The XX Factor: What women really think.

What's With the Big-Name Worship?

Hello to all the XX women—major fan here. I'll be guest-blogging with you for a week, and I'm thrilled to join such an august set of old friends and admired colleagues. So thrilled, actually, I'm buying everybody a round of the "spam, egg, rice and seaweed Hawaiian specialty" that we now know our new president loves. Look for it in the mail, and please warn your letter carriers.

Before we move on to, say, the hot "Baby Alive" doll trend (" 'Be careful,' reads the doll's promotional literature, 'just like real life, sometimes she can hold it until she gets to the 'potty' and sometimes she can't'"), I do want to say I think Hanna's on to something when she calls Obama's Rick Warren move "tokenism." It is a token gesture, and that's exactly what makes it irritating. For what seems like ages, liberals have dutifully swallowed the lesson that America is a center-right country, way more in line with Warren than with Wallis; that the bulk of Americans regard liberal values with suspicion; and that any Democrat who aspires to national leadership has to mince around either shading his liberalism (think of Bill Clinton and Don't Ask Don't Tell) or mounting grand conciliatory gestures toward the other side's values (think of John Kerry's attempts to look militant). This is a pretty broad phenomenon: In my day job at the New Republic magazine, I often write about Congress, and while hoofing around the country to cover congressional races this fall I was struck—as I was in 2006, too—by how far the infinitely adaptable red-district Democratic candidates go to demonstrate their sympathies with conservative mores, while the Republican candidates tend to feel far less pressed to make those kinds of adaptations or token gestures. (George W. Bush sure didn't see the need to tap Gene Robinson or Katharine Jefferts Schori to deliver his inaugural invocation.)

Of course, it's nice that many Democrats try to rise above dogma and pitch themselves to a broader coalition. That's the Obama Doctrine, as much as anything is. But at a certain point, the frantic efforts to smooth conservative America's ruffled feathers get damned tedious. I think Rick Warren was that point for many.

And why the hotshot obsession? What with signing up first Hillary Clinton and now Warren, whom the Independent aptly called "the most popular religious figure in the US bar the Pope," Obama seems to be on a mission to get every American with ~20 million followers to stand next to him on a podium and authenticate the breathtaking range of his appeal. But I can't help wishing he had chosen somebody a little less garishly megawatt, for God's sake. Some slightly more obscure person of good works; somebody less political and less token; somebody more along the lines of Kirbyjon Caldwell during the W. years. That kind of choice, not Warren, would have been the real surprise.