Out of the Kitchen Cabinet

If I play my cards right, and President Obama is reelected in 2012, perhaps I can throw my hat in the ring for a Cabinet position. So far, there are 3 women confirmed and one nominated for the official 15 spots on the Cabinet and another 3 women in Cabinet level positions. Not a lot of women considering how many openings there are. (23 if you include the VP). Apparently Clinton had 9 women in his cabinet at one point. So Obama needs to be looking for more women and since I am a grandmother twice over, I think I should qualify.

Some of these women like Hillary and Kathleen Sebelius are 60ish and thus in the grandmother age bracket. Solis, Napolitano and Christina Romer are 50ish so I am already too old to jockey with them although I was a grandmother at 51 so maybe there is still hope. Fuggedaboudit when it comes to the 40 somethings (Rice and Jackson) --the Obama generation. They still do not have wrinkles in their faces.

Sebelius has my props for being governor of Kansas as a democrat (and for being able to wear so much cyan). I lived in Lawrence KS for a year and never got used to seeing people in the drive through (not many other types of places to eat back then when KS was a dry state) who had shotguns in the back of their trucks. In 1980-1, when I was an assistant professor at KU I was asked to work on a program evaluation of a project in the local public schools where children were taught how to express their feelings in words as part of the school curriculum (e.g Pauly says "I am angry, Grandma" when he does not get what he wants) . Some of our fundamentalist furry friends in KS thought that such humanistic BS had no place in children's lives unless the parents wanted to teach it to them. No school will teach my kid that feelings are ok! So we had to try to determine whether the program harmed the kids and made them want to take their parents' shotguns out of the pickup and shoot the parents. (Wow. I guess I have some strong feelings about this). I left KU before I found out what happened to the school program.

I understand that Sebelius knew well enough to let Kansans have their guns but was brave enough to veto an anti-abortion bill while Governor. Her support of a woman's right to choose is already being touted as a flashpoint for the nomination although it is hard to tell so far how much traction that will get. Polls still show that people in this country support a woman's right to choose. However, we cannot be complacent about these rights and I applaud the efforts of those who still fight the fight to keep the anti-abortion forces at bay.