Jackie Danicki

I don’t care if you’re sick of hearing about her - I’m not, especially when I know people who are saying such smart things about the woman. Hillary, with whom I collaborate and share a home, has said the very smartest things I have heard. She’s also written some of them, so I can share. Here’s what Hill has to say about the supposed vexing power of Palin’s “prettiness”, in response to some pretty provocative and well expressed thoughts from our friend Nancy on that score (links to photographs added by me):

Nancy, you personally are both a beautiful and a charismatic woman, and you do command a great deal of attention in any room with your joie de vivre and animated storytelling. But I think it is oversimplifying the formula to say that this is about you unleashing your “prettiness” on your hapless victims like some kind of kryptonite bomb.

At the risk of making us both sound incredibly vain, I think you and I are both pretty, but I do not share the perceived experience of having my beauty move social mountains all around me. I’m a hardcore introvert, and usually bring my invisibility cloak to parties, if I go at all. In short: I don’t have charisma, and you do. And as a result we move through the world differently. I disagree with your self-assessment that it’s your prettiness that gets you over: I think it’s your attractive personality, and that you are discounting the importance of behavior over looks.

You aren’t alone. Why do men get described as charismatic, while women are called pretty? Active vs. passive. Governor Bill Clinton held a stage much the way Palin did, through a powerful yet easy demeanor, a winning way, and, yes, a measure of physical beauty. Was he ripped for being just another pretty face? Was he “feared” because he might whip out this magical beauty and somehow wield it to hypnotize and destroy us?

So as a woman, no, I don’t fear Palin because I “know the advantage she can have.” Far from it. I believe it takes a lot more than a pretty face to command a room. I think it’s clear enough if you look at the portraits in government hallways that politics has never been a beauty pageant, so why it should become one now just for her escapes me. I think if it were that easy, we’d already be ruled by a race of voluptuous amazons (and perhaps the better for it).

I just eat this stuff up. Bonus: I used to read both Nancy and Hillary’s writing, and swoon, and think how I would feel I had really achieved something to get to roll with people as talented and winning as these two are. What can I say? It feels like winning the lottery just to be in the midst of all this clever and sharp.

Filed under: Life