President Obama addresses the guys.
President Barack Obama on Tuesday called on men to “look inside” themselves and think about bias if they have any doubt about voting for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“To the guys out there, I want to be honest,” Obama told a crowd in Columbus, Ohio, at a Clinton campaign event. “You know, there’s a reason we haven’t had a woman president before.”
He asked male voters to think about their potential biases against Clinton, who would be the first female president in U.S. history.
“I want every man out there who’s voting to kinda look inside yourself and ask yourself, if you’re having problems with this stuff, how much of it is that we’re just not used to it?” he said. “When a guy is ambitious and out in the public arena and working hard, well that’s okay. But when a woman suddenly does it, suddenly you’re all like, well, why’s she doing that?”
Obama went on to praise Clinton. “She is so much better qualified than the other guy,” he said, referring to GOP nominee Donald Trump. “She has conducted herself so much better in public life than the other guy.”
Obama blasted Trump for his disrespectful treatment of women and said the behavior would continue should he be elected president.
“The only thing this office does is it amplifies who you are. It magnifies who you are,” he said. “If you disrespected women before you were elected, you will disrespect women once you’re president.”
I have no delusion that when we have a woman in the Oval Office that all of a sudden this kind of behavior will come to an end, just as racism didn’t end in America when Barack Obama became president. In some ways, it got worse, and I’m not just talking about the crap on the internet with cartoons; look at how the Republicans in Congress reacted and tell me that subliminal racism wasn’t behind it.
I don’t expect the sexism and the misogyny brought to the surface by Donald Trump to go away, either. But there are a lot more women in this country who are not going to let the men get away with it.
