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I read Liza’s summary of Mimi Swarz’s take on mature women in the most powerful workplace in the world with some interest. After all, I’d previously written on the preponderance of single women in the Obama White House,
lamenting the fact that a bold-face name like Melody Barnes put off
marriage for years, in order to run policy in an administration poised
to overhaul health care, energy action, and the economy ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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The reliably wired Marc Ambinder flags National Journal's almost foolishly comprehensive, 366-person omnibus study
of the folks working in every nook and cranny of the Obama
administration (complete with phone numbers)! I've only carved my way
through a third of it, but Marc dishes the important stats... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Politico writer Lisa Lerer:
Obsessive White House watchers can't stop talking about an ESPN article
on the political pecking order of presidential basketball games. Author
Wright Thompson breaks down the sociology (and some of the psychology)
of how power works in Washington.
"What's the hottest invite in Washington?" former Clinton press
secretary Dee Dee Myers asks in the article. "Yeah, it's great to go to
White House state dinners or Stevie Wonder kinds of events. But what's
the sine qua non? It's a pickup game with Obama. That's the inner,
inner, inner sanctum."
placeAd2(commercialNode,'midarticleflex',false,'')
All over town, people are playing hoops—in newly started leagues, in...
(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Ah, the irony of the sexy librarian inquiring whether it's legal to ban books.
What I was initially getting at was less how Sarah Palin defines herself and more how our culture has responded to those definitions. For example, in all the McCain blame-game conversations that are emerging in the press today--like this one by Slate's Christopher Beam--there's a total absence of hand-wringing of the were we ready for a female VP? variety. Of course, had Palin been more prepared for the job, that conversation may be a different one: Her inexperience and incuriousity have been a great leveler.
I'm happy that the McCain flame-out discussion doesn't imply we wait another 24 years for a female candidate, as we have since Ferraro. Hanna suggests, and I agree, that Palin will gain mastery in the political game--at least as it plays out in mass culture if not in policy discussion. But the specter of a post-Palin America, as Hanna put it, with our most famous Alaskan annointed as the lone figure to be reckoned with? That strikes me as just the sort of future celebrity candidacy Obama unfairly had to shake. Normalizing the concept of women in our highest offices? It's about time. Normalizing Palin as the best shot at female leadership? Thanks but no thanks.
Perhaps before I get all worked up about 2012, I should get through tonight. But it's certainly intriguing to consider what this two-year campaign has laid out for the road ahead. Looking at the ballot in my polling booth this morning, I flashed back to the beginning of this relentless, seemingly endless trip. Back then I wouldn't have believed the choices we have had the opportunity to make today.
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My beloved Liz Lemon—er, I mean Tina Fey—isn't the only one suggesting that Sarah Palin's focus has shifted from 2008 to 2012. Today, trying get a jump on the post-election story before the polls even open, much less close, a host of politicos are placing their bets over who will emerge from the broken GOP as the next to be (unofficially) crowned party leader.
When John McCain chose his running mate, he was rightfully lambasted as cynical for passing over experienced insider men for an accessible outsider woman. In the end, he was right on one count: that a swath of the American public—though one which perhaps may not be wide enough to elect him tomorrow—felt so disenfranchised by the people who hold power in this country that they would line up behind someone who reflected and could articulate their own proud feelings of ordinariness. (This profound cultural conflict—rooted deep in issues of education and economics—will require far more systemic thinking than the fuzzy feeling of "unity" Obama hopes to usher in tomorrow and beyond.) Where McCain may have been wrong—and this is big—was in his perception of this election as a game of identity politics.
People have talked plenty about whether Obama is a post-race candidate for a post-race America. I've generally taken issue with that notion—and should he be elected, my heart positively swells with the notion of the descendant of slaves raising her children inside the White House. But by the same flawed token, did Sarah Palin become a post-gender candidate for a post-gender America? Of course, Palin has certainly worked her gender in this race: from that flirty wink and sky-high Manolos to her uber-mom positioning. But like Obama's race hasn't been the totalizing meta-narrative of his candidacy, neither has Palin's gender, and just as this hasn't been an election year for single issue voters, it hasn't been one for single-identity ones either, despite what pundits may have predicted from the outset. We entered this race all aflutter about our first female presidential candidate. We're ending it considering the next one with hardly a shrug about her gender.
While I am hardly a Palin fan, and for myriad reasons shudder to imagine how she might develop with the next four years to study up, the fact that neither her supporters nor her detractors seemed to make a big deal about a female commander in chief (remember those days?) suggests that in unexpected ways, we've come a long way during this long march to Election Day.
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Ann, your daughter is surely right that nobody pressured Chelsea Clinton into making those calls on her mom's behalf—but I'm not even sure that's what David Shuster was saying. "Pimped out" is pretty harsh, and not something anyone would have said about Cate Edwards or the Bush twins or the Kerry girls, but why is that? I think it's because for a young woman who grew up in the White House, Chelsea has enjoyed a pretty impressive zone of privacy—so that when her parents, who've convinced everybody that she's still off-limits, even as an adult and even on the campaign trail, do seem to be bringing her forward for their own reasons, as they did at the height of Monica madness, it's seen as hypocritical. (Everybody wants to have it both ways, but Bill and Hill often actually get to, and not everybody admires their ability to pull that off.)
Calling Shuster's remark "beneath contempt'' is perhaps going a shade too far as well, no? MSNBC has suspended him for saying such a thing. And he's the latest in a long line of people who have regretted ever mentioning Chelsea—from the kid who was fired from the Stanford Daily for writing about her being on campus to SNL's Lorne Michaels for the infamous Wayne's World skit in which she was described as a "future fox'' to ... well, John McCain, whose awful joke about Janet Reno being her daddy will really come back to haunt him now.
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Emily B, I'm with you that I'm left feeling very uneasy about Chelsea's emergence on the campaign trail. She makes me think of Michael Corleone in Godfather III: "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!" How many times can one person be First Child? She's waved goodbye to her Secret Service agents and the press hordes, grown up, started a career, and now the poor thing has been pulled back in. All these months, as she's stood there silently behind her mother, I've wondered about their dynamic. Did Chelsea say, "Mom, I want to do anything to help you win, but please don't make me speak"? Or did Hillary say, "Baby, I need you out there to prove that I'm a human being. All you have to do is stand there and smile; you don't even have to speak"? Now Chelsea is calling talk-show hosts begging them to vote for her mother and forwarding unhinged rants about sexism. Yes, she's now an adult able to make her own decisions, but I feel sorry for her. What must it have been like to grow up in the Clinton White House?
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Ann Coulter is not so much a partisan as she is a performance artist, and her medium is the lie. So, normally, when she takes the stage and does her thing, there is nothing to conclude, beyond the fact that just as Gene Kelly had to dance and Karen Finley worked with chocolate, she is making it up because that is what she does. Well, that and to keep her skills up. So while it might be a pity she didn't hang in there with the tap lessons, we shouldn't take it to heart.
Today, however, in remarks about how she'll campaign for Hillary Clinton over John McCain if he is her party's presidential nominee, Coulter has shown new range by betraying something closer than usual to the truth. No, not that she'd ever actually support Clinton; even if she is all show, she is nothing if not a canny entrepreneur, and she knows her customer.
Yet even more than actual conservatives, those who only play them on TV would be beyond disappointed to see Barack Obama take the nomination away from the right's favorite chew toy. Not only because Republicans consider Clinton the weaker candidate in the general. (And if they don't, then why did George W. Bush come so close to endorsing her?) But also because these professionals have their careers to think of and would hate to even contemplate letting all those '90s-scandal recyclables go to waste. Can you imagine the years of preparation wasted, the patience unrewarded, and Billary best sellers left unwritten? Which is why I suspect Ann Coulter of seeing in Hillary Clinton a candidate who—ready or not for the actual job—would be distracted from Day One. And this time only, she could be right.
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Geez, Juliet, I hope you don't believe that Republicans are all cold-hearted greedmeisters while Democrats are all selfless philanthropists! I bet I can think of a few greedy Democrats and, if I try hard enough, a generous Republican or two.
I can see the apparent contradiction you cite, but I don't know, in the case of the first daughters, that either apple has fallen that far from the tree. Hillary Clinton wasn't doing pro-bono work all those years at the Rose law firm. (And thank goodness, since the Arkansas' governor's salary was reportedly $35,000!) As for Jenna, well, it's hard to read a profile of the Bush family without coming across the term noblesse oblige. Sometimes that means serving in government, other times maybe it means heading down to Latin America to work with AIDS patients, as Jenna did. And let us not forget that Laura Bush is a former schoolteacher and librarian-her influence is apparent in Jenna's choices.
It's easy to sympathize with the children-even young-adult children-of presidents. Chelsea had to watch her parents' marital issues morph into a constitutional crisis, and lord knows the Bush twins didn't do anything in college that I didn't get away with quite anonymously. But one of the fringe benefits has got to be how well-connected you are when ready to enter the workforce. So in some ways it's probably easier to branch out and try something that defies expectations.
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