Something occurred to me when I read Avedon's remarks about Hillary Rodham Clinton's call to increase the minimum wage to $12. (Which is better than Obama's target for it; I suspect both of them are trying to position themselves as moderates, between the extremists who want to raise it to $15 and those who want to abolish it.) I'd been thinking inchoately about this for some time, at least since I wrote this post right after Obama's election in 2008, but it finally worked its way up to consciousness.
I notice that a lot of Clinton's boosters are stressing not how good her positions are -- perhaps because they know full well her postions aren't good -- but how important it supposedly is that we have a woman president. Here's the thing: it isn't important, it isn't important at all that we have a woman president, just that it was not important at all that we have a black president. It's a nice detail, but if you really oppose racism and sexism, the plumbing or pigmentation of the President is not important. What we need is not a woman president or a black president, but a good one. (Obama has been mediocre at best, and often quite bad.) Sex and skin color are not qualifications. I'm not sure that even Bernie Sanders will be a good president -- but hey, isn't it important that America have its first Jewish president? He might be better than the rest of the field, and I'm willing to vote for him, but I am not a cheerleader for anybody, and I do not trust cheerleaders.
