A Lipstick President New York Senator Clinton and Presidency
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
August 31, 2005
A Lipstick President
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
The president is working up a sweat, keeping that perfectly toned body perfectly toned. I slide past stone-faced men with earpieces and ask the president how it’s going.
“Good,” she says, grinning. “People ask me if there could really be a woman president and I say, Of course, it’s the 21st century.”
Geena Davis was shooting a rowing scene at the Potomac Boat House on Monday morning for her new ABC show, “Commander-in-Chief,” about the first woman president.
Luckily, the first woman president is tall, a shade taller than W., so she’s eyeball to eyeball with generals and ambassadors. And she’s a redhead. Redheads, a recent study showed, have a higher tolerance for pain. In the show’s premiere, a lot of pain is dished up for Ms. Davis’s character, Mackenzie Allen, the vice president of a conservative president who keels over before the first hour is over.
Nobody wants the vice president, a political independent, to be Madame President. Not the president, who tells her before he dies to resign so his ally, the archconservative speaker of the House played by Donald Sutherland, can get the job. Not the president’s chief of staff. Not her sulky, sexy conservative teenage daughter. Even her supportive (and faithful) politico husband gets skittish after East Wing staffers begin calling him “the first lady” and arrange his meetings with the White House chef.
Mr. Sutherland’s Nathan Templeton condescendingly asks her, “How many Islamic states do you think would follow the edicts of a woman?”
“Well, not only that, Nathan,” she replies sarcastically, “but we have that whole ‘once a month will she or won’t she press the button’ thing.”
He laughs nastily. “Well, in a couple years,” he says, “you’re not gonna have to worry about that anymore.”
The creator and writer, Rod Lurie, also had an embattled woman vice president in his 2000 movie “The Contender.” (He named his TV president and vice president Bridges and Allen; the stars playing those roles in 2000 were Jeff Bridges and Joan Allen.)
He told me he modeled his female president not on Hillary Clinton but on Susan Lyne, the smart, elegant former president of ABC Entertainment who is chief executive at Martha Stewart Inc. He said he wanted someone “of rather unimpeachable integrity, very kind, very calm.”
As Geena Davis was bursting into the Oval Office, and the other TV president, Martin Sheen, was dropping in on Cindy Sheehan in Crawford, Hillary was plotting for real.
Her political activism began with her 1969 Wellesley commencement speech, when she slapped back a Republican senator, Edward Brooke, for criticizing the students’ Vietnam War protests. She praised “that indispensable task of criticizing.”
But now Hillary’s voice is often pianissimo on the current hot issue: how to get out of Iraq. Once we made sure Saddam was armed against Iran. Now we may have to arm an Islamic protégé of Iran if we want to pull out.
But Hillary’s not playing the vocal peacenik this time – she’s the cagey hawk. She knows if she wants to be the first woman president, she can’t have love beads in her jewelry box.
She has defended her vote to authorize the president to wage war, even though it was apparent then that the administration was snookering the country. And she has argued for more troops in Iraq, knowing it sounds muscular but there’s no support for it from the public – or Rummy.
She figures the liberals will stay with her while she scuttles to the center, even if they get angry when she’s not out front on stopping the war or preserving abortion rights. No one knows how she’ll vote on John Roberts, so this could be her own Sister Souljah moment – will she break with the hard-line left on Judge Roberts?
What Hillary has going for her is exhaustion. Exhaustion kicks in with any party in power for eight years, let alone one that tricked the country into war. And at some point, voters may be too exhausted to resist Hillary’s relentless ambition any longer.
But by hanging back and trimming her positions, by keeping her powder dry until a more politically advantageous time, she may miss the moment when Americans are looking for someone to emerge from her cowering party to articulate their anger about Iraq or their fear about a Supreme Court that will scale back women’s rights and civil rights here, as Islamic courts do the same in Iraq.
Hillary may get caught flat-footed. Or she may be right in betting that there’s no need to do anything rash now, like leading.
E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com
Thomas L. Friedman is on vacation.
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The Geography of New Orleans
The City of New Orleans is located exactly at 90 degrees west longitude, and 30 degrees north latitude. Actually, the exact coordinate lies in the marshes of New Orleans East, just southwest of NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility. The Vieux Carre’, the original city built by Bienville (also known as the French Quarter), presides over a huge 90 degree curve in the Mississippi River some 110 miles north of its confluence with the Gulf of Mexico. The city limits of New Orleans are co-terminous with the boundaries of Orleans Parish (outlined in yellow in the photo-map at left). However, as can be seen in the photo-map, the metropolitan area of the city has grown well beyond these boundaries. In just under three hundred years, New Orleans has grown from the one-square mile settlement founded by Bienville to cover parts of four parishes in southeastern Louisiana.
When the French arrived at the end of the 17th century, they were greeted by this swampy land that they called Le Flottant (the Floating Land). Their description was not far from the truth. The land is naturally very wet, even spongy. A person must dig through twenty feet of land through a hole that would quickly drown him as it filled up with water before he reached what can be loosely termed “solid ground”. He’d have to dig another 80 feet before he reached bedrock consisting of compacted clay, and silty sand. For this reason all structures of any significance must be built on pilings hammered deep into the ground. Skyscrapers are a new feature to the city’s landscape, as these require pilings of thick concrete set more than a hundred feet into the ground. Such is the nature of a low-lying alluvial plain such as the Mississippi River delta. Surrounding this Floating Land on all sides is water, lots and lots of water. The French saw the land as an island, which they named the Isle d’Orleans (Isle of Orleans). The Isle d’Orleans soon became a political and regional entity with geographic boundaries. These boundaries (outlined in yellow on the photo-map at left) were identified by the French as the Mississippi River on the west and south, Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Maurepas on the north, Breton Sound (part of the Gulf of Mexico) on the east, and what the French named the Iberville River (that connected the Mississippi at Baton Rouge to Lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain) to the northwest. This area is on the east bank of the Mississippi River. However, throughout Louisiana’s history – after the territory was divided along the river itself, and only that part of the original territory west of the river was known as Louisiana – the Isle of Orleans remained a part of the Lousiana Territory.
Beginning in the latter part of the 19th century, and continuing on into the 20th, New Orleanians began a concerted project to drain the Isle of Orleans of its shallow swamp. Dry land is a valuable commodity in southeast Louisiana. As the city of New Orleans grew, more of it was needed. All of the high land along the river’s bank had long since been claimed and developed, but more was needed. In order to reclaim the swamp, a series of canals and pumping stations were built. The pumping stations were able to drain hundreds of square miles of swampland, pumping the excess water into Lake Pontchartrain to the north of the city and into the swamps and bayous to the south, thus leaving behind a dry, yet still spongy prairie upon which the city could sprawl. As can be seen in the photo-map above, the system of canals drains the land farthest away from the River. These are the lowest areas within the city, lying below sea level and naturally covered by shallow marshes and swamps. No canals are needed to drain the land close to the river’s banks since the river has built up this land to an elevation a few feet or more above sea level. As water must flow down, the canals drain into the Lake and bayous surrounding the city instead of into the River itself, as one might expect. The few canals that do empty into the River are connected to it in order to allow barge traffic to pass through them.
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