Will Hillzilla Crush Obambi? : MAUREEN DOWD

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
The New York Times

Will Hillzilla Crush Obambi?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 13, 2006

Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama both straddle two worlds, trying to profit from both.


MANCHESTER, N.H.

So the question of the moment is: Which would be a greater handicap in a presidential bid, gender or race?

The answer will depend, of course, on how manly the woman, and how white the black.

Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama both straddle two worlds, trying to profit from both.

Despite her desire to seem far more experienced than her rival, Hillary’s role in high-level politics has been mostly that of a spouse — a first lady who felt that she got elected too. The Yale-trained lawyer had one pump in the “The West Wing” and one in “Desperate Housewives,” one foot in the world of hotshot alphas ruling the globe and one in the world of middle-age women humiliated by their husbands’ dallying with office cupcakes.

She won her Senate seat only after becoming sympathetic as a victim. And she still struggles with the balance between her Mars and Venus sides, sometimes showing her political steel and other times fetching coffee for male colleagues.

Senator Obama glides between the black and white political worlds. In New Hampshire on Sunday, speaking to nearly all-white audiences, the Harvard-educated lawyer looked utterly at home, dressing like a Wall Street banker on casual Friday and sounding as white as Lou Dobbs.

He quoted Martin Luther King Jr. and Louis Brandeis with equal aplomb and wryly noted that when he worked rebuilding a black community on Chicago’s South Side, people there couldn’t pronounce his name and called him “Yo Momma.”

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