Friday, January 11, 2008 - Posts
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When this blog started in October, Anne Applebaum wrote of how the Nicolas and Cecilia Sarkozy, France's president and first lady, could be a model for American political couples. She had her own life, did not help him campaign, and no one in France seemed to care. Well, just as our presidential campaign has been full of surprises, so too has the love life of the French president. According to the Daily Mail, Sarkozy's girlfriend of two months, former model Carla Bruni, is pregnant by him! You must read this fabulously juicy story, including the account of Sarko's near breakdown when Cecilia divorced him. But that was all so 2007, and now he's recovered and in love. My favorite story is about how Carla fell for the son of one of her lovers (others have included Mick Jagger and Donald Trump), who left his wife (who wrote a book about it), and had an out-of-wedlock child with the guy. Her nickname is "The Maneater." Sarko's romance has caused some protocol difficulties as he's traveled the world with her, since foreign governments have not known how to treat a president and his girlfriend. All that should be resolved soon, as apparently he is going to marry her. This is Jerry Springer with foreign accents and designer clothes!
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Part of the slam against Hill's supposedly subpar experience seems to be that she spent much of her career in a provincial backwater like Little Rock. But isn't it elitist and credentialist and regionalist, too, to imagine that political talent can come to the fore only via New York or D.C.? American elections do not work that way. (And amazed Democrats stand around going, "Hey, but our guy had the perfect résumé! And a house in Nantucket!'') Apparently, voters are kind of intrigued with pols from Arkansas, which produced not only the Clintons and Mike Huckabee but that slouch William Fulbright.
This is not how it works in much of the world, I know. I went to graduate school in Belgium on a fellowship, and afterward ended up applying for an internship at the European Commission, handed out every year to 200 twentysomethings from all over the planet. To get the thing, you totally had to know somebody; all the French kids had been to l'ENA and had parents who were former ministers of something or other, and even my American roommate had grown up riding horses with the Reagans. (Oh, I had an in, too, of course: The bureaucrat who processed the applications was sweet on a Belgian friend of mine.) Anyway, the experience was highly instructive in that I saw first-hand how "meritocracy'' works. Even now, whenever I see that word I think, sure, right - affirmative action for (the right) white people. And if we're really all for diversity - or feminism, for that matter -- that means that there have got to be any number of acceptable routes to the front of the line.
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Melinda, I think your own tacking back and forth on Hillary reflects not just the tendency of women voters to swarm her only when she’s been attacked, but also our own ambivalence about what the first female president needs to look like and how we should react to her as women. If you look back over the raucous pre-and-post-feminist pajama party in the media this week (and when have you last heard Gloria Steinem, Erica Jong, Maureen Dowd, Camille Paglia, Marie Wilson, half of Slate, much of the blogosphere and your dental hygienist all whacking each other with pillows on that single question?), we still have a lot of disagreement about that. And as big media turns its attention onto the next Burning Cultural Question (likely, Obama and Race) we may feel like we have to go back to debating these issues less publicly and heatedly.
Let’s not.
At the risk of flogging a dead metaphor, that’s no different than Clinton being accused of crying when she actually held it back.
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