OH, Tina Fey. We all admire you so. The writing, the baby, the glasses, the personality to make it in comedy show business, the vulnerability on "30 Rock."
And then this diatribe... have a look.
So, I get that voters in the end vote more for personality than policy. That's how we got W, and Reagan, and JFK, and Bill Clinton. And why we likely will get Obama. These guys are cool, and we feel comfortable with them.
(And why we didn't get Kerry or Mondale or Dukakis or, you know, all the rest of the guys who aced their polisci exams and then bored their friends at the lunch table.)
And I get that Barack is winning over Hillary because he's got that winning personality. He's got charisma, and he talks about values in a way that makes people cry.
And she's the executive type who would do things, and do them right -- but she doesn't have the It factor.
Which is all fine -- except. Except it feels like it allows us to feel comfortable with a certain amount of women-hating. It gives license to the niggling sensation that any woman who got this far has got. To be. A bitch. And we don't like that.
Well, she probably doesn't have the coziest personality you've ever met. Just like anyone who's gotten that far in political life, having accomplished real things. Man or woman.
(Unless they're a certain kind of clueless. And among those I include W, and Reagan. Who just always got by so far on the jovial, and were born into the role, and were maneuvered into place by other hands, that they didn't need to bother with the ambition.)
I believe Bill Clinton is a master politician who makes anyone in a room with him feel special; I also believe he's probably a philanderer and a egotist.
If he were a woman, she'd be a slut and a bitch. (Can you IMAGINE the s_itstorm if she were discovered with a male intern?)
If Barack were a woman, she'd be unqualified and soft on defense.
If Huckabee were a woman, she'd be in the kitchen. (Unless she was a nun, in which case she would be in a school. Or a church. Or a hospital.)
It's just too easy to dismiss her as a bitch. It's just too easy to tap into our very own misogynist tendencies and pull them out -- to disapprove of her pantsuits, her sagging skin, her harsh laugh, her political skills, her hawkish foreign policy.
It's much harder to examine why we feel this way about a woman with power. With brains. With ambition. With even beauty, that has aged.
We still don't feel comfortable with a woman who wants more than a woman's lot -- a mom, a movie star, a model, a teacher, a nurse...
At some level, I think, we want women to find that to be enough.
Because if they don't... Well, I dunno. But at the end of the day, I'm grateful to Hillary for helping us to find out.