Dear Camille:
Any interesting commentary on Elizabeth Dole's potential run for the White
House?
Lana Sharp
Dear Ms. Sharp:
We desperately need more women running for high office in the United States. While they
have distinguished themselves as governors, senators and university
presidents, women are still badly underrepresented at the top corporate and
military ranks -- and of course in the Oval Office, where they have recently
been relegated to the role of secretary, slut or spousal nag. No matter what
the outcome, a well-managed campaign by a woman for the presidency would give
all American women increased visibility and credibility throughout the
professional and political worlds.
At the 1996 Republican Convention, which awarded her husband the presidential
nomination, Elizabeth Dole made a sensation by tripping the light fantastic in
her high heels down the podium steps and, wired for sound, threading gaily
through the astonished crowd, at whom she cooed and beamed with practiced
Southern charm. She broke the rules of the game and showed how traditional
womanliness could be reconciled with gutsy, in-your-face boldness. "The wrong
Dole is running," one heard and read everywhere.
Hence what a disappointment it was to witness the painful debacle of Elizabeth Dole's
pro forma announcement in Des Moines, Iowa, on March 10 of an exploratory
committee to study her presidential possibilities. Befuddled by reverse
sexism, the major media bent over backwards to avoid honest commentary -- a
paternalistic condescension that all true feminists should resent and deplore.
The awful truth was perfectly evident on C-Span: A tense, awkward and
frumpy Dole didn't bother varying her 1996 routine, which she has plainly
done way too often on the pricey after-dinner lecture circuit. Her
performance was shockingly hackneyed -- the descent from the stage, the saluting
of people by name, the patronizing pat on the shoulder as Glinda the Good
Witch flitted by. Unfortunately, Dole didn't factor in that the front
rows into which she sailed this time with her plastered-on smile would be
packed with cynical, slouching reporters, who couldn't conceal their boredom.
The whole event, carefully staged for media coverage, looked horrendous on
camera -- like that amateur play mounted in a high school auditorium on "The
Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour," discombobulating campily fuming guest-diva Tallulah
Bankhead. Dole's kick-off fiasco inevitably suggested what went wrong
with her husband's presidential campaign, when the Republicans were
pathetically outgunned by the far more media-savvy Democrats (a scenario that
would recur when the Republicans misplayed their hand in their blundering
pursuit of guilty-as-sin President Clinton).
Long before she launched this bid, Dole needed a makeover -- new hair, new
clothes and new speechwriters (does she have any?). Using people as
props -- in this case, a sweetly baffled 12-year-old African-American girl,
whom Dole moved around like a piece on a chessboard -- may arguably if
retchingly work for speakers in major venues, like nominating conventions or
the State of the Union address, but Dole clearly didn't have the
improvisatory theatricality or the production staff to carry it off. She got
no bang for her buck.
At this inaugural moment, in any case, it was absolutely crucial that she
appear statesmanlike. We already know, from her tenure as head of the Red
Cross, that she can tote that bale of symbolic bandages to the masses; she has
the compassion plank nailed down tight. But if any woman is to be taken
seriously as a presidential candidate, she must show she can hack it as
commander in chief. Hence gravitas and substance are in order.
I have constantly argued in my writing and lectures (as at West Point in 1997)
that we must restructure higher education to give women the fact-based
background in international politics and military history and tactics that
will fit them to lead nations. Women's studies, with its victim-oriented
provincialism, is the last damned thing that ambitious female students need.
If Elizabeth Dole couldn't plan a simple press conference to showcase herself with
dignity, it's pretty unlikely she'll be able to earn respect as a major player
on the global stage, where hard decisions have to be made about the use of
American military power. By ill luck, Dole's announcement also occurred
at the moment thunderclouds were gathering over Yugoslavia. She
looked too small, too uncertain and too chirpy to have warheads put under her
control.
I write this as multimillion-dollar missiles and bombs are falling yet again,
unleashed far from America's bustling, indifferent shopping malls and decaying
inner-city schools, which can't even afford books. How, in this century of
Picasso's great 1937 protest painting, "Guernica," can American and European
bureaucrats still so blithely order terror tactics from the air? Barbarism
deployed against tyrants makes us equally barbaric.
By clumsily antagonizing an economically and politically unstable Russia, the
"humanitarian" intervention in Kosovo by NATO (pushed along by Clinton's inept
foreign-policy team) runs the terrible risk of destabilizing the world for two
more generations. Welcome to the new millennium!
