“A gay President in 2084?” – Lisa Simpson
“We’re realistic.” – Gay Republican
It is almost time to start paying real attention to the presidential candidates. The New Hampshire primary might happen in December and Christmas is a scant nine weeks away. We’re getting close; soon the race will become more than masturbatory fodder for cable news and on-line political addicts. Before it does though, I’d like to make a small point, or perhaps just ask a question.
This year, for the first time ever, we have a chick and a black dude in actual contention for residence at 1600. That is historic and has been commented on exhaustively in a we’re-not-racist-or-sexist-but-let’s-talk-about-it-anyway-to-prove-how-not-racist-and-not-sexist-we-are kind of way. What there hasn’t been, or at least what I haven’t seen, is comments on the, for lack of a better term, non-traditional roads they’ve taken.
Clinton has been a national figure for fifteen years now, for good and ill. Her first serious national exposure was on “60 Minutes” (after the Super Bowl) tacitly admitting that Bill had screwed around on her and that she was okay with it seeing as how he was in the running for Big Dick in Chief. That is a humble and humiliating beginning and she has done extremely well for herself since.
Obama, meanwhile, didn’t become nationally famous until aught four when, as a not yet elected Senator, he was widely proclaimed as the future of the Democratic Party. The similarities with Slick Willie were apparent – big speech at the convention for a doomed candidate, setting himself up for a run at the title, young, good looking, blah blah blah blah blah. It was a better opening that Hillary’s and he hasn’t set a foot seriously wrong since.
Now they are the #1 and #2 contenders for the best looking Democratic nomination since 1976. The accepted wisdom is that this is a shoe-in election and whoever takes the Blue nomination need only avoid being caught with live boys or dead girls. (Terrifyingly, I agree with this.) I find it just the tiniest bit funny that had you told someone forty years ago that in 2008 the two top contenders would not be white guys, these two would not be what you would’ve expected. I don’t mean that in that let’s-talk-about-how-not-racist-and-sexist-we-are kind of way, but rather in their paths to fame and contention.
Hillary got where she is by sharing a bed with one of the most charismatic politicians of the last century. Worse yet, she got there by standing by her man through the most famous extra marital blowjob in history. Obama got there by growing up largely outside the, ahem, traditional minority experience and being the most non-threatening black pitch man since Michael Jordan. If you didn’t know his name and had never seen a picture of him, Obama would look like just another vicious Illinois Democrat with killer instincts and saleable bullshit (and that is a storied tradition).
That’s how we got here: a women who married into big time politics and a black guy who is only half black and has no ancestral links to the keystone experience of black people in America (psst, that means slavery). We don’t have an independent womyn or the great-grandson of a slave, the only way we could get farther from the fevered dorm room dreams of trod upon liberals is if we had an adopted Kenyan girl raised by the Bush clan.
Still, she doesn’t have a penis and he isn’t white and if either one of them gets sworn in as number forty-four it will be a first, no matter the path taken. I guess I have no point except to say that, as usual, nobody saw it coming.
