character rather than an endorsement of the National Democratic Party platform.
6:07
SPEAKER_00: Christoph asks if Bashir is the next Clinton.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: We now know that's a very mixed bag.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: First of all, Arkansas was not a deep red state when Clinton was elected.
6:19
SPEAKER_00: It was Democratic through and through.
6:22
SPEAKER_00: Then there was the whole problem with Clinton never being able to keep his pants sipped, including during his presidency.
6:30
SPEAKER_00: And Hillary's involvement in discrediting and smearing the women with whom he had had dalliances.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: The War Room.
6:39
SPEAKER_00: Within the campaign, the strategy for countering and discrediting allegations of sexual misconduct and infidelity brought forward by various women was spearheaded under the label of managing bimbo eruptions.
6:55
SPEAKER_00: This specific phrase was coined by longtime Clinton aide Betsy Wright, who was jokingly referred to by staff as the campaign Secretary of Defense, to describe the rapid response operation tasked with aggressively defending Clinton and suppressing these scandals before they could damage his political viability.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: Then we looked the other way and said, boys will be boys.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: Despite Washington's history of powerful men having girlfriends and mistresses, it was the women who were thrown under the bus whose lives were destroyed to protect the men if it got out.
7:35
SPEAKER_00: Monica Lewinsky, for example, okay, I'm leaving out Gary Hart and Wilbur Mills.
7:41
SPEAKER_00: We can't tell the story of women in politics, honestly, if we only hold Republican women accountable.
7:48
SPEAKER_00: Hillary Clinton was important to women politically, and she also destroyed women's lives when they got in the way of her and Bill's political ambition.
7:59
SPEAKER_00: That wouldn't fly today.
8:17
SPEAKER_00: His administration championed NAFTA, which George H.W.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: Bush had negotiated, but Clinton worked to enact.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: He also signed the 1996 Welfare Reform Law, which ended traditional guaranteed government aid and replaced it with temporary assistance program tied strictly to work requirements.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: Clinton defended these measures as modernization, expanding trade, and encouraging work.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: Critics on the left and organized labor later viewed them as evidence that the Democrats had become too comfortable in power and too willing to weaken the social contract.
8:59
SPEAKER_00: And this is a big part of our problem now.
9:03
SPEAKER_00: With the combination of our own actions, at best ignoring the people we said we wanted to help, and at worst literally harming them, coupled with the GOP's manipulative machinations, pounding them with misinformation and feeding their racism, Democrats intellectualizing their lives, the working class eventually began to hate us Democrats.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: Our social contract.
9:33
SPEAKER_00: This is where our country has failed in such an enormous way.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: A chunk of our country, the oligarchs, the Republicans, many of the wealthy of both political parties, want to stop the disadvantaged from gaining some measure of self-destiny or prosperity.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: They think it costs them too much for people to be free.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: I like that Andy Bashir speaks plain English.
10:01
SPEAKER_00: That's part of what forges real connections with voters.
10:04
SPEAKER_00: When Lyndon Johnson ran for office the first time, he drove around dusty West Texas to hit every blink and you'd miss a community to meet his people.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: This made an impression on them.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: And I hear another woman and Democratic Senate candidate for Arkansas, Hallie Schaffner, is doing the same.
10:24
SPEAKER_00: And running a great race.
10:26
SPEAKER_00: She's up against Tom Cotton, who apparently never shows up in Arkansas and basically won't debate Schaffner.
10:33
SPEAKER_00: Here are a few comments from my Arkansas people about the Schaffner Cotton race.
10:39
SPEAKER_00: I think the fact that he, Cotton, is too cowardly to debate Halley says everything about how spineless and inauthentic he is.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: A blight on our state.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: I think Halley is working hard and Tom is getting scared.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: He is actually spending money on advertising and at least having some photo shoots on farms.
11:01
SPEAKER_00: Arkansas Farms, who knows?
11:04
SPEAKER_00: I think she has a shot at beating him, but it is an uphill battle.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: She has a solid answer for every question raised, has impressed a lot of folks at her events, level-headed, stays calm in the face of MAGA attack ads, cotton's out-of-state dollars.
11:22
SPEAKER_00: Her momentum is strong.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: His ads play to people's fears that his own party has created about dangerous people who are undocumented.
11:33
SPEAKER_00: He is portraying her as a radical and a socialist.
11:37
SPEAKER_00: She is fabulous.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: I don't think enough people are paying attention.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: She's running a great campaign and going everywhere.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: I don't know whether it's important, but I haven't seen any cotton signs anywhere in central or northwest Arkansas.
11:54
SPEAKER_00: And I hear it's the same in a lot of other places around the state.
11:58
SPEAKER_00: Tom Cotton has declined invitations to participate in the traditional broadcast television debates, agreeing so far to only one debate hosted by the conservative and Christian network, Salem Media Group.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: Cotton doesn't want to debate.
12:17
SPEAKER_00: We know why.
12:18
SPEAKER_00: Schaffner would whip his ass.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: But the arrogance of this Republican white man, a United States senator, is an insult to his constituents.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: And there's another reckoning in a Southern woman-to-woman race.
12:32
SPEAKER_00: This one in Tennessee.
12:35
SPEAKER_00: Jerry Green is a Memphis City Councilwoman, an attorney, a mother of three, and the chief public defender for Shelby County.
12:43
SPEAKER_00: When she won the Democratic primary, she made history as the first woman to ever secure the Democratic nomination for governor of Tennessee, setting up an all-female showdown against Republican Marcia Blackburn.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: Of course, Marsha Blackburn is spewing her guile and poison.
13:02
SPEAKER_00: That's what she does.
13:04
SPEAKER_00: The race escalated on September 10, 2026, when Blackburn officially refused to debate Green ahead of the November election.
13:13
SPEAKER_00: Green's campaign had proposed four separate televised debates across the state, but Blackburn's team flatly rejected the invitation, issuing a highly combative statement to local news declaring, I'm not going to give air to a socialist candidate who is running to destroy the agenda of Tennessee, destroy the United States, and defund the police.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: Oh please, I am rolling my eyes.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: Echoes of Tom Cotton.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: But this is Republican strategy.
13:47
SPEAKER_00: Don't debate because how can Republicans defend what they and Trump have done?
13:52
SPEAKER_00: I can't believe Darlene finally agreed to debate Annie.
13:56
SPEAKER_00: I can't wait to see Annie crush her.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: Darlene's identical name-calling won't cut it.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: Calling your adversary a communist or a socialist is one of the oldest tricks in American politics.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: It's been used to smear opponents, confuse voters, and distract from failures.
14:15
SPEAKER_00: And in this case, the failures are Trump's and his Republican enablers for going along with cruel, debilitating policies that are wrecking people's lives.
14:25
SPEAKER_00: The first Red Scare was a century ago.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: The fear returned in the 1950s when the rich, powerful, and their conservative politicians learned that they could shut down arguments about workers' rights, child labor, and economic inequality simply by painting reformers as dangerous radicals.
14:47
SPEAKER_00: Social Security, unemployment insurance, and the minimum wage were all attacked as un-American schemes.
14:55
SPEAKER_00: Proof that the country was being taken over by communists.
14:59
SPEAKER_00: The point of these attacks is to frighten people away from the real issues.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: Who is actually making their lives harder?
15:07
SPEAKER_00: Who is protecting the powerful?
15:09
SPEAKER_00: Who is truly failing the people?
15:12
SPEAKER_00: Give working people a scary label to fear, and you can persuade them to vote against their own best interests.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: Politicians who can't defend their policies, their corporate handouts, or their attempts to overturn elections can point across the aisle and yell, socialist, and create the chaos.
15:32
SPEAKER_00: Democrats have used the same weapon.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: During the Cold War, party leaders pushed progressive and anti-war activists out of their own ranks to prove they were tough on communism.
15:43
SPEAKER_00: Today, the corporate wing of the party dismisses populist challengers and critics on the left as extremists, unrealistic, or radicals, bent on sabotaging the party.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: Republicans use socialists to dodge accountability.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: Corporate Democrats use radical to protect the status quo.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: The words change.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: The purpose is the same.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: Keep people fighting over labels instead of demanding their fair share.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: But Southern women don't give up.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: We are persistent.
16:18
SPEAKER_00: You would think the Democratic Establishment would want to help.
16:22
SPEAKER_00: But once again, the National Democratic Party has basically ridden off the South, denying Annie Andrews, Jerry Green, and Halle Schaffner the kind of serious financial backing it pours into the battlegrounds it has already decided are worth fighting for.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: But Southern women are strong and savvy.
16:43
SPEAKER_00: Let's show those haughty bastards.
16:46
SPEAKER_00: This is our political year.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: Our hope, our goal is to elect these women.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: Dr.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: Annie Andrews, Hallie Schoffner, and Jerry Green, so they can lead the way back to a life that makes us proud.
17:03
SPEAKER_00: Thanks guys for pulling up a chair and listening.
17:06
SPEAKER_00: If this piece made you think or made you mad, please share it.
17:11
SPEAKER_00: And if you haven't subscribed to From the Inside Out, I hope you will.
17:15
SPEAKER_00: My new book, A Modern Declaration, is out now.
17:19
SPEAKER_00: I wrote it in the style and urgency of the original Declaration as a small modern day revolutionary pamphlet about democracy, power, and the obligations of citizenship.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: You can order it through Amazon or your local bookstore.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: And after you've read it, I'd be so grateful if you'd leave an honest review on Amazon.
17:42
SPEAKER_00: Reviews really do help an independent book find its readers.
17:47
SPEAKER_00: Until the next time, from one tiny speck in the cosmos to another.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: See you soon.