Obama's Our First Woman President

Dana Milbank thinks Obama's taking the pandering just a bit too far
By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff
Posted May 15, 2012 9:05 AM CDT
Obama's Our First Woman President
President Barack Obama arrives to deliver the commencement address to graduates at all-female Barnard College, on the campus of Columbia University, May 14, 2012.   (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Good news, Barack Obama. You may not be the first black president (that would be Bill Clinton), but you are the first gay one, and apparently the first woman, too. That's how Dana Milbank of the Washington Post is interpreting yesterday's schedule. Eager to exploit his advantage over Mitt Romney with the fairer sex, Obama made his fourth appearance on The View, then gave the commencement speech at the all-female Barnard College. "Heck, he even appeared in public wearing a gown," Milbank quips.

Obama praised a generation of young women, acknowledging that it was "a cheap applause line" at Barnard. "But Obama was being modest. He didn't deliver a cheap applause line. He delivered an entire speech full of them." He said Congress would get more done with more women legislators, speculated that "founding mothers" were "whispering smarter things" in the founding fathers' ears, and so on. In Milbank's eyes it "veered into pandering, as Obama brazenly flaunted his feminine mystique." Click for Milbank's full column. (Milbank, incidentally, isn't the first columnist, or even the first Post columnist, to call Obama a woman—Kathleen Parker did it two years ago, and then defended herself thusly).

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