Huge congratulations to Barack Obama!  This is such a magnificent feat!

This is one of the best analyses I have read of this entire campaign. It hits the nail on the head with regard to the intersections of race and gender in this campaign. I tried to make this point back in January and February, but Eisenstein’s piece is just plain better.

It’s also why it’s sad that Emily’s List, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and others can’t jump out and support Michelle Obama against the attacks on her AND why they can’t see the intersections of race and gender in attacks on Obama as “a kid” or a black man “doing something in the neighborhood.”

The bright side though is that there seems to be a great generational difference and the younger generation is much better attuned to these dynamics.

Zillah Eisenstein writes:

Hillary’s preoccupation with white voters is a dead give-a-way of how she thinks about gender, and being a woman. Gender is white to her, like race is black. Bill and Hillary Clinton have thrown African-Americans to the wind because they thought they could play the gender card with its history of whiteness and win.

And here lies the rub. Hillary Clinton presents herself to the electorate as a woman. She argues that she wants to break the glass ceiling of/for gender. But the truth is that she is not simply a woman but both a woman and also white. The very fact that she ignores her own race, in a way that Obama cannot, is proof of the normalized privileging of whiteness. In this instance white is not a color, but the color, the standard, by which others are judged. So she silently, inadvertently but knowingly, uses her color to write her meanings of gender and mobilize older white women and angry white men by doing so. She presents herself as a woman but her real power here is as white. Misogyny — the fear, hatred, punishment, and discrimination towards women — ensures that Hillary’s privilege is her whiteness.

…

Hillary Clinton should never be demeaned for being a woman. But being a woman comes in all colors and classes. Hillary has done the unforgivable. She has used race — the whiteness card — on behalf of gender. We, the big “we” — the huge diversely defined feminisms in this country and across the globe — are better than this. Black feminists in this country, during the 1970’s and 80’s women’s movement made sure to break open the race/gender divide and clarify that gender is always racialized and race is always gendered. No person ever experiences one with out the other. Only when whiteness parades as an invisible standard can you think that gender and race can be separate. As such Hillary is white and a female and Barack is black and male. They are each both. Everyone is.

Hillary’s manipulation and misrepresentation of her gender reveals her sexual decoy status. Being female is not enough to allow one to claim their gender as a political tactic. Such claims must be rooted in a commitment to end gender discrimination and their racial and class formulations; not pit races and classes against each other in the hopes of being the first woman president. Clinton does not share a political identity with women of all classes and colors and nations simply because she has a female body. She first needs to claim that body and demand rights for it — reproductive, day care, health, education, etc. She has no multi-racial woman’s agenda because she has no anti-racist agenda. Meanwhile she is thrilled that she won big in West Virginia. West Virginia is “almost heaven” to Hillary. She says it shows the country that she can win the “hardworking white Americans” in November. But West Virginia is not heaven, nor is it like much of the rest of the country. It may look like what the U.S. used to be, but that is exactly the point. It does not have the diversity of color, age, culture that defines the U.S. today. Neither does Hillary’s vision.

Read more.

Obama remarked:

“To try to distort or to play snippets of her remarks in ways that are unflattering to her I think is just low-class,” Obama said

Good. I’m glad he drew that line in the sand.

It’d be nice if Emily’s List, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan and that whole crew had her back as well. I ain’t holdin’ my breath on that one though.

(h/t bravenewfilms)

Today we have Jay Newton-Small of Time Magazine who blesses the nation with a very critical-to-people’s-everyday-problems piece about when Obama does and does not wear a flag pin.

Newton-Small writes in her provocative article:

In case you missed it, Barack Obama’s American flag lapel pin is back. How long it will stay on is anyone’s guess.

I am so intellectually stimulated by her incisive observation.

Meet Jay Newton-Small:

There is no flag pin in sight on Ms. Newton-Small, but there could be one under all the hair though. Good job, Ms. Newton-Small. Way to push us toward solving oil dependence, getting affordable health care, and bringing the troops home. America’s journalists–always leading the way.

Any wonder why America has been under such trial and tribulation under their leadership?

Republican Spokesperson #1: We learn that Bill O’Reilly lashes out when he doesn’t know stuff.

Republican Spokesperson #2: Pat Buchanan plays dumb over how polls are done randomly.

Republican Spokesperson #3: We learn that Sean Hannity shamelessly distorts Michelle Obama’s speeches to paint her as “angry black woman.”

Republican Spokesperson #4: We learn that Republican spokespersons are full of hot air

And we learn that they have a nominee who seems mighty comfortable around their craziness…

The NARAL endorsement might be bigger news since it slices right into Clinton’s chief demographic of support.

And the New York Times reports:

He and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton have similar voting records on abortion issues, said Nancy Keenan, the president of Naral Pro-Choice America, but the group was driven to endorse by an eagerness to enter the fray and the sense that Mr. Obama is a more viable candidate.

“We think that John McCain is getting too much of a free ride out there,” Ms. Keenan said of the presumptive Republican nominee.

She added that based in part on pledged delegate totals and the popular vote, Mr. Obama is seen as a stronger candidate than Mrs. Clinton.

“Both of these candidates brought literally millions of people to this process,” she said. “But we have to be in red states and blue states. We have to be talking to people that are in all economic strata, we have to be talking to both men and women.”

The board of Naral’s political action committee met on Friday to discuss an endorsement, and although the vote to back Mr. Obama was unanimous, “there were a lot of Clinton supporters on that PAC board,” Ms. Keenan said. “Out of respect for Senator Clinton, they wanted to wait until after West Virginia.” Mrs. Clinton won the state in a blowout on Tuesday.