A sign-of-progress term for a female politician arguing against a position purported to be held by a fellow woman office-seeker – but actually is made-up. In other words, an imaginary opponent.
By extension, this mischaracterizes an opponent’s views, making them easier to argue against. This approach assumes voters are stupid and incapable of critical thinking.
Hillary Clinton in early summer 2014 seemed to throw out a straw woman charge in her latest memoir. Hard Choices covers the former first lady and senator’s experience just before, and during, her tenure as secretary of state, in President Barack Obama’s first term.
Clinton claims that after then-Sen. Obama won the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. his team wanted her to attack Sarah Palin for being a woman.
But’s that’s not how it happened, say Obama campaign veterans. Obama confidantes do acknowledge asking Clinton to criticize then-Alaska Gov. Palin, the freshly-minted GOP vice-presidential nominee. But that was over Palin’s experience and public policy record – standard issues in campaigns – not her gender.
"That’s not what happened," said one campaign veteran, who wished to remain anonymous, according to Politico. "The Palin thing was an odd way to put it. The question that was raised with numerous Democratic leaders was whether Gov. Palin had the right experience to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, and it’s the same question that would have been raised regardless of gender."
“We wanted Hillary to go out and say the Republican platform is completely inconsistent with the principles on which I ran,” said the official, who said the idea was never supposed to be an overarching criticism of the then-Alaska governor.
“That moment from 2008 has become a Clinton talking point as she embarks on a book tour that many see as a prelude for a presidential run — one that will further test the tenuous alliance between the two former rivals and their loyalists, particularly those who haven’t completely let go of past slights.”
Such sniping between former campaigns is hardly unusual in politics. But it’s a sign of progress because it involves two credible female candidates for the nation’s highest positions. Usually the term of art in the political arena is straw men, because that gender has dominated high-level American politics up until now.
The Online Etymology Dictionary dates its figurative use to 1896. Though politicians of all kinds employ it, presidents, naturally, have the loudest megaphone to put forward such fallacies.
Conservatives regularly inveigh against President Barack Obama for constructing too many straw men. In particular they cite his second inaugural speech, in January 2013, for containing a series of straw-man arguments.
“We reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future,” Obama said. “For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn.”
But that was a false verbal construct. Nobody was proposing pushing Granny off a cliff. What was at issue in D.C. budget battles was some sort of balance in spending and tax priorities, not a total abolition of programs to help the elderly and disabled, as Obama seemed to be implying.
That led Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the 2012 Republican vice-presidential nominee, to blast Obama’s “straw man” attack on the Republican Party over entitlement programs. Ryan told The Laura Ingraham Show the next day the speech demonstrated the president did not understand the Republican position on entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security.
Obama’s immediate predecessor, George W. Bush, was himself a master of straw-man phony issues. A March 2006 Associated Press article detailed numerous examples of Bush’s use of the “straw man argument.”
The AP noticed that Bush frequently began sentences with “some say” or “some in Washington believe,” referring to “Democrats or other White House opponents.” By not naming them, Bush was more free to omit “an important nuance or [substitute] an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual position.” Bush could then knock “down a straw man of his own making” that nobody would actually defend.