The Rules for a Fair Fight

By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Okay, folks, we've been here before. Not in this exact spot, but the trees sure look familiar.

Is a woman candidate primarily a woman or a candidate? (Can't separate the two? Right! Advance to the next question.)

Can a guy ask her tough questions without being a jerk? Can she cry without seeming weak? And what happens when a feminist running a post-feminist campaign is described as "one strong woman" but tells voters "I'm your girl"? Are there rules for any of this?

Hillary Clinton is going back on some debate stage with all those men again next week.

Get used to it, people!

We're going to tell you what The Rules are.

(And why are there always more rules for the women?)

The Rules for Female Candidates

Be tough, tough, tough.

Project strength, ladies! Set that jaw! If there is a single rule for female politicians -- especially those seeking an executive office such as governor or president -- it's that they must work harder than male candidates to appear strong and decisive. When voters don't know the candidates well, they are more likely to fall back on stereotypes of women as nicer, more conflict-averse and more emotional, says Leonie Huddy, who directs the Center for Survey Research at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Georgia Duerst-Lahti, a political science professor at Beloit College, says the phrase she sees most often in media reports to represent concern about female weakness is whether the candidate can handle "crisis decision-making." (None of that looking into another leader's eyes and just trusting him!)

You, Geraldine Ferraro, you remember! You were running for vice president in 1984 and got the question about whether you were tough enough to push The Button.

"They would never ask that and they never did ask that of a man," Ferraro says.

Duerst-Lahti suggests that the importance of toughness may help explain Hillary Clinton's relative hawkishness.

"She came out and she was the toughest of all of them in the Democratic field, at least on what to do in Iraq," Duerst-Lahti says. "She had to out-masculine all her male counterparts."

But not too tough.

In the 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial race, Mitt Romney described his opponent Shannon O'Brien's attacks on him as "unbecoming" -- after she questioned him sharply about his position on abortion during a debate. Unbecoming: antonym of ladylike? Discuss.

Former Washington mayor Sharon Pratt (formerly Sharon Pratt Kelly) was criticized for being cold. Clinton has been described by Karl Rove as "brittle" and by the head of New York's Republican Party as "an angry woman."

It's the same old story. A strong man is admired. A strong woman is -- well, with due deference to a line Barbara Bush once used about Ferraro -- it "rhymes with rich."

Female candidates traverse a narrow path, avoiding behaviors that might give rise to stereotypes. Be firm, but not angry. Be compassionate, but not weepy. Too much emotion: dangerous.

(See: September 1987. Patricia Schroeder cries when announcing she isn't running for president. AP headline: "She Says Crying Not Sign of Weakness.")

Managing the clothes

"Women are more likely to appear in business clothing in ads, whereas guys often roll up their sleeves and appear in work shirts," says Huddy. That's because women need to reinforce the image of themselves as competent and professional.

Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway says she tells all of her female candidates: "You need to figure out what to do with your gender and then you need to stick with it." That means one hairstyle and one look. The less written about appearance, she says, the more space for stances. In her 2000 Senate race, Clinton turned to dark pantsuits. "She basically put herself in what I call a campaign uniform," Conway says.

With that uniform and a relatively consistent hairstyle, Clinton blunted the impact of two of those female candidate bugaboos. There's a trifecta, you see.

"Hair, husbands and hemlines," says Duerst-Lahti.

Which leads us to . . .

Managing the husband

This is a particular issue for Clinton, of course. But prominent spouses can be an issue for any political candidate because they tend to draw the spotlight away from the person running for office. (See: Teresa Heinz.) It just so happens that, as Joan Hoff, former president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency, points out, female candidates are more likely to have spouses who are at least as successful and prominent as they are.

And then there's the larger cultural discomfort of a man subordinated. Pratt says when she served as mayor, people tended to assume her husband had a larger role in the decision-making of her office than he did.

Cut to the academic: "It's because we think of men as autonomous and we think of women as heteronomous. Women are always connected; men stand alone," Duerst-Lahti says.

In a best-case scenario, the spouse himself recognizes the need to maintain a supporting role. Bill Orr, who once described himself as "a former male chauvinist pig," has said he had to come around to the idea of his wife, Kay, running for governor of Nebraska. But she ran and won -- serving from 1987 to 1991 -- and he decided he needed to raise money to redecorate the mansion.

He put out a "First Gentleman's Cookbook."

Be prepared to be a symbol.

In the same way that a smaller statistical sample means that each person polled carries more weight, women on the national stage are made to stand in for other women. They are studied for what they tell us about the state of contemporary womanhood.

During her husband's first term, Clinton told the Wall Street Journal: "A friend told me I've turned into a gender Rorschach test. People are not really often reacting to me so much as they are reacting to their own lives and the transitions they are going through."

Everything is symbolic. Everything is closely studied for its intent and its implications. Which is why women can get offended if a male candidate calls his female opponent "ma'am" a lot, as Bob Ehrlich did to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in a 2002 gubernatorial debate in Maryland.

Which is why some people looked at the Democratic debate last week and saw a front-runner being scrutinized, and others saw a whole bunch of men ganging up on a woman. A tough woman, but still.

"What was she -- a pinata for two hours?" asks Ferraro, who is supporting Clinton and says she objects only to the nature and extent of the attacks, which she perceived as "personal."

"I can't remember when a front-runner was attacked for two hours like that."

"The tone was probably less personal than if she'd been a man," argues Democratic strategist Anita Dunn. "I think the candidates are being relatively careful."

Former congresswoman Pat Schroeder, who is supporting Clinton, believes the former first lady is scrutinized to a degree male candidates are not. She cites the recent interest in Clinton's hearty laugh.

"Have you ever heard the president's laugh?" Schroeder asks. She demonstrates with a breathy little chuckle. " 'He-he-he-he.' It's like Woody Woodpecker."

Actually, people have been making fun of his laugh for years.

So much is about what you see in these inkblots.

The Rules for Male Candidates

Get the little woman on board.

Remember, gentlemen! Your better half, is, well, your better half. Use her. Plus, she can say stuff about a female opponent that you can't. (See: the Silver Fox, under Rules for Female Candidates.)

Men wishing to disable a female opponent's popularity with the female electorate can also do as Jim Talent did when he was running for reelection to the Senate in Missouri against Claire McCaskill. He put together a group of "Women for Talent." (He lost, though.) Rick Lazio, in his 2000 run for the New York Senate against Clinton, similarly started going to women-centered events.

He lost, too. For reasons we'll explore in our next rule . . .

Don't do anything that seems, um, physically intimidating.

This one's pretty big. When Lazio approached Clinton during a 2000 debate with a pledge to ban soft money ("Why don't you just sign it?"), he got a rap as a bully. There are those who say that if he'd done that to a man, the move would not have seemed like bullying. There are others who believe that Lazio would never have done that to a man -- that the invasion of Clinton's personal space was sexist.

In either interpretation, Lazio loses.

Similarly inappropriate: when George H.W. Bush bragged about his performance against Geraldine Ferraro in the 1984 vice presidential debate, apparently unaware he was near a microphone. "We tried to kick a little ass last night," he said.

Politics may be rough and tumble, but there is still an expectation that men show female opponents "good manners," says political scientist Susan MacManus of the University of South Florida at Tampa. Or they risk being "unbecoming."

Speaking of which . . .

To attack or not to attack?

This may be the most complicated issue. How to attack without seeming condescending? How to attack without making women in the audience recall the time when they were the only woman at a board table? And in a situation like the Democrats face this year, does the mere specter of a woman being criticized by several men make female voters feel protective of her?

Or not?

"We've known for years the difficulty that male candidates have in running against strong female candidates and even the public sends mixed messages about what's appropriate for a campaign against a woman," MacManus says. She calls the 2008 presidential race a "convergence" election in which "the realities of today's culture are colliding with expectation of the past."

"I've run into more Republican men who are scared to death to run against a woman," GOP strategist Kellyanne Conway says. Some clients have cut back on debates to avoid confrontations, Conway says. As for others, "I've had some people have their wife do the ads."