Campaigning While Female

In an article from Salon Life the debate continues over the difficulties of being female and running for President in a nation where women are supposed to remain young and sexy and if they cannot, then men should dump them for chicks just out of high school.

Hillary Clinton is 60 years old. In an age of lifts and injections and implants, we are beginning to forget what 60 years old looks like in nature. But as the daughter of a very beautiful woman who turned 64 on Tuesday, I can tell you that without intervention, it involves wrinkles and grooves, valleys worn deep by years of laughing and talking and furrowing a brow and reading in bad light and yelling at children.

Sixty years on a man looks similar, and a cursory examination of former presidential candidates at critical, exhausting stretches of a race would turn up pallor, flappy necks and dry skin. In the weeks before Bill Clinton (one of our youngest candidates ever, and thus one of our least pruney) was elected, he lost his voice. It was regarded as a mark of how hard he'd been working, how many sleepless nights and stump speeches and greetings, how many germy hands he'd clasped. And we've all seen what years in the Oval Office do to a candidate: From Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton to George W, there is ample evidence that being president is not a job for anti-aging enthusiasts.

If democracy is all about people getting the leaders they deserve, then this election is Hillary's. If people are so concerned about a wrinkled woman being President, then they deserve a wrinkled female President. If I believed these things were decided by honest voting, I'd entertain the idea of voting for Clinton just to foist her on the people who say nay for all the wrong reasons.

But it would be a far better joke to foist me upon them instead.