A Lipstick President - New York Times
The New York Times
August 31, 2005
A Lipstick President
By
MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
The president is working up a sweat, keeping that perfectly toned body
perfectly toned. I slide past stone-faced men with earpieces and ask the
president
how it's going.
"Good," she says, grinning. "People ask me if there could really be a woman
president and I say, Of course, it's the 21st century."
Geena Davis was shooting a rowing scene at the Potomac Boat House on Monday
morning for her new ABC show, "Commander-in-Chief," about the first woman
president.
Luckily, the first woman president is tall, a shade taller than W., so she's
eyeball to eyeball with generals and ambassadors. And she's a redhead.
Redheads,
a recent study showed, have a higher tolerance for pain. In the show's
premiere, a lot of pain is dished up for Ms. Davis's character, Mackenzie
Allen,
the vice president of a conservative president who keels over before the
first hour is over.
Nobody wants the vice president, a political independent, to be Madame
President. Not the president, who tells her before he dies to resign so his
ally,
the archconservative speaker of the House played by Donald Sutherland, can
get the job. Not the president's chief of staff. Not her sulky, sexy
conservative
teenage daughter. Even her supportive (and faithful) politico husband gets
skittish after East Wing staffers begin calling him "the first lady" and
arrange
his meetings with the White House chef.
Mr. Sutherland's Nathan Templeton condescendingly asks her, "How many
Islamic states do you think would follow the edicts of a woman?"
"Well, not only that, Nathan," she replies sarcastically, "but we have that
whole 'once a month will she or won't she press the button' thing."
He laughs nastily. "Well, in a couple years," he says, "you're not gonna
have to worry about that anymore."
The creator and writer, Rod Lurie, also had an embattled woman vice
president in his 2000 movie "The Contender." (He named his TV president and
vice president
Bridges and Allen; the stars playing those roles in 2000 were Jeff Bridges
and Joan Allen.)
He told me he modeled his female president not on Hillary Clinton but on
Susan Lyne, the smart, elegant former president of ABC Entertainment who is
chief
executive at Martha Stewart Inc. He said he wanted someone "of rather
unimpeachable integrity, very kind, very calm."
As Geena Davis was bursting into the Oval Office, and the other TV
president, Martin Sheen, was dropping in on Cindy Sheehan in Crawford,
Hillary was plotting
for real.
Her political activism began with her 1969 Wellesley commencement speech,
when she slapped back a Republican senator, Edward Brooke, for criticizing
the
students' Vietnam War protests. She praised "that indispensable task of
criticizing."
But now Hillary's voice is often pianissimo on the current hot issue: how to
get out of Iraq. Once we made sure Saddam was armed against Iran. Now we may
have to arm an Islamic protégé of Iran if we want to pull out.
But Hillary's not playing the vocal peacenik this time - she's the cagey
hawk. She knows if she wants to be the first woman president, she can't have
love
beads in her jewelry box.
She has defended her vote to authorize the president to wage war, even
though it was apparent then that the administration was snookering the
country. And
she has argued for more troops in Iraq, knowing it sounds muscular but
there's no support for it from the public - or Rummy.
She figures the liberals will stay with her while she scuttles to the
center, even if they get angry when she's not out front on stopping the war
or preserving
abortion rights. No one knows how she'll vote on John Roberts, so this could
be her own Sister Souljah moment - will she break with the hard-line left
on Judge Roberts?
What Hillary has going for her is exhaustion. Exhaustion kicks in with any
party in power for eight years, let alone one that tricked the country into
war.
And at some point, voters may be too exhausted to resist Hillary's
relentless ambition any longer.
But by hanging back and trimming her positions, by keeping her powder dry
until a more politically advantageous time, she may miss the moment when
Americans
are looking for someone to emerge from her cowering party to articulate
their anger about Iraq or their fear about a Supreme Court that will scale
back
women's rights and civil rights here, as Islamic courts do the same in Iraq.
Hillary may get caught flat-footed. Or she may be right in betting that
there's no need to do anything rash now, like leading.
E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com
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