Stateside With Rosalea: Daughters Day

By the power vested in me as POTUS (Person of Totally Unbridled Skepticism) I hereby declare Sunday, May 11, 2008, Daughters Day. And now, briefly, some daughters of note—a very screechy high C, to be exact.

::Chelsea::
Poor Chelsea! How sad for her that the relentless desire of Ma and Pa Klingon to once again fly the blue and white skies in a blue and white plane is ruining their daughter’s chances of ever being President of the United States one day herself.

Sometime in the future, Chelsea will be the junior U.S. Senator from a state where she’s just served a couple of terms as a legislator, and the “inexperienced” meme her parents harp on will be dragged out and used against her. If ever there was an advertisement for all that’s wrong with the “me at any cost” generation, Bill and Hillary must be it.

C’mon, Chelsea! Show a spark of independence and declare for Obama!

::Condi::
In many ways, I have immense respect for Condoleezza Rice. Not just on the world stage but here at home she has three strikes against her in the legitimacy stakes: unmarried, African-American, and a female. After decades of supposed equality in the States, gender and race are still strong factors in how a person’s competency is viewed.

Add to that the subtle—and not so subtle—discrimination against people who choose not to marry and/or bear children in a society that is built around marriage and parenthood, and you have to admire Condi’s determination to overcome all the odds stacked against her.
Unfortunately, she’s done it by being a perfect mentoree, following along with whatever her mentors tell her to do.

Time to strike out on your own, Condi!

::Cokie::
Well, I suppose she’s somebody’s daughter, but honestly! On This Week this morning, commentator Cokie Roberts declared “Single women will always vote for Democrats. African Americans will always vote for Democrats.” Huh?

It’s an assumption that black voters are offended by, and her comment reminded me of something a steward reportedly witnessed LBJ saying aboard Air Force One at the time he was negotiating passage of the Civil Rights Act: “I’ll have them n*****s voting Democratic for two hundred years.” (The comment is reported in Kenneth Walsh’s 2003 book Air Force One: A History of the Presidents and their Planes.)

Recommended reading for Cokie: This 1998 article by Bay Area black journalist Chauncey Bailey explaining why he voted for the Republican candidate instead of Barbara Boxer in that year’s Senate election.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE—

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