Contrary to what Senator McCain seems to think, the problem with private health insurance is not that healthy people cannot get it.

According to an LA Times story covering Elizabeth Edwards’ reaction to the McCain plan, McCain’s plan proposal would exempt health insurers from having to cover those with pre-existing conditions like melanoma or breast cancer.  Senator McCain, as someone who suffers from melanoma, would therefore likely be ineligible for private coverage.  Whatever coverage he could manage, were he Joe Blow instead of The Straight Talk Express, would certainly exclude melanoma and any related illnesses or conditions from covered treatment.

Further, Senator McCain wants to “encourage competition” by allowing insurance companies to sell across state lines.  The Edwardses are concerned, and rightfully so, I say, that this would allow health insurers to move their headquarters into states with relatively loose consumer protections, much as credit card companies have done.  Combine this with McCain’s intention to block “frivolous lawsuits” (since by GOP standards, most lawsuits against big business are “frivolous,” regardless of actual basis), and we have recipe for consumer disaster. 

Additionally, McCain’s plan calls for making employer-sponsored healthcare taxable income.  So, if you are able to get health coverage through your employer (which is how most of middle class America manages it), and you’re already paying through the nose for coverage that shrinks every year, McCain wants to make the cost prohibitive even to you.   According to saukvalley.com, “…a worker whose employer-offered family plan now costs an average $12,000 a year, that would mean a tax increase of $3,360, if in the 28 percent bracket.” 

Lee Burman at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center also suggests that some employers might drop workers’ healthcare coverage altogether should the government offer that tax credits for private insurance, as proposed by McCain.

Healthcare in this country is in a poor enough state.  It’s bad enough I can’t get reimbursed for my son’s speech therapy – even when it’s covered in my contract documents – but now Senator McCain want to see to it not only that certain folks are never covered, but that those who are pay more for fewer privileges and cannot seek redress should the insurance company fail to live up to its end of the severely constricted bargain.

We certainly don’t need McCain’s “help” with making it more expensive for the average consumer to receive less coverage.  We get enough help from the insurance companies as it is.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) made a tactical error when he suggested during an interview on Friday that Senator Clinton should bow out of the presidential race now.  In a later statement Senator Obama allowed that Clinton “can” stay in the race as long as she likes.  Neither Leahy’s statements, nor the follow up by Obama, have done Obama any favors with women of a certain age.

The statements have resonated with many women in a fashion counter-productive both to the theme of unity and to actually winning the general election.  Many women are using the word we're not supposed to use, "sexism."  Over on the blogs people are asking why the comments were sexist, “because a man said them?” asked more than one commenter.  In a word, yes.

It’s a matter of perspective, you see.  Some statements, when coming from men rather than women, reek of the legacy of patriarchy.  Women are as attuned to this as minorities are to the stench of racism.  The allowance that the little lady “can” stay in the race of she wants only compounded the error.  It’s patronizing.  It suggests Clinton somehow needs permission from party leaders to do what any other candidate in a close race would not only be entitled, but expected to do without requiring permission from anyone  – namely, head for the finish line and see who actually wins.

If the situation were reversed, with Clinton in Obama’s shoes and Obama in Clinton’s, then calls for Obama’s concession would be both equally premature and equally perceived as patronizing among those who expect no different from the old-boy establishment.

A further survey of comments on various news articles regarding the subject turn up such gems as “waste your vote on a lil’ woman,”  “a candidate whose idea of foreign policy is donning an apron and baking a batch of brownies,” and “The enemy was within...clothed in familiar suits (and pant suits).”  There have been, in fact, multiple mentions of “pant suits” over the course of the race, as if the suits that men wear do not somehow involve pants.

And then there are Clinton's knees and her neck, both showing signs that she's not a girl of twenty competing for the cover of Sports Illustrated.  There are comments regarding her failure to "keep her house in order," her "whining," her crying, all typical disparagements against females - uppity ones in particular.  There was "pimping" and the implication that Clinton's entire career rested upon the laurels of a scorned woman - as if she had no other qualifications, brought no mind or substance or anything of value to the table.  There was Limbaugh's grossly offensive, if somewhat oblique, comparison of a Clinton/Obama ticket to a sexual position.   There was "beat the bitch" and that rightwing political group whose name was designed to form an acronym of "the c-word."   Hillary is "castrating;" she is "emasculating."  Say what you will about the particular point on the spectrum, Leahy's comments play into a pattern of sexism that has been both blatant and subtle, from both right-wing and left: universal, and abiding, and infuriating.

Combine this with the equally patronizing “you’re likable enough, Hillary,” signs which suggest Clinton should “iron my shirts,” and the media’s insistence on charged language, and women who grew up living the less-than-equal treatment that same media now tells us is a bygone era cannot help but notice a pattern of inveterate sexism when it comes to depictions of and dealings with the Senator from New York.

If Clinton’s supporters made egregious comments mentioning fields and cotton, they would be castigated as racists, and rightly so.  Yet women are being told, once again, to ignore the current of sexism running throughout this primary season.  We’re being told, once again, that it’s really all in our heads.  We’re being told, for the umpteenth million time in our lives, not to worry our pretty little heads over such complicated matters as what we have a right to perceive as insulting.

Being a woman in this country often provides a vastly different experience from being a man, just as being white generally means a vastly different experience than being black.  Neither situation is fair, neither is justified, but both are just as real and as common as cornflakes. 

Much as entrenched racism has code words and phrases, so, too, does sexism, and women of a certain age know sexism when we hear it, much as men do.  The difference is that our hearing has been finely tuned through decades of living on the wrong side of the equation. 

So, rather than demoralizing Clinton’s women’s base with a “statement of the obvious,” the comments reminded many of the years we have struggled to be taken seriously in the public sphere, and of the sexism that still pervades modern day life, let alone politics.  Somehow I doubt that’s the result Leahy  - or Obama - intended.

You know, I've been entirely consumed with my own life for the last year or so.  My older son has dyslexia, my husband and I both have insurance companies that refuse to cover his therapy - though said therapy is supposed to be covered,  older son's teacher is worse than useless (and has generated so many complaints - outside of my own - that her contract is not being renewed), manufacturing (the industry in which I work) has taken a significant downturn, my dad had a heart attack, my mom with osteoporosis broke her leg, I sprained an ankle so badly it may never heal correctly, apparently I have carpal tunnel.  You get the picture.  It's been a spectacularly bad year for Chez Kiosan, and I've only begun to scratch the surface.

About six months or so ago, though, I was looking forward to at least being able to vote wholeheartedly Democratic, regardless of the nominee, in the next presidential election.  I am exceedingly sad to say I don't have the luxury of that illusion anymore.

I wanted very much to be able to vote my conscience with a major candidate.  While I readily admit to preferring Clinton at the outset, I was fully prepared to vote as enthusiastically for Biden, Dodd, Richardson or Obama should any of them secure the nomination.  That was before, however, my friends to left of me - and indeed, Senator Obama himself, insisted I was either stupid, a closet racist, or both, for not supporting him from the outset.

I cannot in good conscience vote for McCain, so I started trying to invent excuses - these were the opinions of his more rabid supporters, not the opinions of the Senator from Illinois himself, I theorized.  However, I signed up for his campaign emails - woe unto me.  I finally had to write a note to Mr. Plouffe - or, more accurately, whatever low-level staffer reads the campaign's emails (yes, I know, Hillary likely employs the same) - begging that the official campaign emails leave off making Clinton, a fellow Democrat, out to be the devil incarnate.  I must say I signed on for Hillary's emails early, and I cannot recall a one that called out Senator Obama as anything less than a human opponent; most didn't even mention him.

Super Tuesday came and went, and the pro-Obama faction on the net became both more virulent and more offensive.  Clinton supporters were morphed from normal, average, centrist Democrats into baby-eating, do-anything-to-win, idiotic, self-deluded, baby-eating (noted twice because it is a favorite meme and because it is well known that eating babies causes terrible indigestion), racist, NASCAR-loving, uncultured, baby-eating (acid reflux) heathens who couldn't be counted upon to vote with any conscience, let alone one they called their own.

I have given up Kos and HuffPo and even the comments on WaPo, as subsumed as they are by partisans so proud of their own penises that cannot even imagine anyone finding satisfaction elsewhere.  I have given up most of the blogs I used to enjoy because so many of the friends to my left have abandoned all good sense in favor of a leftist cult of personality which not only rivals that of Bush II, but completely overwhelms it.  I have given up completely on the idea of a fair and balanced media presence of any sort, when even my evolution and global warming-denying parents note that it might be an outside possibility that the news media haven't really been treating candidate Clinton entirely fairly - maybe - but that pimping comment and the stuff about her knees is fair game.

I began, I admit, preferring Senator Clinton to any other Democratic candidate, but I also began willing to vote for whomever the process settled upon.  Senator Obama and his supporters have, however, relieved me of that particular burden.  I intend to vote my conscience, and it calls for neither Senator McCain (whose typical Republican yes-I-lcheated-on-my-wife-but-at-least-married-my-mistress (unlike Bill) and 100 years' war I cannot stomach), nor Senator Obama (whose ties to the Chicago machine, whose woeful lack of record, whose inability to deal with his own committee assignments, and whose intentional divisiveness I cannot stomach), and Nader is a goof. 

I am currently formulating my write in vote.  I'm not sure who it will be yet, but it won't be McCain or Obama.

And let me preempt the "well, we don't need you" tripe I've seen from the rabid Obamists - yes, as a matter of fact, you do.  You need people who care about the process and who can be relied upon to vote.  You need people who don't like Bush but who still can't be bought in mere "I'm not Bush" coin.  Obama's most viable claim to the coronation nomination is that he can bring independents into the fold.  I'm here to tell you that independents who've paid any real attention to him are frequently turned off.  I have voted Dem in all but 2-3 races, I believe in the sanctity of privacy, that all people were created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  I believe the greatest of us owe to the least of us at least a bare minimum of supprt, if only to support the society upon which we all agree.  I believe healthcare should be a right and not a priviledge; I believe the tax system is completely out of whack; I believe watching out only for your own pocketbook robs you of a certain basic humanity.

And for all I'm undeclared, this insistence that I'm either an idiot, a racist, nor both has me guessing that since *I'm* not feeling terribly united there are many who feel less magnanimous than I who feel even less "united" by one of the most fundamentally divisive candidates I've been alive to witness.

Of course, it is entirely possible that Senator Obama and his supporters will prove me wrong in the general election.  I'll grant that it is likely that Obama will take the primary with more pledged delegates, more superdelegates and higher popular count (not necessarily including Florida and Michigan, which would merit an entirely separate series of posts).  It is possible that, inspite of the constant, unrelenting name-calling, core Dems will come out for Obama no matter how much he vilifies party centrists and their supporters.  It is possible that alienating lifelong Democratic voters who have felt allegiance to policy and platform over rhetoric and rancor won't matter.  It is possible that Carly Simon will record a top 40 hit this year. 

Remote, but possible. 

Um, psst.  Wanna know where the title of this comes from?  Go here.