Twenty Set’s Monica O’Brien interviewed several Gen-Y women by e-mail as part of her postmortem of the 2008 election. She just posted a piece on the role female candidates and First Lady-to-be Obama played and the ramifications of their presence on the very public political stage for future elections.
You can find my thoughts on why Hillary lost and what Michelle Obama represents to professional women over at Twenty Set.
The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America – I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you – we as a people will get there.
There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as President, and we know that government can’t solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And above all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it’s been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years – block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.
What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek – it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.
So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers – in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people.
I love this video. The celebrities aren’t taking a stance on any issue in particular. Instead, they press the importance of voting, period.
A bunch of celebrities are demanding that you don’t vote because voting is stupid. No one cares about education, health care, abortion, polar bears, the economy, etc.
But then celebrity after celebrity point out that what you care about might matter. From social security to Darfur to the AIDS crisis at home and abroad, the 2nd ammendment, war on drugs. “This is really only about your future.”
They remind you that you need to REGISTER to vote and insist they’ll wait for you to register before moving on.
It’s completely non-partisan, but it reminds people of the issues at stake (regardless of the position you take on those issues), the need to register (the deadline is October 4th in some states) and the necessity of voting.
And of course, they ask you to take the message viral and share it with 5 friends.
PS. Maybe it leans left. But much of Hollywood is pretty liberal. The point is non partisan — vote!
Jill over at Writes Like She Talks recommends that bloggers “spread Tim Wise’s article, ‘This is Your Nation on White Privilege,’ far and wide.”
I’m happy to help the cause.
This election season has demonstrated the profound double standards in our country in regards to gendered personality traits, qualifications, character, and experience. Obama’s March speech on race is just the tip of the ice berg in terms of conversations that need to be had about how our race defines us and what privileges and challenges our genetic makeup hands us.
Whether or not you plan to vote for Barack Obama in November, we need to acknowledge that all Americans aren’t equal, yet. The repeated and prolonged attacks on Barack Obama throughout the primary and general election periods are not just about politics. Every challenge made of Sarah Palin’s qualifications can’t simply be written off as sexism and sour grapes over a personable Phyllis Schlafly 2.0.
There’s this false notion that nearly 150 years after slavery was outlawed in America, that race is no longer an issue. Throughout the country ballot wars are raged against the continuation of affirmative action in employment and education systems. People insist that the sins of their fathers, are not their own. Sadly, the civil rights movement of the 1960s shifted our culture some, but not enough.
Here are a few of Tim Wise’s observations on white privilege:
For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.
White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.
…
White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.
White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don’t all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you’re “untested.”
…White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was “Alaska first,” and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you’re black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she’s being disrespectful.
Click through for the full piece. Your thoughts? Pass it on.
Sarah Haskins’s latest piece on marketing to women. Her focus: Sarah Palin and the 2008 election.
photo by tiffanybrown76
“What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it Brick?
Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room? …
There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity … You can smell it. It smells like death.”
–Big Daddy, as written by Tennessee Williams in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Sam Harris is a great writer (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason). Today, his column makes a very important about Sarah Palin’s nomination to the Republican ticket: Average isn’t good enough.
Americans seem to think the very serious executive posts of President and Vice President are something akin to an episode of American Idol or Donald Trump’s The Apprentice. The reality is the weight of the world will literally be placed upon the shoulders of the person elected in November.
Sarah Palin is a great hockey mom and governor of a small, oil-pumping state. It’s not just that she’s not in Hillary Clinton‘s league. She’s not the caliber of Putin or Gordon Brown or Kofi Annan. I can’t take anyone seriously who puts her in the same category as those leaders. And that she considers herself qualified to go head-to-head with such world leaders, since she’s just a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, is yet another sign of her bad judgement and McCain’s.
Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. No one wants an average neurosurgeon or even an average carpenter, but when it comes time to vest a man or woman with more power and responsibility than any person has held in human history, Americans say they want a regular guy, someone just like themselves. President Bush kept his edge on the “Who would you like to have a beer with?” poll question in 2004, and won reelection.
This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages — and loses — both necessary and unnecessary wars.
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