My, my, but Affirmative Action has come a long way …

• John Edwards was criticized during his bid for President in 2004 for having less than only one term (i.e., less than six years) in the Senate before his candidacy for President.
• Bill Clinton was criticized and scrutinized for only having been a governor, although multi-term, and no Federal Government experience.
• Yet Barrack Obama has only been a State Representative and had less than two years in the United States Senate and no governance experience before he announced his candidacy.

We’ve heard all those wonderful promises of “change” spewing from his mouth, but just exactly “how” does he intend to bring that “change” to fruition. Everybody knows that people ‘resist’ change … and Congress is full of people.

A President is nothing more that a ‘cheerleader.’ The President doesn’t enact new legislation, the Congress does. He can cheer Congress on, but ‘he’ can’t ‘do’ it. He has to hope and pray he can get Congress to mobilize behind him. But, he hasn’t been in Congress long enough to forge any meaningful relationships with Senators and Congressmen whom he will need to call upon to do his bidding. And now, the health of his needed benefactor is in question. I, for one, am concerned that we just might have 4 years of a lame duck Presidency if he can manage to unite the party and get elected.

Absent selecting Hillary Clinton as his running mate, or another capable female running mate like Kathleen Sebelius, the governor of Kansas, I don’t think he’ll be able to reunite the party. Women across the nation, who voted for Clinton and who have watched in disgust as sexism was not only tolerated, but perpetrated by the media and others, will be highly offended with the selection of yet another male candidate by the good old boys club. Here’s just a few examples of some of the sexism issues:

• Feb. 10th: Katie Couric asked Hillary, “Someone told me your nickname in school was Miss Frigidaire. Is that true?” But in Scott Pelley’s intervew with Obama, he was asked about policy.
• Rush Limbaugh asked: “Will Americans want to watch a woman get older before their eyes?”
• MSNBC host, Chris Matthews, had to apologize on-air after intimating that Clinton wouldn’t be contending for the presidency if Bill Clinton hadn’t “fooled around” with Monica Lewinsky.
• MSNBC reporter, David Shuster, was suspended temporarily for his “pimping out” Chelsea remark.
• John Edwards, a fellow candidate, exclaimed that Clinton didn’t have the ability to hold up as our commander in chief.
• And given the media’s lead, a young man in Salem, N.H. must have felt it was clearly appropriate to yell out “Iron my shirt!”
• Even You-Tube videos …
• But the final one that still irks the you-know-what out of me was John Edwards’ endorsement of Obama as “the best man” (not “the best person”) for the job.

“One of the legacies of the Clinton campaign is that it’s been a wake-up call, really, to the women’s movement of how far we have to go. We have a lot of work to do. We are in much worse shape than we thought.” … Eleanor Smeal, founder of the Feminist Majority Foundation.

Clinton has a record of reaching across the isle in Congress to pass meaningful legislation. She has the network of relationships Obama will need. If he doesn’t recognize that, then he is truly naive. I understand that he wants to introduce change and he thinks of her as ‘old establishment,’ but he’s absolutely going to need a respected insider to steward his ‘changes’ through the Congress.

If it’s time for a change, then that change should include not just a Presidential candidate of a different color, but a Vice Presidential candidate of a different sex. Afterall, she did get darn near half the votes throughout this Primary process.

And please, don’t let me hear him say that he has a ‘mandate of the people.’ That one just won’t fly. Barely more than 1/2 the votes is NOT a mandate.