Far be it for me to defend the Republican slate of presidential candidates, but I have noticed something bubble up into the surface that kind of bothers me.

It is a line.  A derogatory reference to “ten middle-aged white men.”  A quick google search and you find, right at the top, this.

Now, the Democrats have… um… five middle aged white men (unless you want to slide one or two into the “elder” camp),  a black man, a white woman, and a Hispanic.  This is the most diverse slate of candidates any party has ever spewed out at us, prodded up by the fact that the front-runners are, indeed, not a middle-aged white man.

Prior to that, all we can go on is the temporary existence of Elizabeth Dole in 2000 — who, to be fair, I believe dropped out later in 1999 than the hyper-early May we have right now.  (A bit more serious a contender than whatshername was in whatsthatyear.  Refresh my memory.  There was a female Republican presidential candidate in 1968.  Or 1972.  Kind of.  Sort of.)  We have a small mixture of black candidates never quite taken seriously as presidential contenders — the source of not taken seriously as a presidential contender Joseph Biden’s praise of Obama as “clean” and “articulate”.

And we have a whole lot of middle-class white candidates from the start of the Republic to today, of which every single elected president and vice-president has been culled from.

Hence the existence of anything other than a bunch of middle class white men as serious presidential contenders is a brand new phenomonem.

And it seems pointless to thump the Democrats’ chest for suddenly, in this election year of 2008 (actual calendar year 2007) to have something else.
……………..

Besides which, there are at least 11 middle aged white men:

John Cox has asked a federal court to stop next week’s G-O-P presidential debate unless he can take part. Cox claims in a lawsuit that the South Carolina G-O-P and Fox News Channel rigged their selection process to exclude him.Ten candidates have been invited to the debate next Tuesday in Columbia. It is sponsored by the South Carolina Republican Party and Fox  .At issue is a requirement the two organizations used to decide who could participate in the debate. The groups required a candidate to earn at least one percent of support in state and national polls.Cox’s lawsuit claims his name was –not– used in the lone state poll that was used to gauge voter support.

Well, to be fair, if Giuliani’s name was exluded from the list… actually he would probably receive more than one percent in “write-in” votes.  Sorry Cox.  You don’t have a leg to stand on.

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