Not only did I watch Joe’s entire speech, but I then stayed up after 11P.M. to watch the GOP response delivered by the junior Senator from Alabama, a 42-year-old woman named Katie Britt.
I was actually much more interested in Britt’s 15-minute spiel than what Biden said in the more or less hour that he talked. Because I knew what Joe was going to say and I wanted to get some idea about how the GOP would define their message in the campaign.
So here was Britt, who’s the youngest woman ever elected to the Senate from the GOP, who has a law degree from the University of Alabama Law School and has been a political consultant and/or GOP staffer for the past twenty years.
In other words, she’s had the kind of career that most women, particularly women from the South, only dreamed about 25 or 30 years ago. Which makes her a perfect representative for a national political party which wants everyone to think it represents the best and the brightest for what this country offers all its citizens today.
Except that Britt didn’t deliver her anti-Biden message before a partisan crowd of GOP fans. She didn’t stand on the steps of the Capitol to remind the audience that the GOP had the same concerns about maintaining democracy that Joe made a strong point of mentioning in his speech.
To the contrary, here was a woman thoroughly committed to a political career and a lifelong job in the public sector who gave the GOP response to Joe from some studio which was decked out like a kitchen where she was sitting at the table and kept referring to herself as ‘Mom.’
That’s right. The junior Senator from Alabama told her audience that every night she and her husband sat around the table with their kids and talked about how concerned they were for the future of the country, in particular whether their children would be able to survive if Joe was given the opportunity to ruin everything for another four years.
Now I don’t know whether Katie Britt and her husband ever eat a meal with their two kids, but I am the father of three children and when my wife and I would on occasion sit down and eat with them at the end of the day, the discussion at the table consisted of the adults telling the kids to stop whining and eat.
I don’t think my wife and I ever had a single conversation about whether our three kids would get good jobs after they finished school, nor did we ever discuss whether the kids were going to finish school. Every day we all got up, my wife and I went to work, the kids went to school, and dinner was just a necessary event which happened before the kids went to bed.
Know who was the last politician to talk about how ‘special’ it was to sit around a kitchen table and talk about current affairs? It was Sarah Palin (remember her?) who actually told some interviewer that she would have no trouble understanding the federal budget because she had to sit at the kitchen table and balance the family budget every week.
And not only did Palin actually make this incredibly stupid and insipid comment to explain why she was ready to become Vice President of the United States, but she did it with a straight face!
She didn’t laugh, she didn’t smile, she actually sat there and in one, brief moment showed the entire viewing audience that she was dumb as shit.
So, here we are at the beginning of another Presidential campaign and the GOP is right where it was back in 2008. Women, particularly white women, and particularly white women from the South, are expected to sit at the kitchen table, cook and serve a nice meal to the husband and the kids, and worry about the future while they clean up after the meal, put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher and then put the kids to bed.
Katie Britt has an advanced, professional degree, has been working in the public sector in positions of authority and responsibility for the past 15 years, and all she could do last night was refer to herself as ‘Mom’ at least ten times.
And by the way, did a single so-called ‘expert’ on the CNN panel which assembled to explain Britt’s remarks to all the dummies like me in the viewing audience mention anything along the lines of what I just said?
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