Obama's hostility not confined to women in the White House

In his new book about the inner workings of the Obama White House, author Ron Suskind quotes insiders who accuse President Obama of being "hostile to women":

It says that women occupied many of the West Wing’s senior positions, but felt outgunned and outmaneuvered by male colleagues such as former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Summers.

“I felt like a piece of meat,” Christina Romer, former head of the Council of Economic Advisers, said of one meeting in which Suskind writes she was “boxed out” by Summers. [. . .]

“The president has a real woman problem,” an unnamed high-ranking female official told Suskind. “ The idea of the boys’ club being just Larry and Rahm isn’t really fair. He [Obama] was just as responsible himself.” [. . .]

According to the book, female staffers, like Dunn and Romer, felt sidelined. In November 2009, female aides complained to the president about being left out of meetings, or ignored.

Dunn said in the interview that her husband, now-White House lawyer Bob Bauer, was “surprised to see me as someone who could be talked over in meetings.” [. . .]

Obama, according to the book published by Harper Collins, failed to call on Romer after asking her male colleagues for their opinions. The snub prompted Romer to pass a note to Summers where she threatened to walk out of the dinner, according to the book.

Try to imagine Margaret Thatcher, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Condoleezza Rice, Liz Cheney, or even Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann complaining that the boys didn't give them a turn to speak at a meeting.

But Romer, Dunn, and company were skipped over and talked over, and according to the rules of political correctness, that's a foul. The women apparently couldn't hold their own at meetings, or were perceived as having little of value to offer, and consequently felt "outgunned," "outmaneuvered," "sidelined," "ignored," and "left out." Somehow, these good liberal men forgot to pay proper obeisance to the wimmen in the room, giving them the chopped-liver treatment instead. Oh, the humanity. 

Moe Lane saw it coming: QotD, I TOLD YOU Obama Was A Male Chauvinist Pig edition.

I told people back in 2008 that then-Senator Obama didn’t like to hire women; didn’t like to promote women; and definitely didn’t like to pay women more than 82 cents to the male-equivalent dollar.

You mean these guys are hypocrites? Yeah, and condescending, too:



But we already knew that. For the record, Romer and Dunn have since qualified or denied their claims of no fairsies. Allahpundit on that:

Dunn evidently thought better of her “hostility” accusation after making it to Ron Suskind, the book’s author, because when the Post contacted her to follow-up for this story, she insisted she’d never said it and that Obama totally “values having strong women around him” or whatever. Uh huh. And so it came to be that another left-wing feminist, forced to choose between party and cause, bit her lip for the team. It is, after all, an election year. 

Sometimes it's hard for lefties to remember which way to posture themselves.

But really, it's a bit difficult to accuse Obama of disliking "strong" (read leftist/feminist) women, since he chose one to be his bride. Or, at least, he was chosen by one. The courtship of Barry and Michelle was perhaps as much power-struggle as romance, if this 2008 Washington Post feature is to be believed:

After Barack went back to Harvard, the couple had a long-distance romance. In interviews, Michelle is fond of recounting how, during this period, she began to pressure Barack to get married, and how Barack put her off, arguing that marriage was a meaningless institution and that the only thing that mattered was how they felt about each other. Michelle, whose parents had been married for some 30 years, wasn't buying it.

Then, one night in 1991, he took her to Gordon, an expensive Chicago restaurant, and she started to press him again. He went into his usual tirade against marriage, a dissertation that went on until they ordered dessert. When it came, the plate had a box on it, and in the box was an engagement ring.

"'That kind of shuts you up, doesn't it?'" Michelle remembers Barack telling her. She acknowledged to a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times that she doesn't remember what the dessert was, or whether she ate it. "I was so shocked and a little embarrassed because he did sort of shut me up." 

But not for long.

But we digress. I'm more interested in Obama's real hostility toward humanity in general than in some failure to give White House feminists the ego-stroking they think their gender demands. The Bookworm on that:

No surprise to Bookworm that the White House is hostile to women

Back in September 2009, I posted about Obama’s obsession with getting women into burqas which is, to my mind, a very misogynistic approach to women.  I’m therefore entirely unsurprised to learn that those women who have worked in the White House claim that it’s a hostile environment to women, and that this hostility comes from the top.

Click on the link in bold. Worrying about human rights and defense of the persecuted has never been Obama's thing. Look at his attitude and political stand toward the most defenseless among us. Or his taste in music. Feminists might find a way to complain about some of that, instead of wringing their hands over being "ignored" at meetings.

Linked at MichelleMalkin.com -- thanks!

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I was in the middle of making a minor edit to this post when someone came to the door. Apparently I hit "save as draft" instead of "publish" and accidentally removed it from the interwebs. Sorry about that.

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Thanks also to Doug Ross for linking!

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