Madam Secretary is Hillary. A political wife is the politician. Deal with it

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/21/madame-secretary-hillary-political-wife

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Hillary Clinton does not muck horse stables.

She will do the occasional shot of Crown Royal, dance with her husband on a beach, hang out with Katy Perry and even dress up like a cowgirl for Halloween. Shovelling a pile of horse shit from a dank stall? Hillary Clinton only does that metaphorically.

But Téa Leoni, who plays Elizabeth McCord on CBS’s eponymous new show Madam Secretary – attractively dishevelled, of course, and sporting braids – does get her hands and her pitchfork dirty because, as she tells her son, “This relaxes me.”

Does she also bake chocolate chip cookies?

As Ted Koppel said in 1992, “Meet the new political wife. She has a career, she has opinions. A partner in every way.” (How crazy is it that only 22 years ago, a politician’s wife “having a career” was so outré that it bore mentioning on the news?) But in 2014, the political wife is the politician in the family and, on the campaign trail and on television, we’re still grappling with what that means.

Beyond the persistent critiques of careerism and aggression aimed at female politicians, even their femininity is a double-edged sword: appear effortlessly feminine (and fuckable) without spending too much time or effort on it, and thereby seem too concerned with ladylike to be trusted with power.

We are not, sadly, living in a post-Tracy Flick world: “ambitious” is an insult lobbed at women and a compliment paid to men. Women politicians are supposed to answer the call to service – even at 3am – but we’re not supposed to pursue the call-maker to let him know we’re interested.

Leoni’s McCord is, of course, shoveling that non-metaphorical shit far away from the White House when she gets her call – and it’s a compliment when the president tells her he wants to appoint her as his secretary of state because, “You have no such [political] ambition.”

Oh, so that’s how women make it in politics today? They work hard, and wait for the aggressive male politicians to notice how non-threatening they are?

Maybe it’s just difficult to distinguish the lack of ambition in women from our logical response to the social pressure we face to not express any assertiveness, lest we be deemed less womanly for it.

Leoni’s character directly acknowledges the fraught relationship we have between power and the women who wield it when – late at night, in bed with her sexy, charismatic professor husband played by Tim Daly – she suddenly bemoans that they used to have sex more often and says, “I know some men, they’re turned off by women in positions of power.”

He responds to his beseeching, vulnerable wife, half-joking in an effort to get out of talking about it, “I’m completely attracted to your masculine energy.”

It’s not quite suggesting that his Lady Macbeth unsexed herself, but it’s also not far from it. Power is supposedly a manly thing, and we “need” a little more lady-ness in our lady politicians – something of which the real-world politicians are fully aware.

We critique Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s hair, applaud her for losing the weight she put on because she had cancer and then slam her for recognizing – and asking for perfectly legal help from her committee – to help with her wardrobe (a situation with which former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is familiar).

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand had to listen to her male peers – who are not exactly known for their toned physiques – critique her weight to her face, face more than a little press interest in her weight loss and clothing choices and then, once she dared write about how gross that felt, deal with people demanding that she reveal who said it because it was supposedly so beyond the pale.

We mocked Hillary Clinton’s ankles, chattered incessantly about the ubiquity of her (ankle-hiding) pantsuits for more than a decade, praised the previously-derided pantsuits and then returned to searching for unflattering photos to illustrate poorly-disguised partisan hit-jobs.

“Madame Secretary” Leoni also acquiesces to a presidential makeover request – yes, the president’s chief of staff demands that she style her hair better and try out some make-up – but only because the makeover and the paparazzi treatment forces the New York Times to hold a damaging story about two Americans held in Syria for the day she needs to resolve the situation. Apparently, the national media can’t handle covering the “news” of her makeover (She wears heels! And has a red coat now!) and the potential executions of two citizens within 24 hours.

Still, that’s not quite an accurate portrayal of the Washington press corps’ fascination with powerful women’s style. Tea Leoni could have just asked wardrobe for some bangs.