Maureen Dowd makes an honest-to-god interesting point in her latest column, noting that the GOP attacks on various Democratic politicians tend to invert gender roles. Al Gore the beta male environmentalist, John Kerry the indecisive wimp, John Edwards the too-pretty product user, Hillary Clinton the angry testicle-cruncher. It's a good lesson for them to learn, I guess -- when they tried to stereotype Bill Clinton as too much of a horndog ladies-man, his vote totals went up. Nevertheless, I think Dowd gets this wrong:
The gambit handcuffs Hillary: If she doesn't speak out strongly against President Bush, she's timid and girlie. If she does, she's a witch and a shrew. That plays particularly well in the South, where it would be hard for an uppity Hillary to capture many more Bubbas than the one she already has.
It's not Hillary who's handcuffed, but her attackers. The femi-Clinton's televised demeanor never sways from genial, her media appearances invariably leave her looking decent. But subtextually, the right has invested so much time and energy assuring voters that a stone cold sociopath lurks beneath her smiling exterior that the qualities making her feminine and likable can no longer color her as weak and incapable. Everybody knows she'd sooner feast on your flesh than look at you, and that's exactly the sort of person America apparently wants fighting the War on Terror.
Female candidates are generally hampered by an inability to appear both pleasant and tough, making the right's kind work on behalf of Hillary's killer instinct her greatest advantage. Republicans can argue that she's unkind, but that'll be belied by her media savvy -- the TV don't lie. And they can argue she's a wimpy woman, but they've already convinced Americans of precisely the opposite. When Hillary was in the White House, they spun her as a first lady better suited to the presidency. Now that she's eyeing the White House, they're proving totally unable to reverse their own characterizations. My heart truly goes out to them.
