Getting rid of Barbie for President
posted 12-19-2007 8:14 p.m.

 
In today’s Washington Post, political columnist Dana Milbank writes:

... even these private reflections of the candidate frequently centered on public policy: "Senator Clinton was one of the first people to realize that the air was toxic. . . . She wants a good education for everybody. . . . She helped set up the system to provide services to indigent clients." Even the candidate's mother, Dorothy Rodham, noted how "she's been very active with social justice causes."

Maybe, then, The Hillary They Know isn't so different from the Hillary everybody else knows: She's a public-policy savant whose idea of a good time is reading white papers into the wee hours. ...

Milbank goes on to remark that “It was only a couple of weeks ago, after all, that she described as ‘fun’ her now-abandoned plans to attack rival Barack Obama.” Guess he just couldn’t resist that ‘gotcha’ at the end of the graf.

I reread the column. It struck me that there was something a little too smug about it, something that just pissed me off. It happens to be one snapshot in a long series on the campaign trail, this one about how Hillary Clinton has to go to great lengths to remind people that she puts on her sneakers one foot at a time, just like we do. That she still has something in common with the rest of us, even though she’s a policy wonk who sits up nights reading stuff the rest of us would never want to, just because somebody has to and she’s really good at it.

The part that middle America — hell, practically all of so-called ‘normal’ (meaning non-wonkish) America — holds against her is that she actually likes reading that stuff and, worse, can make sense out of it and tell others about it, so that we can each in our turn make intelligent decisions about it as citizens. Not that we will: we leave that job to our elected officials, then we curse them and distrust them for actually being ambitious enough to want the job we don’t.

Those good folks in Iowa whom Sen. Clinton is trying to persuade get to unduly influence the rest of the nation, come January. The people who live there are real enough, but their place in the popular mindset isn’t — it’s part of some 19th-century fantasy of what it is to be American.

Every four years, pundits and image makers, politicians and political columnists pay due homage to that fantasy, as if any of it still applied to modern life. We see largely rural and small-town states like Iowa and New Hampshire as places where solid homegrown values still supposedly reside, as if they cold not possibly do so in cities. Never mind that there are gangs and meth labs and heroin runners out in the cornfields just as much as there are in the suburbs or the inner city, that people still drink, get divorced, and beat their kids in the sticks as much (or as rarely) as they do in the city, or that global warming affects us all. Rural Iowa is still supposed to be hallowed ground, the repository of all we hold dear, and the caucuses there some kind of harbinger for presidential primaries and elections. What crap.

Small towns and farmlands may have been the roots of the nation, but that isn’t where the nation’s soul lives anymore. It isn’t where most of the people live, for better or worse. And I find myself resenting that the 19th-century fantasy that Iowa and New Hampshire symbolize for us and the mindset of the voters there have so much influence, so early, on a political process that affects us all.

I’m a city dweller, born and bred — an urban woman with no nostalgia whatsoever for the American past, but with a whole lot of respect for the problems that face the nation and the world today. I look at the Iowa that Republican and Democratic candidates canvass, and I see a social and political landscape that has no place for women like me. Or Hillary.

Laura Bush is more the image these folks have of what’s appropriate for a woman in the White House. Rural and small-town America has a homier vision of what women are supposed to be: waitresses, secretaries, nurses, schoolteachers. Friendly. Always helpful, nothing threatening about them. None of them would be up at 4 a.m. reading position papers or draft legislation. It occurs to me that Laura Bush is the Barbie version of what a woman in the White House is supposed to be. And I hate that.

In political Barbieland, there is nothing that isn’t perky, reassuring, smiling, homogenized, non-threatening. It’s all frilly and acceptably female. Where are the outfits and accessories for Barbie the IT developer, Barbie the geologist, Barbie the neurobiologist or molecular geneticist, Barbie the aeronautical engineer? Barbie the policy wonk?? Nonexistent.

But there are plenty of real women out there who are nerds, geeks, wonks, who use their brains for a living. Who stay late at work developing projects, monitoring experiments, analyzing legal decisions, writing research reports, reviewing patient records, going to faculty meetings, brainstorming into the wee hours. Women who have as much laundry waiting for them as do the farmers’ wives and the soccer moms, but who have given up part of their social lives and their ‘free’ time to do work that they’re good at, work they love. Who are still underpaid and undervalued by a society that can’t get long without them, who look at that fantasy that hovers over Iowa like stench from an industrial pig farm and find themselves marginalized by it.

There are thousands of such women, millions of them out there. Nerds, geeks, wonks. They love what they do, but sometimes they feel penalized for it, marked as odd. I’m one of them, and we’re all marked, but most of us wear that mark with pride. Sure, there have been nights when I literally dreamt about statistics on the uninsured and days when I thought that if I had to read one more position paper about Medicare or Social Security, I’d scream. I’m an analytical reporter and a policy analyst, so it comes with the turf, but knowing that doesn’t always make doing the work any easier.

But then there are those times when I’ve gone through reams of documents until I thought I’d drown in them, when suddenly the last piece snaps into place, an analysis clicks into focus, and I realize I’ve figured out something nobody else has yet — and I am so joyous I could dance. For about two seconds, until I’m stopped cold, wondering what I can actually do with what I’ve just figured out. I call those my Hillary moments. I only have to write about what I’ve figured out. She has to do all the same reading and then actually do something with the result. And she likes it; imagine that.

That’s the dirty little secret that all those nerdy, geeky, wonky women and I share: we’ve all had those delirious eureka moments, and they almost make all the drudgery that comes before and after worthwhile. In fact, they’re one of the reasons we love what we do: those moments are our reward. I look at those women, and then I look at Hillary, and I recognize that she is one of us. Somebody like me. And I haven’t ever seen anyone like me anywhere near the White House. Except for the years Sen. Clinton was First Lady. I hated it when political advisers dumbed down her image to make her ‘palatable’ to the rest of the electorate.

Now, that out-of-date fantasy image of America is making her do it again on the campaign trail, and I find myself growling under my breath.

So when I read something like Dana Milbank’s column today, it makes me want to take that pseudo-Midwestern, Barbie image of political women and smash it. Brutalize it. Torch it and throw the ashes into a tar pit, then nuke that with an industrial laser, until the particles pass through the exosphere into the solar wind and are carried out past the far ends of the solar system, never to return. I want it dead and buried, along with that useless 19th-century fantasy. And I want a clueless, self-indulgent, complacent America to stop daydreaming, grow up, and start dealing with its problems today, not tomorrow or 200 years from now.

Then I remember that all those nerdy, geeky, wonky women and I all have the vote. And I think there just might be a chance yet to trounce on that Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary after all.

Do I think that Hillary Clinton is the perfect candidate? Nope, I have serious doubts - she’s deeply flawed; but then, so are the rest of us. Is she political? You bet, but that’s part of the job. Is she ruthless? Probably; but show me a scientist who has to dump years’ worth of her work and start over because an experiment was compromised who isn’t ruthless about it. Aggressive? Sure — and so is every successful CEO on the planet. Ambitious? Absolutely — same as any woman who’s ever become an astronaut or an astrophysicist, a submarine captain or a film director. You don’t get to do the good stuff by being shy and retiring.

Sen. Clinton may not be what we expect as president. She may even fail spectacularly, but I want her to have the same chance at failing (or succeeding) at that job as any man running for it. And after 200-some years, instead of one more generation of silky voiced, plastic-smiled, hand-shaking, baby-kissing men, I’d like to see someone in the Oval Office who looks like me — not sanitized political Barbie, but me.

Let’s see if all those other nerdy, geeky, wonky women want to do something about that.