(THE BLOG)

HALLI CASSER-JAYNE - bio
RED, WHITE 'N TRUE™
BARRY V. BARACK
Posted, September 17, 2008,  12:01 p.m

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Question: Why did Barack Obama idly stand by and make no effort to reach out to disenfranchised Hillary Clinton supporters and leave himself vulnerable to attack from the right?

And why does he continue to leave the courting of those voters to surrogates and make no effort to move them into his corner himself?

Why from early June when Hillary Clinton conceded the race until now has Barack Obama failed to address the issue of sexism, or make a bona fide effort to assuage the women who felt disenfranchised by its own party with his personal effort to bring them back into the fold?

Ask these questions of women and you’ll get a host of spirited answers. Obama, if nothing else, is a lightening rod for discussion.

One thing is certain, few women I talk with are voting for Obama with glee. Most are voting for him with resignation, some are yet to decide who they will vote for, and many women will never vote for Barack Obama.

Yet, all are wondering why Barack Obama stood before the American public and when asked if he would consider Hillary Clinton for his running mate replied, “Hillary would be on anyone’s short list,” except, he neglected to say, his.

Obama’s not reaching out to women has left many scratching their heads.

Enter Sarah Palin, John McCain’s antidote to the disenfranchised women who had supported Hillary Clinton but weren’t sure they could support Barack Obama. Palin has proved to be the answer for many of Hillary’s supporters who see getting a woman into the Executive Branch of the American government as essential to the equalization of women in American society.

For some others, Sarah Palin is a quandary just as Obama is, because for those women Palin represents a cultural divide, she anti-Abortion, they pro-Choice. Still, fully 20 percent of white women voters moved to McCain-Palin camp within days of his naming Palin as his veep. In fact a survey, conducted Sept. 5-10, found 65 percent of working-class white women say Palin shares their values.

Yesterday, after two weeks of being pummeled by the McCain-Palin ticket, and after weeks of party leaders telling Obama that he needed to fight back harder, the Obama campaign announced that it would be sending out his former foe, Hillary Clinton with his vice-presidential nominee, Joe Biden, to woo women back into the fold.

In addition, Women for Obama and the DNC's Women's Leadership Forum have scheduled a "National Issues Conference" in Chicago to raise money for the campaign, and senior female Democratic lawmakers will hold an event later this week pressing the campaign's themes.

As part of the coordinated effort six women's rights groups endorsed Barack Obama for president yesterday including the National Organization for Women (NOW), although many of these groups are looked upon with open disdain by many of the voters Obama is trying to move into his corner.

Still, all this coordinated appeal to women is shy on one front. Who continues to be missing from the appeal? Barack Obama.

As one women said to me yesterday, “It is clear to me that to Barack Obama I am nothing more than a vote. He doesn’t really care about me. Clearly he doesn’t care about how Hillary was treated. He was as sexist towards her as any of the media. Why is it so hard for him to speak to women directly? You know what I think? I think it’s cultural with him. I think Barack Obama needs to talk with Bill Cosby. I think Obama is one of those African-American men with an attitude problem towards women.”

“I think,” of course, is only one woman’s opinion, but all opinions count. Barack Obama himself has taken on comedian Bill Cosby’s mantle that Black men must start taking responsibility within the framework of the Black family. There are too many absentee fathers; Obama’s included, leaving too many women, such as his own mother, with the difficult burden of single parenthood.

“I know the toll it took on me, not having a father in the house,” he said in a speech on the subject of the black family in America. “The hole in your heart when you don’t have a male figure in the home who can guide you and lead you.”

So, my friend wonders, if Barack Obama is so sensitive to the burdens women face, women of all colors bare in American society, why has he been so cavalier in addressing their needs and concerns, starting with listening to the needs and concerns of Democratic Party women.

Of course the boy raised in the single parent home was Barry. Barack Obama is a persona adopted by the presidential candidate at a time in his life when he was trying to figure out exactly who he is, a persona he chose through an accumulation of life experience that he was not the white Barry but the African-American Barack Obama.

Did young Barry witness in his childhood environment replete with multiple influences including a white grandfather, grandmother and mother, an Indonesian stepfather, and, of course, an African father, a certain disparagement of women, which was as much a part of his era of upbringing as bi-racial marriages are familiar today?

We do know that Obama holds a certain disdain for his white grandmother who he sold out in his speech on race. "I can no more disown him (his mentor Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr.) than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

We also know that despite an abundance of requests that Obama make a direct appeal to Hillary’s women, he has categorically refused to do so. And, again, only after McCain named Sarah Palin as his running mate and Barack Obama saw women quickly moving to his Republican rivals has Barack Obama's campaign begun to seriously address the disaffected Hillary Clinton voters.

And that tells women a lot about who Obama is whether you call him Barry, Barack, or a typical male chauvinist pig, who, as far as we know, doesn’t wear lipstick.