A reader writes:
Tonight with my daughter and wife I watched the first half of Stephen Frears’ and Peter Morgan’s The Queen. Your comments regarding Hillary remind me of the tone deaf comments and disposition of the royals in the film to Diana, her death and the public’s response to it. They just don’t get it. Tone deaf because no matter how closely you watched Hillary in the White House, you miss what she meant to some of us, what her senatorial career means to some of us, and what her chances of being the first female president means to us. Her book sold because many of us are moved by her work. Many of us prefer her to Bill who we also cherish in the same way we love and value Eleanor over FDR. Yes you were close up in the 1990s, but as Morton’s movie demonstrates, some phenomena are almost unrecognisable from up close.
My very precocious 9 year old sat with me watching a few minutes of Chris Matthews show tonight and hearing so much about the horse race and Bloomberg and Rudy. She asked very specific questions about who can and who can’t run. Can she ever run? Could her father? What kind of profession must you come from? Do you need a certain degree? My fourth grade students ask this question all the time: every couple weeks. And Hillary’s running means something completely different than Barack or even Libby Dole. It is possible you are too close to your work and what you know to see that, just as I am too close to my work and what I know not to see that. She and her ever-present coffee cup are real to a lot of us. I have never worked for a candidate and I don’t work for her but she is someone who makes my daughter’s horizon more real.
The reader is right. I don’t get it. But I did get Diana. Loved her. Ditto Maggie. And Golda. I think it’s partly because I would love to see a woman president that I can’t bear to think this phony could be the first one to do it.
The Dish 