IS THERE AN ECHO IN HERE?

Just reading Kathleen Parker's "Obama: Our First Female President" in today's Washington Post and feeling a strange sense of deja lu....


If Bill Clinton was our first black president, as Toni Morrison once proclaimed, then Barack Obama may be our first woman president.

--Parker

In the same sense that Toni Morrison claimed Bill Clinton was our first black president, Barack Obama could be thought of as another groundbreaker: our first female president.

--Ralph Alter, "Our First Female President?," American Thinker, June 5, 2009

Obama is a female candidate for president in the same way that Bill Clinton was the first black president.

It was Toni Morrison who first had the insight.

--Martin Linsky, "The First Woman President?," Newsweek, February 26, 2008

Obama ... offers a compelling blend of masculine and feminine. Bill Clinton, who was famously dubbed America's first black president, provides a useful typecasting precedent.

--Lucy Berrington and Jeff Onore, "Bam: Our 1st Woman Prez?," New York Post, January 7, 2008

****

When Morrison wrote in the New Yorker about Bill Clinton's "blackness," she cited the characteristics he shared with the African American community:

"Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."

--Parker

In a 1998 essay in the New Yorker, the Nobel Prize-winning author described Bill Clinton as "the first black president," commenting on his saxophone playing and his displaying "almost every trope of blackness."

--Linsky

****

Women, inarguably, still are punished for failing to adhere to gender norms by acting "too masculine" or "not feminine enough." In her fascinating study about "Hating Hillary," Karlyn Kohrs Campbell details the ways our former first lady was chastised for the sin of talking like a lawyer and, by extension, "like a man."

--Parker

Hillary has long been accused of androgyny -- trying to sound like a man, flexing her rhetorical muscle....

--Berrington and Onore

****

Generally speaking, men and women communicate differently. Women tend to be coalition builders rather than mavericks....

--Parker

He embodies many of the positive characteristics we tend to regard as feminine: sensitive and empathetic, seeking to find common ground and minimize conflict....

--Berrington and Onore

****

Obama is a chatterbox who makes Alan Alda look like Genghis Khan.

--Parker

Obama is filled with sensitivity (one might even say, empathy), he would rather talk than fight...

--Alter

Obama is advocating conversation and collaboration -- talking with everybody, including those with whom he has significant disagreements.

--Linsky

Those shots of Barack and Michelle sitting with Oprah on stools had the feel of a smart, all-women talk panel...

--Berrington and Onore

****

Obama may prove to be our first male president who pays a political price for acting too much like a woman.

--Parker

...the clincher is that, consistent with all outward appearances, the Obama administration fights like a girl.

--Alter

And I haven't even bothered to cite the oeuvre of Maureen Dowd.

I guess it's brilliant originality like this that got Parker her CNN gig and Pulitzer....