Now His Sexist Slip Is Showing

[Recently, President Obama called…] California Attorney General Kamala Harris “by far, the best looking attorney general.”.

[...]

This is hardly the first time Obama has been smarmily sexist under the guise of paying a compliment. In the same New York magazine story on Christine Quinn in which Mayor Michael Bloomberg was notoriously quoted saying, “Look at the ass on her,” Obama got a pass for a more politely phrased brand of creepiness. According to the piece, Obama said to a Republican legislator, 32-year-old Nicole Malliotakis, that she didn’t look a day over 23. Quinn promptly joked that Malliotakis should become a Democrat, and the president chimed in, “Come on, honey! I said you’re pretty! I said you look 23!”

  Salon

So, okay, this doesn’t really make him stand out in the world. People seem to think nothing of commenting on a woman’s looks, whereas it rarely comes up in regard to men who aren’t in the entertainment business. But it does make him too clueless to be president. Among other admittedly more pressing reasons he shouldn’t have the job.

[W] omen, above all, are subject to a can’t-win calculus in which the desires of men, rather than their objective qualifications, determine how they’re treated — for better or worse. It applies wherever women exist in public, even when looks are entirely irrelevant to the issue at hand.

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Almost as obnoxious as the men talking about how put-upon they are by p.c. harpies who aren’t interested in the unsolicited feedback — positive or negative — were the supposed liberals talking about how we should all just chill out. This was the position of the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart, who pointed out that Obama and Harris are friends, that this wasn’t tantamount to “luridly cat-calling a woman he doesn’t know,” and who finished up with an exhortation to “lighten up, people.”

Yes, the fact they are friends makes it okay for him to say those kinds of things.

Then again, I think we are within reason to conclude that he doesn’t think much of her attorney skills if that’s the compliment he came up with.

UPDATE: Okay, maybe we can’t say that. Here’s the full quote:

"You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you'd want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake.

“She also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country -- Kamala Harris is here. (Applause.) It's true. Come on. (Laughter.) And she is a great friend and has just been a great supporter for many, many years.”

  LA Times

Really, he should have stopped while he was ahead.