The 2008 VP Poll at http://www.votenic.com is now open! Feel free to vote your choice and show support for your candidate. For the record, we called Barack's clinch on the primary vote months before it happened.

Yes. Thank you. Being the first woman president will require precisely two things: Being president, and being female. If Obama gets sworn in in January, he will have one of those traits--as have dozens of men before him. But he will NOT be the first person to have both. Why belittle the unachieved historical moment (not to mention the one that actually WILL be achieved) by claiming victory ahead of time?

I also have to take issue with the notion that being an unswaggering male is the same thing as being female. First of all, there are plenty of swaggering females. Secondly, there are plenty of men who can identify with Obama precisely because they've never seen his head poking out the top of a tank or watched him pretend to go duck hunting. None of those men are women because of that. Lots of men watch Oprah, and lots of women would prefer a monster-truck rally. To speak in any other terms just reinforces the stereotypes, which helps to strengthen that glass ceiling.

In fairness, the "trope" comes from Faludi's book The Terror Dream where she traces the American obsession with macho Marlboro men to the cultural myth of Dan'l Boone defending the helpless wimmenfolk against the Indians. And wild as it sounds, she makes a reasonable case for the thesis.

Of course Obama isn't a woman any more than Bill Clinton is black. But the campaign for the Democratic was a gender-bender, with Hillary playing macho and Obama channeling the ewig weiblisch. That IMHO was a very good thing.

There's a lot of confusion about what equality for women and minorities requires, and too often the take has been taken as a matter of valorizing old stereotypes rather than working to eliminate them. The Clinton-Obama match-up has displayed a black man who is about as remote as one could wish from our cultural stereotype of "black"--in fact, a candidate who was panned as an "elitist" and wuss--running against a woman who knocked back boilermakers at redneck bars and hung tough. For all that racism and misogyny tainted this campaign, both got enthusiastic support which suggests many Americans are moving beyond these stereotypes.

This is encouraging. I'm just an old-fashioned feminist. I believe that the goal of feminism is not to valorize "femininity" but to liberate us from it and, more generally, to free women and minorities from gender and ethnic "scripts" which have been reinforced by decades of multiculturalism and identity politics.

Is Beyer a GOP plant? Does this dope even realize that the GOP ALWAYS paints Democrats as girly-men, from the 'Breck Girl' Edwards to the vaguely 'French' John Kerry, etc., etc.? Is she that stupid, to say such a thing out loud?

This is right out of the Republican playbook. All Democratic men are effeminate; all Democratic women are suspiciously masculine.

It's also the line taken by most of Maureen Dowd's columns -- in a newspaper that religiously refers to everyone as Mr. this or Ms. that, she gets away with calling Obama "Bambi", Edwards the "Breck girl" and so on. Yet for some reason people think she's a liberal, when she couldn't be doing a better job for Karl Rove if he paid her.

This is not about Obama, specifically. It's about Republican tactics.

Props to Obama for not playing that sort of masculinity game. Maybe it's time we wrapped our heads around the notion that that isn't what 'being a man' is all about, anyway.

When I was in my 20s and trying to sort this all out, I came to the conclusion that being a man was about things like taking responsibility for myself and my actions, being willing to do the right thing even when it wasn't going to score points with anyone, refusing to take advantage of others' weaknesses, reaching out to people who needed a helping hand - things like that.

I noticed also that my criteria were equally valid for either sex, but that there was the curious absence of an analogous term for women. We still need one.

Remember how disturbing it seemed -- once an actual black person was in reach of the presidency -- that Bill Clinton had so internalized the "first black president" moniker that he was shocked African Americans would flock to Obama instead of to his wife?

Why, no Ms. Golstein, I do not remember that at all. Perhaps you could provide, oh I don't know, some evidence to back that assertion.

thaaaaanks
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