President Barack Obama’s boys club initiated yet another, a CNN panel noted Sunday while discussing the president’s replacement for Press Secretary Jay Carney, marking a trend within the White House that includes few women.
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During the round table, host Jake Tapper and Bloomberg’s Margaret Talev lamented that President Obama had replaced Carney, who announced his resignation Friday, with another man.
“Another white man,” Tapper quipped. “President Obama likes his bros. He likes his bros.”
While some believed Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest was the obvious successor — he ultimately was named Carney’s replacement — others thought State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki could’ve taken over, becoming only the third female behind Dee Dee Myers, Bill Clinton’s press secretary, and Dana Perino, George W. Bush’s spokeswoman, to take the podium. Psaki also served as spokeswoman for the president’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns.
Talev noted that because Obama announced Carney’s resignation on the heels of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki’s own announcement, it likely would be overshadowed because he wasn’t being replaced by a woman.
“It will be a continuation of the status quo,” she said.
Though the White House frequently joins in a chorus of chants from Democrats about the GOP’s alleged “war on women,” the Obama administration has taken heat for its treatment of women working in the West Wing, National Review reported.
Christina Romer, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, recalled feeling “like a piece of meat” and said she was ignored during her time at the White House. And Anita Dunn, who previously served as the White House communications director, said working there was “a genuinely hostile workplace to women.”
h/t National Review
