Some of us knew all along

One of the things I've enjoyed this week is watching some commentators catch on to how I've seen President Obama all along. I wrote about one front-pager at Daily Kos earlier this week. But E.J. Dionne had a go of it as well in his column titled Who is Obama? Now we know.

Barack Obama is not the man many Americans thought he was. This sudden realization has transformed American politics.

The sheer audacity of the successful operation against Osama bin Laden has forced Obama’s friends and foes alike to reassess what they make of a chief executive who defies easy categorization and reveals less about himself than politicians are typically drawn to do.

Obama is hard to understand because he is many things and not just one thing. He has now proved that he can be bold at an operational level, even as he remains cautious at a philosophical level. His proclivity to gather facts and weigh alternatives does not lead automatically, in the venerable phrase, to the paralysis of analysis. It can also end in daring action tempered by prudence...

The president’s rhetoric has often emphasized caring, compassion and community, the language one expects from a moderately liberal politician. Yet as one of his close aides told me long ago, there is inside a very cool, tough, even hard man. Obama is not reluctant to use American military power.

Do you see what he did there? He pointed out the lie that someone who emphasizes "caring, compassion and community" can't be cool, tough and hard.

Its a myth that all too many people buy in to and is why so many have misunderstood Obama. Remember when everyone on the left was screaming that he had to man up? Michael Moore even went so far as to say that he needed to take off his tutu and put on the boxing gloves.

So now we've all gotten to see the "manly" side of President Obama. Does that surprise you? If so, you've bought into the dichotomy that feeds our sexism in this culture. And as women, we ought to know better.

As I've watched the conversation this week about all of this, several times I've thought of one of my favorite poems by Marge Piercy. I hope she'll forgive me for quoting just a few verses that demonstrate the point I'm trying to make.

For strong women

A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not to be done. She is pushing up on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way though a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you're so strong.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
sucking her young. Strength is not in her,but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

What comforts her is other's loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain,the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.

It's high time we recognized this kind of strength. And it's also high time we welcomed men into the fold of those who can display it. Let's remember that next time we hear President Obama talking about caring, compassion and community.