Clinton: If We Don't Agree With the President, Call Michelle Obama

Sen. Hillary Clinton used to say that she was the one who could answer the phone at 3 a.m. and know what to do as president. Speaking at the Emily's List lunch, Clinton, after congratulating Michelle Obama for her speech last night, said if the president isn't on her side -- call his wife.

"I know a little bit about how the White House works," Clinton said. "And, you know, if the president isn't exactly on our side -- call the first lady, and with Michelle Obama, we are going to have somebody who answers that phone."

Obamarama

Okay, it's official: Michelle Obama is hot. I wasn't totally buying the "I'm a happy wife and mom" routine in her talk tonight. I know she had to do it, but all I can say is, she's just overflowing with power and knowledge and know-how ... and, whee!, that's sexy. She will be a huge asset to President Obama.

Maybe in 8 years it'll be President Michelle Obama and Vice-President Hillary Clinton, or vice-versa.

Can he help us heal?

I came out as a Barack Obama convert in February, much to the dismay of some of my feminist friends who were pulling for Hillary's history-making run as a woman.

Hillary, however, voted for the Iraq War. Who knows what Obama would have done if he'd been in her place? However, he wasn't. He's in a much better position to hammer home his differences with Bush & Co.

The last eight years have wreaked havoc on the U.S.'s world-wide reputation. Too many people hate us, fear us--and for what? A war designed to enrich Bush & Cheney's corporate friends in the face of killing, maiming and displacing millions of human beings. If we elect Barack Obama, Americans are telling the world that we don't support this.

Along those lines, look at what this New York Times piece says about foreign reaction to Obama's clinching the nomination:

Indeed, for many, the idea of an African-American in the White House for the first time seemed a concept that could potentially presage a profound shift in America’s sense of itself.

Gerard Baker, the U.S. editor of The Times of London, wrote: “In 220 years a country that has steadily multiplied in diversity, where ethnic minorities and women have risen to the very highest positions in so many fields of human life, has chosen a succession of 42 white men as its leader. For good measure, the vice presidency, the only other nationally directly elected position in the US government, has been held by a succession of 46 white males.”

“But last night, in a tumultuous break with this long history, the ultimate realization of the American dream moved a little closer, and a black man became his party’s nominee for the presidency,” Mr. Baker wrote.

Ségolène Royal, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Socialist rival in last year’s French presidential election, called Mr. Obama’s candidacy “a historic choice.”

“He embodies the America of today and tomorrow,” she said Wednesday. Ms. Royal, who attended an Obama rally in Boston on Feb. 1, said his consistent opposition to the war in Iraq could help mend America’s battered image in the world. “He had a lucid judgment of the war in Iraq.”
. . .

“It should bring a good change in relations with Pakistan” should he win the presidency, said Munaway Akhtar, a prominent lawyer specializing in international arbitration in the capital, Islamabad. “Pakistan has always been friendly to the United States but the people have never benefited, the rulers have always benefited. Hopefully, that would change with Obama.”

There was a prevailing sentiment, he said, that Mr. Obama would better serve Pakistan’s interests. “If Obama would become president there would be a push for democracy in Pakistan.”

A former senior Pakistani diplomat, who was briefly ambassador to the United States, Tariq Fatemi, said that Mr. Obama’s “idealism” struck a chord with Pakistanis.

“Barack Obama would do very well in improving the image of the United States. He would position the United States more as a force for moral values rather than for brute force,” he said.

That sense of optimism emerged in Hong Kong’s financial district.
“I feel his image is younger, fresher and more energetic, with no baggage and a shorter history,” said Richard Law, 50, a lawyer.

Across Europe, Mr. Obama’s announcement was seen through the prism of national interest. In Kosovo, whose birth as an independent country in February won strong support from the United States, political observers said that both Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain would be embraced by the territory’s ethnic Albanian majority, since both supported Kosovo’s self-determination.

In Denmark, which supported the invasion of Iraq before withdrawing its troops amid a growing domestic backlash, Matias Seidelin, the political editor of the newspaper Politiken, said Mr. Obama was widely seen as the candidate who could repair America’s damaged reputation.

“Obama is viewed a multilateralist who favors dialogue in his foreign policy,” he said.

Mr. Seidelin said Mr. Obama’s s multiethnic background could foster understanding between cultures in the United States and other countries.

In Germany, where newspapers and broadcasters have been fascinated by the United States election campaign, several politicians and commentators have referred to Mr. Obama as the new John F. Kennedy, expressing fervent hope that he will be make it to the White House not only because of his youth and background but also as radical departure from the Bush administration.

Reinhardt Bütikofer, leader of Germany’s Green Party, said the election was of crucial importance for democracy. “I think this is a major historical moment,” he said. “And it came about against all the odds. What is most exciting is how Obama has been able to mobilize younger voters. This is one of the most important aspects. He can always be proud of that.”

The enthusiasm was also clear among conservative politicians, such as Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the foreign policy spokesman for the Christian Social Union, the sister party of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats.

If Mr. Obama becomes president, “a transatlantic honeymoon will take place which will reach its climax at the next NATO summit which will be held both in Germany and France. We will reach a new peak of transatlantic romanticism,” he said.

“The dreams of Germans are connected with a renaissance of multilateralism, to which Obama is committed.”

In Brussels, Jan Marinus Wiersma, vice president of the Socialist Group, which has 216 seats in the European Parliament, was equally exuberant: “Mr. Obama represents an agenda for change for which we in Europe are longing. We hope and expect Mr. Obama to win. This will be the start of a new era of positive cooperation between the U.S. and Europe.”

In Switzerland, Miriam Behrens, the spokesperson for Switzerland’s Green Party, said, “Among the general public there is a tendency to support Obama. He’s perceived as a person who’s very charismatic and he’s more open to a European approach to things. That’s very much appreciated here.”

Some Europeans expressed caution about the outcome of the November election. “It’s clear that to affirm this change, there would have to be a victory in November, which isn’t at all certain,” said Mario Del Pero, who teaches American history at the University of Bologna in Italy. But Margherita Boniver, of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Party of Freedom, said an Obama victory in November “would be a moment of great liberation, of the overcoming of many millenary prejudices” whose impact would spread to the entire world.

Nikos Karahalios, a top strategist of the ruling New Democracy Party in Greece, said the government in Athens “isn’t playing the Republican or Democratic card game. But Greece, a small country struggling to make its mark in international affairs, has always had a history of siding by the underdog. That’s what Obama is. That’s why he’s appealing to the Greeks.”
He also evoked expectations that Mr. Obama could soften the anti-Americanism that has flowed from the Iraq war. “How well Mr. Obama rebrands America is crucial for Greece. It will determine how Greeks position themselves vis-à-vis the United States,” Mr. Karahalios said.

The American campaign has been closely followed in Baghdad, where politicians have tended to judge their American counterparts by reference to their stance on and knowledge of the Iraq war.

In a telephone interview Wednesday, Mahmoud Othman, a prominent member of Kurdish alliance in Parliament, said: “It is a matter related to the American people. I have preferred Clinton to be the candidate because she is more concerned about the Iraqi issue and the Kurdish issue especially. In general, I think it is good for the Americans because they want a change. They want a new administration since Obama represents the youth and he wants change.”

And since Obama is now the nominee, here's a poem in honor of him:

Presidential cigs

I was shocked (in my usual naive sort of way) when I heard on the radio the doctor who gave Obama his physical says he's in great health--and that the only obvious health risk in his life is that he's a smoker.

Huh? Where have I been?

It's funny how it made me feel. It felt a little betrayed, as though he'd been hiding something. I mean, I'd never ever seen him smoking. Not in the bars where he quaffed booze to prove he was just as much of a man as Hillary. Not while kicking back in a car or private plane on the campaign trail. Not while hanging out with the unwashed masses.

Why didn't he have a cigarette during the debates, just sit there and puff, exhaling into Hillary's face or something--like the old days when Johnny Carson used to smoke at his desk as he interviewed people.

I wonder if Obama will quit cigarettes just as he quit his church?

Come on, if David Sedaris can quit, anyone can.

Do any of you give a hoot about this one way or the other?

UPDATE: Based on the comments of Joanna & Becky, I did more research on this topic. Apparently Obama's been trying to quit for quite some time now. As of four days ago, he was still battling it and re-trying the Nicorette.

Alice Walker: Build alliances based on Truth

There's an amazing piece by Alice Walker in The Root. Ostensibly it's about Obama vs. Clinton, but it's much more than that.

She begins by painting a picture of what it was like to live on a Georgia plantation (she was born in 1944):

"My parents and older siblings did everything imaginable for Miss May. They planted and raised her cotton and corn, fed and killed and processed her cattle and hogs, painted her house, patched her roof, ran her dairy, and, among countless other duties and responsibilities my father was her chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at any hour of the day or night. She lived in a large white house with green shutters and a green, luxuriant lawn: not quite as large as Tara of Gone With the Wind fame, but in the same style.

"We lived in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in wind and rain. Miss May went to school as a girl. The school my parents and their neighbors built for us was burned to the ground by local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their competitors in tenant farming. During the Depression, desperate to feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten dollars a month to twelve. Miss May responded that she would not pay that amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn't pay it to a nigger. That before she'd pay a nigger that much money she'd milk the dairy cows herself."

She then talks about why she supports Obama, and while a lot of what she says swirls in a complex way around race, class and gender. She points out, for instance, that Obama isn't the only one with a "racial heritage"; there are clearly certain benefits to whiteness that are the invisible elephant in the room.

While she would "adore having a woman president,"

"my choice would be Representative Barbara Lee, who alone voted in Congress five years ago not to make war on Iraq. That to me is leadership, morality, and courage; if she had been white I would have cheered just as hard."

Walker also addresses the differences she has with Obama--indeed, with most American politicians:

"I want a grown-up attitude toward Cuba, for instance, a country and a people I love; I want an end to the embargo that has harmed my friends and their children, children who, when I visit Cuba, trustingly turn their faces up for me to kiss. I agree with a teacher of mine, Howard Zinn, that war is as objectionable as cannibalism and slavery; it is beyond obsolete as a means of improving life. I want an end to the on-going war immediately and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to destroy their weapons and to drive themselves out of Iraq."

While she calls the fact that Obama is a clear contender a "miracle we are witnessing," she calls on us to "build alliances based not on race, ethnicity, color, nationality, sexual preference or gender, but on Truth."

She also offers a kind of pragmatic optimism at the end that speaks to me deeply. She says:

"Even if Obama becomes president, our country is in such ruin it may well be beyond his power to lead us toward rehabilitation. If he is elected however, we must, individually and collectively, as citizens of the planet, insist on helping him do the best job that can be done; more, we must insist that he demand this of us. It is a blessing that our mothers taught us not to fear hard work. Know, as the Hopi elders declare: The river has its destination. And remember, as poet June Jordan and Sweet Honey in the Rock never tired of telling us: We are the ones we have been waiting for."

Coming Out as a Barak Obama Convert

I've become an Obama convert.

Katha Politt's great piece in her The Nation blog articulates much of what I feel. She makes a great point about how, on domestic issues, Obama and Hillary are similar. But...

...on foreign policy Obama seems more enlightened, as in less bellicose. Maybe Hillary Clinton's refusal to say her Iraq vote was wrong shows that she has neo-con sympathies; maybe she simply believes that any admission of error would tar her as weak. But we already have a warlike president who refuses to admit making mistakes, and look how that's turned out. The election of Barack Obama would send a signal to the world that the United States is taking a different tack.

She also is helping me to embrace, rather than cynically reject, how Obama makes me feel:

I usually resist words like "hope" and "change." But . . . let's go with the charismatic candidate this time. Let's go with the candidate voters feel some passion about. Let's say goodbye to the Clintons and have some new people make history.

My Republican brother-in-law said he might even vote for Obama. I do think Obama has a better chance of winning a national election--not because Hillary's a woman, but because (warranted or not), she is seen as a divisive figure.

Obama might just bring us back together after the horrible tearing-apart of these past eight years.

I've been doing some searching of Obama's position on queer rights. As an Illinois senator, he sponsored legislation in Illinois that would ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

And when he was criticized for planning a campaign event with a preacher (Reverend McClurkin) who claims to be a "former homosexual cured by prayer," Obama said:

I strongly believe that African Americans and the gay community must stand together in the fight for equal rights. And so I strongly disagree with Reverend McClurkin’s views and will continue to fight for these rights as president of the United States to ensure that America is a country that spreads tolerance instead of division.

Obama disagreed with McClurkin's views on gay issues; however, instead of silencing McClurkin, Obama added an openly gay minister to the slated events.

I respect that because trying to silence people is not the path toward change. (Ever hear of backlash? It's a result of attempting to shut the door.)

Instead, bring in love and dialogue. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

Super Tuesday

No matter what, today is an historical day. No matter what, this is an historical election cycle.

This guy was my choice--and he's no longer in the race (no surprise; I voted to register my ethical support for his convictions).

Now, I'm conflicted--I see strengths and problems in both Clinton and Obama.

Still, look at them. They are the top runners. It's an exciting time.