Monday, January 19, 2009

What can make a political junkie say "meh"

My email box is full of invites to inauguration get togethers, but not even the end of the Bush cleptocracy can get me excited about tomorrow.

I am having a really hard time with it actually. I can't get past the fact that the dude giving the invocation hates me and people like me, and that our shiny new president thinks that's reason enough to give him a national platform. Hell, I'm a slutty single mom whose had abortions (Nazi!) and called the police on my Kid's dad instead of heading to church to get counseling. Not to mention that I'm pretty flexy on the Kinsey scale. Rick Warren would tie me down and perform an exorcism if he thought he could get away with it.

But it's not just Obama's choice of national preacher that has got me down. I keep looking at the stimulus package, desperately combing through the details to find some tiny thing that might make my life easier. Some kind of funding that will go to jobs that I can do. No luck. No national healthcare either. Food stamp amounts are supposed to go up, but since I've been waiting for over 3 weeks for the local welfare office just to schedule an appointment to see if I'm eligible for them, I don't know that it's going to do me much good.

There is one bright spot, Hillary. I am tickled that women in the rest of the world will finally have a tough American ally standing up for them. But it's bittersweet when at home we won't be getting the same advocacy from our president. We are just a footnote for him. A secondary thing that he thinks about only rarely. Secondary. Woman may make up 52% of the population, but we are just a note in the margins to Obama. Perhaps he feels that if he does things to help out our husbands then we will benefit by proxy. Unless you don't have a husband, or don't sleep with men.

There was a line in The West Wing once about how "You're not just the president of the people who voted for you". But what I've seen so far is that Obama is the president just to people who never vote for him. Godbags and Milton Friedman die hards.

But at least I'm used to having a president who couldn't give a rats ass about people like me. I do have 8 years of experience with that. The only difference is that I never expected a right wing Republican president to speak for me, but I do kinda expect the Democrats to. I mean, that is the reason for their existence after all.

No comments: