The Vice President Gets the Vapors
By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Dick Cheney is worried that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has shrunken the "big sticks" of the once-tough guys who were the vice president's colleagues in Congress.
Barbara Walters wants to know whether former president Clinton will organize the Easter egg hunt or fuss over Christmas decorations if there is a future President Clinton.
Tee hee hee.
There is a common subtext here, or, rather, common subtexts. The first is the continuing, maddening, mystifying discomfort with the notion of a woman as leader. The second involves the supposed implications -- humiliating? emasculating? -- of female leaders for the men around them.
In case you missed it, the vice president made those comments in an interview with the Politico. "Most striking were his virtually taunting remarks of two men he described as friends from his own days in the House: Democratic Reps. John Dingell (Mich.) and John P. Murtha (Pa.)," wrote my former Post colleagues Mike Allen, Jim VandeHei and John F. Harris.
Cheney, they wrote, "scoffed at the idea of two men who spent years accruing power showing so much deference to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the big spending and energy debates of the year." The House's senior Democrats "march to the tune of Nancy Pelosi to an extent I had not seen, frankly, with any previous speaker," Cheney said. "I'm trying to think how to say all of this in a gentlemanly fashion, but [in] the Congress I served in, that wouldn't have happened."
Asked if these men had lost their spines, he responded, "They are not carrying the big sticks I would have expected."
Gentlemanly, indeed. Once, Murthas and Dingells were Big Men on the Hill, swinging the Big Sticks of committee chairmen, Cheney is saying. Now they are, if not nancy boys, Nancy's Boys. Somehow, Newt Gingrich took on the committee chairs when he was speaker, and no one questioned their, um, equipment.
You might expect Cheney to be a little more evolved; after all, he has a tough wife and two tough daughters. Lynne Cheney wrote a children's book, "A is for Abigail," to demonstrate the country's progress from an age when "women who had none of their rights recognized to today, when I am so lucky to have little granddaughters who can look forward to being moms or they might want to be president."
Even without sticks.
As for Walters, her inevitable question -- could someone please interview Bill Clinton without descending to the level of "what will they call you" inanity? -- demonstrates that you don't have to be a man to succumb to this level of retrograde silliness.
Granted, the prospect of the first husband-wife presidential combo poses legitimate issues: the dynastic discussion, the matter of the Clinton Restoration, the old two-for-the-price-of-one debate. It's as relevant -- more relevant, actually -- to ask Bill Clinton whether he'd sit in on Hillary's Cabinet meetings as it is to ask Judi whether she'd be at Rudy's, as he once said. After all, Bill has actually run Cabinet meetings.
But it's inane -- and, yes, sexist -- to focus on the ceremonial aspects of the job, with its smirking Real Men Don't Do Place Settings undertone:
Walters: If your wife becomes president, I don't suppose that you're going to participate in the Easter egg hunt or the Christmas decorations.
Clinton: You know, I'd actually like doing that.
Walters: You're gonna do the Easter egg hunt?
Clinton: If -- if that's -- if I'm asked to do it. I would love to do that.
If Bill Clinton is one of the 10 Most Fascinating People of 2007, surely there must be more interesting questions to ask him.
Bill overseeing the menus and seating charts for state dinners? Big deal. Do it or delegate it. Any working woman can tell you that it's perfectly possible to worry simultaneously about finishing up that appellate brief and icing the cupcakes for the second-grade bake sale.
The obsessive focus on Clinton as first gentleman ignores the fact that the job has evolved from its have-teas-and-bake-cookies days -- and that most first spouses have been significant advisers behind the scenes. Indeed, as Jennifer Senior pointed out in New York magazine, Clinton's post-presidential portfolio has a distinctly estrogenous air.
"One could even go as far as to say that Bill Clinton is already leading the life of an ideal First Lady," she wrote. "His foundation focuses on just the type of causes associated with presidents' wives -- fighting childhood obesity, urban renewal, stemming the spread of poverty and [AIDS] -- and his most recent book, 'Giving,' about the virtues and pleasures of philanthropy, is a First Lady topic if ever there was one."
So maybe someday we'll get beyond gender, past the point of tittering about women wielding power. Maybe in time for Dick Cheney's granddaughters.
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