Charlotte Allen in the Washington Post is embarrassed by the reaction of much of the fairer sex to the Obama campaign:
Here’s Agence France-Presse reporting on a rally for Sen. Barack Obama at the University of Maryland on Feb. 11: “He did not flinch when women screamed as he was in mid-sentence, and even broke off once to answer a female’s cry of ‘I love you, Obama!’ with a reassuring ‘I love you back.’ “
Women screamed? What was this, the Beatles tour of 1964? And when they weren’t screaming, the fair-sex Obama fans who dominated the rally of 16,000 were saying things like: “Every time I hear him speak, I become more hopeful.” Huh?
“Women ‘Falling for Obama,’ ” the story’s headline read. Elsewhere around the country, women were falling for the presidential candidate literally. Connecticut radio talk show host Jim Vicevich has counted five separate instances in which women fainted at Obama rallies since last September. And I thought that fainting was supposed to be a relic of the sexist past, when patriarchs forced their wives and daughters to lace themselves into corsets that cut off their oxygen.
“What is it about us women?” Allen asks. “Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental?” Why, indeed? (For even more fun, check the comments to her article from all the indignant feminists.)
I think, in this presidential year, our view of the candidates has less to do with sentimental goo and more to do with the cult of personality. We like to deify our leaders, to endow them with super-human, even supernatural abilities. The problems facing us are frankly overwhelming to most: a failing economy, the increasing threat of terrorism, the fracturing of the family, and sometimes just the staggering load of information we all have to wade through every day. We look to others — newscasters, celebrities, televangelists, pundits, comics, and, yes, politicians — to help us make sense of it.
To wrest reason from all this chaos would have to require someone with exceptional abilities. And Barack Obama, with his unflappable poise and trim good looks, seems exceptional, even, dare I say, Kennedyesque — particularly when compared with the increasingly strident Hillary Clinton, who Allen claims “has run one of the worst — and, yes, stupidest — presidential races in recent history, marred by every stereotypical flaw of the female sex.”
Both Hillary and John McCain may have longer resumes, but Obama has that “it” factor, that indescribable trait that we all first learned about in high school watching our more confident peers stride through the halls, that ineffable something that invokes confidence and admiration, even adoration. (And we of a certain age all know what that kind of adoration can lead to.)
He’s becoming nearly impossible to beat, and he’ll make the November election one of the most interesting in history.