The Contender?
Last night I watched The Contender, a movie about the nomination of a female vice-president. It's mostly concerned with post-Lewinsky prurience and takes sexual politics to an absurd level to make that point (gang-bang allegations? Really?) but left me thinking about Kathleen Sebelius (and no, I'm not revealing anything scandalous here). Like Joan Allen's character, she's a delicately featured, centrist Democrat who's the daughter of an Ohio governor. Sebelius has made it to lots of shortlists for Obama's veep, but seems to be forever the bridesmaid. The reasons for her rejection are wide-ranging: She's too nice. She's an uninspired speaker. She's not Catholic enough. She's too pretty, so she'll remind voters of their deep-seated fear of miscegenation standing on the podium next to Obama. She's a female whose birth certificate fails to read "Hillary Rodham."
These arguments against Sebelius are usually preceded by the bullet points in her favor. But the oddest endorsement of Sebelius came from Hillary-hater extraordinaire Camille Paglia, who wrote that Obama will need someone with Sebelius' "blandly generic WASPiness that has persistently defined the American power structure in business and government and that has weirdly resisted wave after wave of immigration since the mid-19th century." Paglia's backward semi-compliment streamlines all the other complaints into one smooth peg: a boring identity is the ultimate sin in this election cycle. But is she really so inoffensive as to be offensive? Consider—she's just a year younger than Hillary, meaning she would have faced those same glass ceilings in her political rise—more, perhaps, since she ran for office earlier. And she might not be considered Catholic enough now for purposes of the veep slot, but I would imagine it didn't do her any favors in the Kansas of 30 years ago, where WASP probably wasn't the first dismissal that came to mind for her. (She may not wear her Catholicism on her sleeve, but I actually think that's something that might appeal to a lot of moderate Catholics, who don't tend to be a Bible-thumping group—as for the single-issue voters who're peeved about her abortion record, well, they probably weren't sniffing near the Democratic ticket anyhow.)
So it's not hard to imagine she threw some ‘bows along the way, but like Nancy Pelosi, smoothed her scars into a public persona and cloaked her chutzpah in pearls, pantsuits, and a picture-perfect home life. They both worked within, and rose to the top of, the existing power structure—something about flies, honey, and vinegar, maybe. (Pelosi and Sebelius, by the way, both went to the same all-women's Catholic college that my mother attended for a time. From what I gather, social life there often alternated between dates with Georgetown guys and girls sitting around a dorm common room with their hair in curlers, chain-smoking and playing intense games of bridge—if that isn't training for navigating Washington's smoke-filled back rooms and cliquish power circles, I don't know what is.)
Maybe I'm just rooting for a nice Irish-Catholic girl from Ohio to make it big for my own selfish reasons, and maybe her undefined national image lets me project whatever I want to on her. But I kinda bet Sebelius has a hell of a story and somewhere along the line decided it wasn't in her best interest to tell the gory details. She's a feminist and a trailblazer, but in what now sticks out as an oddly old-fashioned way. She doesn't seem to want to be anyone's lightning rod, which is perhaps what really bugs hard-core Hillaryites. And maybe they're right—in our ultra-confessional era, can someone truly become a feminist icon who's not willing to mine her identity politics and shout her personal history from the podium? Or, perhaps more pointedly, does a woman have to be a feminist icon before she can be on a national ticket?