By Helen Rumbelow (THE TIMES, 08/04/06):
THIS WEEK WE GOT to see how Americans think it would be to have a woman in the Oval Office. In the new TV drama Commander in Chief, which has just started in Britain, Madam President is more than 6ft tall, talks in a gravelly voice and has a mouth so inflatably large and laden with lipstick that voters would never have any trouble reading her lips. In short, Geena Davis does not play the first woman to lead the free world, but the first drag queen.
Of course the show makes great play of this girls-on-top fantasy. There is a sharp exchange between Davis and a rival who questions her ability to lead. “Well, not only that,” she mocks him, “but we have that whole ‘once a month will she or won’t she press the button’ thing.”
He responds nastily: “Well, in a couple of years you’re not going to have to worry about that any more.”
And there is a rather nauseating moment when the President’s young daughter spills her drink over mommy on the way to the inauguration speech. You know, the average pressures of balancing work, life, the national budget and your baby’s Ribena.
But never once in the tumultuous process of taking office does Davis betray any emotion. She remains cool, clipped, aloof and vaguely unlikeable. Although the programme-makers do their feminist best to show a woman succeeding at being in charge, in doing so they unwittingly identify the problem of being a female politician. They are drag queens of a sort, their femininity a mask, their humanity hidden.
Take the lunch I had with a minister when I started to cover politics. Here was a woman I had never met, but found irritating on television. She seemed cold, at best a little “nannyish” and dull, at worst patronising. I am hardly giving away clues to her identity here — how many women in government can you think of who do not fit this description? So imagine my surprise when she approached, swearing like a trooper at her lateness, a smile making her almost unrecognisable. On every point I had got her wrong: she was warm, very funny and surprisingly passionate about her cause.
I came away disturbed by my bad judgment of character. How could I have been so turned off by her public persona, but so bowled over by her in private? Yet the more female politicians I met, the more I encountered the same mystery — alter egos so different and so much more likeable that it was difficult to understand why they were kept concealed. When the demeanour of these women was criticised in conversation with friends, I would try to persuade them that really, underneath, they were fantastic. They didn’t believe me. It was, as I observed those suffocatingly safe performances in the Commons, hard to believe it myself.
Now, everyone separates their home and work selves to some degree. But the change is normally subtle: when you see a male politician droning on in public, it is a near certainty that he is a dullard in private. For many women in power the opposite is true — their work selves are the kind of disguise that would give Oscar-winner Geena Davis a run for her money.
I know why they do it. Their gender means their status is more in doubt, the scrutiny upon them greater, the margin for error smaller. They cannot afford to do a Mo, or an Edwina — careers sunk on a surfeit of “character”. So they keep to the line, and keep their jobs. But it also keeps them back. When David Cameron this week mouthed off about the UK Independence Party (“fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”), it made him seem strong. Tony Blair, as his advisers at the election realised, is at his most convincing when sweating with panic among a hostile studio audience.
For a leader to be truly engaging, it is not enough to be good at his or her job. They have to reveal something of themselves, something for their public to connect with on an emotional level. That is why Bill Clinton is such a consummate politician, and why his buttoned-up wife Hillary — the current best chance of a real Madam President — is not.
We will have true equality when the word charisma is used about women in power, not just men. One day we won’t just aspire to have a woman in the White House, but a human too.