Mia is right to call out Obama and the Dems on their lack of speaking to women thus far (I disagree with them all on the Obama campaign being “feminist” in theory or practice no matter how many young people were pulled in or how diverse but that’s another thing…). When Diane Watson was miffed at Obama’s “…get over it” remark she had a point. He had said, well, if they’d just read where I am on women’s issues they’ll get over the Clinton loss. Therein he framed us as only being concerned about, what? knitting? he didn’t say. All issues are women’s issues and the point the panel made well is that we want to be part of all discussion and policy setting.

That said, the next chance for us to do so is at the Dem platform committee, which no one still knows when and where and how to contact them despite the rules granting public input before they do so.

Today Ira Chernus in the Baltimore Sun says the anti-war crowd should lay off both Obama and the platform committee (does he know how to contact them?) and not be “too extreme” (he doesn’t acknowledge that war is extreme…) and cause the party to lose to McCain over a cultural disconnect. Well, we are disconnected and this is not the Cold War era of Nixon. If we’ve not grown culturally and politically since then, why not? And what can we do invoke progress (isn’t “change” the theme here?) in a party that’s grown so stale it risks alienating everyone by its irrelvance (other than as an “other” to Republicans?).

War is certainly a woman’s issue as well as all the societal needs WE are sacrificing to the obscene costs of that violence, like funded abortions, funded birth control, funded child care, funded health care, access to livable waged jobs and housing…. . What else of all that does Ira and Obama want us to keep off OUR platform?

Another example of my not seeing Obama’s campaign as feminist. Or two.

Wasn’t it the day after the SD and MT primaries on June 3rd, after a crowning at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul (I’m telling you, he’s no Wellstone) that Obama went back to Capital Hill and generated all sorts of media (its called ‘earned media’) pictures with him surrounded by….men. It was raining men, let me tell you. Suited up men, too, not those blue-collar workers who are in most need these days. That was sure some way to win over the Hillary voters.

And today Max Blumenthal enlightens us on what the hell is really going on with Obama’s perceived need for the rightwing evangelical vote. He’s dippin’ deep, for sure. But is this feminist? What part of this has anything to do with feminism? As Max says, all those invited to the gathering in Chicago were men. Were they afraid women might be on the rag if they came, sullying (or challenging) the positions of power all of them claim for themselves? Max mentions one woman who is heading up evangelical efforts for the Obama/Hildebrand/Tewes campaign and if she represents a feminist spirituality I need a big long retreat in a very quiet place:

Mara Vanderslice has been called the “faith guru” by The Hill in Washington, DC. Her consulting firm, Common Good Strategies, recently formed a political action committee, the Matthew 25 Network, to advocate on Obama’s behalf. In the past, Vanderslice has advised her clients not only to downplay their support for abortion rights and gay rights but also never to use the phrase “separation of church and state.” Hired by Sen. John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004, she ultimately found herself sidelined. “She was a little bit overzealous,” the late Father Robert Drinan, a liberal Catholic legend and Kerry adviser, told the New York Times. Vanderslice claimed results two years later in the Congressional midterms. Her clients, she said, citing exit polling, garnered 10 percent more of the evangelical vote than two years before. Whether Democratic gains among so-called “values voters” were a result of Vanderslice’s inspired appeals, or simply a reflection of the nationwide backlash against the Republican Congress and Bush’s policies, does not deter her from taking credit.

Man, woman, we can do far better than Vanderslice and Rivers and Wallis. Rather than looking desperate for the rightwing religious vote, how about tossing women and feminists a few bones? We’re the ones with 51% of the vote, remember?

Here’s a link to Max Blumenthal’s righteous piece at the Nation via Alternet.

And just to hog the entire soliloquy here on Obama’s feminist campaign, see this today, too, at Counterpunch

Our founding fathers (we had no founding mothers) got it all wrong. They believed in the separation of church and state. Evangelicals want to separate the state from your tax money by turning Sunday’s collection over to certain religious groups that will use it for “faith-based initiatives.”

Whatever “intersectionality” Obama’s campaign appeared in those early caucuses, wouldn’t a real consideration of intersections endeavor to make social and financial needs fulfillable without entering a church or being made to parade as a pauper? Or, how about just saying enough with the fraud, whether in the Pentagon or religion-touting revolving accounts?