Newsweek Wades Into the Trenches

While it's still up on their site, some thoughts on Newsweek's "Hear Her Roar" (really, fellas?) cover package, anchored by the Tina Brown "embed" story :

Brown's article is a perfect representation of why I shifted from "I prefer Barack but would be proud to call Hillary my president" to "would John McCain really be so dangerous in the White House?" The article opens with a breathless account of Clinton on the campaign trail in Ohio, and inspires great faith in the
Hillary-The-Tireless-Crusader-With-an-Encyclopedic-
Command-of-Policy-Minutae.

But that Hillary isn't running for president in Tina Brown's (or Robin Morgan's, or Gloria Steinem's, or Geraldine Ferraro's) world. Hillary-The-Victim is. And it's so unfair:

"In the relentless youth culture of the early 21st century, if you are 50 and female, the novel that's being written on your forehead every day is "Invisible Woman"... the very scar tissue that older women see as proof of [Hillary's] determination just embarrasses their daughters, killing off for them all the insouciant elation that ought to come with girl power in the White House."

Relentless youth culture? Invisible? By whose estimation does Miley Cyrus wield more power than Nancy Pelosi or Meg Whitman? Is Brown actually saying that middle-aged women are invisible because we don't see them in Neutrogena ads or on "Access Hollywood"? Goodness, woman, if that's your measure of "visibility," then you don't need youth serum, you need to grow up.

I've been losing my temper for at least a month and a half now with this kind of Boomer self-absorption and self-righteousness, but at least I have new insight into its sources, courtesy of the cringe-inducing accompanying piece by Sarah Kliff.

"Obama is so incredibly easy to get: drink the Kool-Aid, get on the bandwagon and get excited... This guy exudes cool and he does it effortlessly, in a breezy suit without a tie and armed with a cadre of hip celebrities. But Hillary? ... She exudes a painful mix of consistently embarrassing mom and annoying high-school overachiever, the one who spends Saturday night diligently studying for a test that is two weeks away."

I will take out a full, congratulatory ad page in the first magazine (or 500,000 impressions on the first website) that runs a reasonable article by a young woman explaining that she supports Barack Obama because she likes his policy prescriptions for urban poverty, or that she was sold on his candidacy by his bi-partisan legislative achievements in nuclear nonproliferation. I'll even provide them with at least a dozen volunteers to author it.

Not to be totally dismissive of the entire essay collection. The ever-brilliant Dahlia Lithwick contributes her tightly written and convincing request that, "at the end of all these months of peering in the mirror, we can stop looking for the candidate who embodies every slight and insult we've ever encountered, and contemplate which of them is better suited to govern."

And for every self-obsessed aging second wave-er, Jonathan Alter issues a lovely rejoinder on behalf of his remarkable pioneering mother:

"When my two sisters became active Obama volunteers and her granddaughters as well as grandsons grew excited about politics for the first time, my mother began to think about the contest in a new way. The next president was for them, not her, she reasoned. Slowly, idealism edged identity."

Tina Brown, meet Joanne Alter.

Please.