Ilyse Hogue | The Nation

I spent a half-hour yesterday cutting and pasting the presidential debate transcript into Word and then using the search function to look for the term “women.” When the ABC transcript came up empty, I tried the CNN one. When that also returned no results, I decided to change my search parameters to “woman”—i.e., singular. Booyah! I got four, count ’em, four hits! All four were in anecdotes about a “woman I met…”

Perplexed, I went to recheck the debate schedule. Maybe there wasn’t any mention because a future debate was dedicating time to the topic? Nope. Economics and foreign policy are where these debates are headed.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who noticed. My e-mail inbox is full of outreaches from women’s groups who note that Romney’s extreme positions were neither defended or challenged. From stalwart NARAL to new on-line group UltraViolet, women’s groups are once again left to point out that women were left out of the debate.

Eva Longoria strode on stage at the Democratic National Convention tonight looking every bit the international star that she is. She didn’t have an empty chair, but she carried a sharp analysis and a disarming sass. She spoke of her modest upbringing in Texas and how, while college was not optional in her family, the money was sparse. Eva took what jobs she could—fast food, mechanics, aerobics—to pay for college and then pay back her loans. Her family believed that the opportunity America would offer if she got her degree was a worthy investment. Pivoting from the personal to the political, Eva drew a sharp line between the candidates with the thunderous applause line: “The Eva Longoria who worked at Wendy’s flipping burgers—she needed a tax break. But the Eva Longoria who works on movie sets does not.”

In the theater of modern conventions, party platforms are pro forma, but party pizzaz is paramount. This is the reason the Republicans were so thrilled to have a star like Clint Eastwood that they didn’t bother to vet his bizarre performance last week in Tampa. The Democratic National Convention is the final dress rehearsal for the last two months of the campaign, where they take the narrative for a spin and the audience response is like real-time market-testing. And Longoria was there to appeal directly to key target demographics and leave them feeling better about an administration that’s lost some luster in the long slog of the last four years.

Young people voted in record numbers in 2008. Even more, this is the group that gave the long-shot candidate a rock-star status that helped propel him from a long-shot candidate to the White House. But with their economic prospects dim because of the recession and payments due on college loans, their participation this cycle is far from assured.

As anyone knows who’s ever tried to make an idea or a piece of content go viral, it’s almost impossible to manufacture the conditions for the perfect cultural storm. There’s a special magic required for the organized chaos that erupts when a single moment gives voice to a gathering undercurrent of social consensus. And last night at the RNC, Clint Eastwood had that special magic. Just probably not in the way that the Romney campaign had anticipated.

Surprise guest Eastwood was reportedly given three minutes to speak, but spent the better part of fifteen minutes of prime-time coverage ranting at an empty chair that was supposed to be an invisible President Obama. Pain was visible on the faces of candidate and campaign operatives alike as it became clear that these confused ravings of the famous octogenarian were going to be the stand-out performance from an otherwise carefully orchestrated week.

And that it is. Within moments of Eastwood’s start, @InvisibleObama had a Twitter account with a picture of an empty chair. By the end of the speech, the chair had almost 17,000 followers. It now has 48,000.

First American woman in space Sally Ride passed away Monday, and her death has become a question of adjectives. Specifically, which ones are used in the plethora of tributes. Used: iconic, pioneer, brilliant, author, passionate, advocate, and role model. All true. Not used: lesbian. Also evidently true.

Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan accused the New York Times of either active or passive homophobia by omitting this core part of Ms. Ride’s identity in her extensive obituary. Ultimately, though, Sullivan saves his harshest criticism for Ms. Ride herself, calling her an “absent heroine” for her trademark discretion and bemoaning her missed opportunity to serve as a role model for young gay people.

My neck hair bristled reading that, empathizing with Sally and far too familiar with the universal curse of professional women painfully managing the delicate balance between fruitful camaraderie and destructive vulnerability in male-dominated and often sexually charged workplaces. Still, it seems that towards the end of her life, Ride was quite open about her relationship with her partner of twenty-seven years, Tam O’ Shaughnessy, who was noted as surviving family in the statement released by Sally Ride Science to announce her death.