This is not a woman who has to prove she's tough enough and mean enough; she is more like a bulldozer who has to prove she won't always be in high gear and ready to flatten you.Ms. Noonan has a gift for writing clearly about subtle impressions and perceptions…
But she is making progress. She is trying every day to change her image, and I suspect it's working. One senses not that she has become more authentic, but that she has gone beyond her own discomfort at her lack of authenticity.
Her grin is broad and fixed. She is the smile on the Halloween pumpkin that knows the harvest is coming. She's even putting a light inside.
The question, actually, is not whether America is "ready" for a woman. It's whether it's ready for Hillary.
Hillary's problem is not that she's a woman; it's that unlike these women (Ed. this is a reference to other powerful women, such as Condi Rice, Nancy Pelosi, etc.) – all of whom have come under intense scrutiny, each of whom has real partisan foes – she has a history that lends itself to the kind of doubts that end in fearfulness. It is an unease and dismay based not on gender stereotypes but on personal history.
To win the 2008 presidential election, Hillary Clinton will have to (a) win the overwhelming majority of Democratic voters, (b) win a clear majority of independent voters, and (c) win an interesting number of normally Republican voters. Her big problem with Democrats comes from the “nutroots” – those liberals for whom the Iraq war is the only issue (they want out, and Hillary has made it clear she'd stay there). Who knows on the independents? But she's betting that her best hope for winning any Republican votes lies with Republican women, who will vote for Hillary simply because she's a woman. To make that work, she has to convince the world that she really is a woman (not in the biological sense, of course, but rather in the behaviorial sense). Read Ms. Noonan's whole column for much more on that…
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