It's a minor point, but Ann Friedman notes that Hillary Clinton's campaign has more women staffers because she "promotes lower-level staffers." She quotes Garance: "No other candidate can say, for example, that their campaign is being managed by their female former scheduler." I don't know a lot about campaigns, but I know one thing: the scheduler is not, or should not be, a "low-level staffer." The scheduler is key. He or (usually) she controls the campaign's most important and finite asset: the candidate's time. Media buyers, "strategists," pollsters are a dime a dozen, and they all come with big egos and big price tags. A great scheduler, however, one who can balance all the political and personal obligations, and use the candidate's time in a savvy way that positively reinforces the message, is a brilliant and rare thing. It is because schedulers are often women that it is considered a lower-level job, I think. There is a terrible disparity in political work, in which the pollsters and media buyers (usually men) make real money and own houses in Georgetown (sometimes more than one) and horse farms in Virginia, while others (researchers and schedulers, for example) work twice as hard for one tenth the pay. And are invisible. I would modify Ann's point a bit to suggest that Clinton's strength is not just that she promotes people up from the "women's jobs," but understanding the importance of those jobs in the first place. As evidence, I would note that in 1992 she appointed an extremely high-powered and politically experienced friend -- Susan Thomases -- her scheduler, and that became one of the key positions in the whole Clinton operation. I suspect it's one reason why her campaign operation seems to run so effectively. -- Mark Schmitt
