Obama Confidante Jarrett Wields Clout of Campaign Inner Circle

An interesting look behind the scenes; of course, it's spin. Yet there are a few sentences that caught my eye.

Jarrett has been there for Obama as well: she was ``politically astute'' as finance chairman during his 2004 campaign for the Senate, said Vernon Jordan, a longtime Clinton supporter who's married to a cousin of Jarrett's. Obama, said Jordan, ``is lucky to have her by his side.''

Vernon Jordan is a veteran civil-rights figure, became a powerful PotomacLand lawyer, and a Clinton confidante. Sort of a modern version of Clark Clifford.

The feminist tilt to Obama's organization is sometimes overshadowed because he's running against Hillary Clinton. Some backers of the New York senator resent Obama for hurting the chances of the most formidable female presidential candidate in history.

Of course, 'they' fail to acknowledge that Obama is the most formidable black presidential candidate in history. They just want it their way because they think it is their, or her, turn. Yet what says that this particular woman merits being president? They think she deserves to be president because she's such a capable person; but, I beg to differ. She does not , no one does, deserve to be elected president.

Feminist Gloria Steinem wrote in the New York Times in January that Obama's resume wouldn't have qualified him to run for president were he a woman. ``Gender,'' she wrote, ``is probably the most restricting force in American life.''

Probably? Maybe. Of course, some might say Hillary's resume wouldn't have qualified her to run for president were she a man. And that colour is the most restricting force in American life. Depends how you look at it. Their sense of entitlement galls me. But the story is about Valerie Jarrett.

Jarrett, who is black, was born in Shiraz, Iran, and spent part of her childhood in London with her parents before moving to Chicago, where she grew up on the South Side. Her father is professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Medical Center and her mother is a former president of Erikson Institute, a graduate school in early childhood development.

The larger, or at least a concomitant, story is about Senator Clinton deserving to be president. It is her turn to be president -- but, why? In some good measure it is because she 'stood by her man' while the jerk was putting her, and also by the way the country, through hell. I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky, he chortled, and Hillary chalked the semen stain to a vast right-wing conspiracy. She swallowed it (pun very much intended) and now she merits being president.

Bunk.