The XX Factor: What women really think.

It's All Relative

Melinda, good point about Caroline Kennedy playing by the rules of the old political guard. Judith Warner, a columnist for nytimes.com, recently wrote an op-ed for the paper implying that Kennedy is not playing by the rules at all. She posits that Kennedy doesn't deserve, and has done nothing to earn, Hillary Clinton's seat in the U.S. Senate. That's Warner's opinion and of course she has a right to it, but I nonetheless found it a bit troubling, especially coming from a woman. This last line of the piece was particularly irksome: "Caroline doesn't have to be a fairy-tale princess anymore. She can be her own white knight, vaulting the Kennedy's proudly into the 21st century, if only she plays by the rules and waits her turn."

Wait her turn? Isn't that what men use to say to ambitious women who seemed too eager to scale the walls of the corporate ladder or break the glass ceiling? When exactly would Kennedy's turn come? And by what means? Imagine if the suffragists and black civil rights activists had sat back and waited for their turn to come knocking on their doors. The notion of waiting for power to be handed to us as some sort of reward for waiting patiently in the wings while others go out and get what they want is so outdated. The people preaching patience are usually the ones holding the power, and are usually unwilling to give it up without a fight. They're also the ones who usually write the rules that Warner says Kennedy should play by.

Just how is Kennedy flouting the rules if they specifically allow for the governor to appoint a replacement for Clinton? The last time I checked, Hillary Clinton had not held political office before she ran for the Senate from a state she had never even lived in until she decided to seek office. So I'm not exactly sure what Clinton did to earn the Senate seat? She ran and she won, and if Kennedy is appointed to Clinton's seat, Kennedy will eventually have to do the same thing to keep it.

I agree with much of the recent commentary and news stories—this one is a particularly fun read—about the sickening level of nepotism in politics, but I don't believe that Caroline Kennedy should be held to a different standard than the many, many other members of Congress who got their seats through familial connections or won their seats with little or no prior political experience.

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?

Carolyn Maloney Does Fine on Colbert (And Why, Again, Do I Care?)

Was Carolyn Maloney not adorable on Colbert last night? She has a new book out, Rumors of our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, about how little the wage gap has narrowed over the years—and what is the glass ceiling made of, Plexiglas? But Maloney did break one barrier last night, becoming the first member of Congress I've seen on that show who actually seemed to get the joke, understand the deal, and have ever heard of the program prior to appearing on it. So the laugh was not on her when she kept right on pitching Obama while Stephen pretended to use a breast pump that sounded more like a buzz saw—supposedly to show how right employers are to fire lactating women for distracting their co-workers. And when he asked for guidance on the proper way to compliment a subordinate on her great breasts, Maloney didn't fume like all those unfortunates who'd come on before her, whose passive-aggressive aides seemed to have forgotten to brief them. Nor did she play along to her own detriment, like that ninny Robert Wexler, who Colbert got to say that of course he loves cocaine and prostitutes. She was funny, but without making an ass of herself. And I guess it's a sign of how far we still have to go that I actually found myself feeling relieved.

Emily, your post on relating to Michelle Obama because you both grew up grooving on the Brady Bunch seems like exactly the sort of response that Bill Bishop (also hawking a book, The Big Sort) was talking about on Jon Stewart last night when he said we don't actually vote on issues any more. Instead, having organized our whole lives around sticking to our own kind, politically speaking, we tend to go for the candidate who most reminds us of ... us. "We vote lifestyles,'' he said, in response to campaigns designed to hold a mirror in front of the voter and say pssst, "Vote for you!'' Not that you're going to base your vote on the Marcia Brady connection or anything. (And thank goodness, because Michelle was really more of a Jan.) Even after all that has been written on the role emotion plays in our electoral decisions, there's still more to this than we'd like to admit. But enough of this, or authors are going to be calling my house at all hours trying to get me to stay up late more often.

Moving Up the Ranks