The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Sizzle Factor ...

Emily, Melinda and Meghan. All of you offer compelling observations about how the smoke pouring out of the feminist brain today, and yet I have to disagree.

I read Steinem’s op-ed twice this morning; the first time because I agreed with her so wholeheartedly, and then again because I am paid to cock my head and scowl. And so here is where I must part company with Steinem’s premise: I think in comparing the ways in which gender, as opposed to race, holds a candidate back in America she has factored out the single most important thing Obama brings to the table. It’s not just that he’s inspiring or charismatic or an agent for change or any of the bullet points we’ve affixed to him. It’s that he is unchanging, and forgive me but—authentic—in ways she simply is not. She somehow managed to earn this presidency on the merits, without ever showing anyone who she really was.

The real contrast between Obama and Clinton lies not in this who’s-carrying-a-greater-burden sweepstakes. It’s that he figured out how to transcend labels and she tried to do so by turning herself into an android. In the end, it seems to me, Obama faces easier sledding today not because its easier to be a black man in America than it is to be a woman, but because he’s modeled—and rather beautifully—how much simpler it is to be yourself than to become a piece of precision machinery, comprised of polls and talking points.

Maybe Steinem is right that a woman with even Obama’s sizzle would have been toast from the get-go. But I am not sure that he and Clinton are the best markers of that competition. I’d have liked to see a woman in this race who’d had Obama’s innate confidence and openness. That would have been a fight worth watching ...