The First Woman President?

Toni Morrison dubbed Bill Clinton the "first black president." Well, I'm dubbing Obama the first woman. Hillary does not represent me or my woman-ness or my feminism or anything like that, and I can't see how she represents anybody else's, either.

Despite her recently hyped rejection of CAFTA, she has traditionally voted with the GOP for trade agreements that victimize third-world women and children and outsource U.S. labor. Obama hasn't.

She has supported an imperialist war that creates worse conditions for Iraqi women than Saddam's regime did. Obama does not.

She is no challenge to the current soft-fascist, soft-money regime in the U.S. (the multi-national corporate master of us all) because she thought she needed it to win her place in history. Obama didn't need them after all.

And lately, she seems to be stooping even lower by employing the decades-old GOP, Good Ol' Boy, campaign strategy: Dividing working-and middle-class voters around the issue of race rather than offering them anything in exchange for their votes. It's a sad fact that a lot of people vote their prejudice, and she knows it. Her LBJ comments smack of a certain smug "liberal" white supremacy and signal to me that she's just as ready to scare up some biggoted white votes as she was to accept a fundraiser from Rupert Murdoch, to support the war, and to tout The Patriot Act. None of this is any other than the patriarchal bullshit we've been living with already.

As Michelle Obama says,

"Dream of a President who was raised like Barack was by a single mom who had to work and go to school and raise her kids and accept food stamps once in a while. Imagine a President who knows what that’s like."

That president would come about as close to honorary womanhood as any I've seen.

Photo Credit: kenyonfarrow.com