Obama: Our First Woman President?

"Barack Obama's win in Iowa was the latest upset in the long, discredited history of gender assumptions. A large and apparently decisive bloc of voters widely thought to be Hillary Clinton's - young to middle-aged women - preferred Obama."

"Yet it's not only Obama's policies and strategies that appeal to women. He is like a woman: slim, good looking, with long elegant fingers, appealingly dressed - all terms more typically ascribed to female candidates.

Those shots of Barack and Michelle sitting with Oprah on stools had the feel of a smart, all-women talk panel: Obama fit right in for reasons beyond race.

Hillary has long been accused of androgyny - trying to sound like a man, flexing her rhetorical muscle - but on Thursday night it was Obama who won the androgyny sweepstakes.

None of the other '08 candidates has the inherent, subliminal male-female appeal of Obama. He's physically attractive, but not in the way Bill Clinton was - the way that drew women in search of oral sex and grotesque fame to the White House.

Women are gravitating to Obama out of a different urge - the desire to invite him to our book club, join him for coffee or have him coach our child's soccer team. He embodies many of the positive characteristics we tend to regard as feminine: sensitive and empathetic, seeking to find common ground and minimize conflict, not taking power for granted."

"Bill Clinton, who was famously dubbed America's first black president, provides a useful typecasting precedent. By the end of this year we might indeed have our first woman president - but not necessarily Hillary."

Keli wrote:I think that I will vomit.