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Recently in Salon People

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My confidence in Dole's political instincts and potential was never high (as I told Charlotte Hays early last summer in our interview for the Women's Quarterly), but I must say the media had incredible gall to complain about Dole's withdrawal when they didn't do squat to help her -- so besotted were they with the chimera of Hillary Clinton's possible senatorial run in New York. Virtually no attention was paid to Dole as she plunged pluckily into the crowds in state after state, which led to her surprisingly strong third-place finish in the Iowa straw poll in August. The lack of serious press scrutiny deprived Dole of the opportunity to learn from her mistakes and to make key adjustments of her saccharine delivery and often nebulous policy statements.

However, most of the blame rests on the candidate herself, who skittishly avoided the free exposure of national talk shows where she could have honed her debating skills. As many commentators have observed, running for president without a trial campaign for lower office is probably too much of a stretch. Dole seemed clueless about the sheer range of concrete issues needed to prove a candidate's viability for the presidency. And her lack of all-pro handlers was quaintly naive. While the once painfully dowdy Hillary Clinton has had a top-to-toe makeover by her Hollywood chums (with pantsuits now concealing her figure flaws), Dole scarcely budged from her early-1980s Joan Collins-as-Alexis Carrington look, which signaled in its own way how culturally sheltered and frozen Dole was.

If the glass ceiling is ever to be broken in politics, it's women themselves who must rethink their sexual personae. The first woman president will need to avoid Elizabeth Dole's fatiguing sorority-girl chirpiness and seek a more convincing authority of manner -- which is already possessed by both Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Camille Paglia Camille Paglia's column appears in Salon People every third Wednesday. + Biography + Archives

Feinstein impressed me anew last week with her performance on CNN's "Crossfire." "She should be president," exclaimed my partner Alison as we watched. "She's rational and smart, and she seems stable and trustworthy," Alison said. "She has true self-confidence without egotism. She's not a flibbertigibbet; she's not obsessed with herself."

Whatever reservations some California residents of both parties may have about Feinstein, please note that I have been studying her for years as a national candidate, a seasoned politician with foreign relations expertise who could represent this nation to the world. As a senator and former mayor, Dianne Feinstein, unlike Elizabeth Dole, has long experience with the harsh give-and-take of the day-to-day political process, that dusty bull pit of butting, shoving and goring where both winners and losers must come up smiling.

Feinstein is tough yet cordial and even-tempered. She projects hard-nosed realism yet compassion and concern. And she sure can parry and thrust with the hectoring media, who never throw her off message. Dianne Feinstein is in my view the leading contender for next year's Democratic vice-presidential nomination. She is manifestly well prepared to assume the presidency in a crisis.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, continues galumphing down her celebrity-studded, taxpayer-gouging primrose path. Coldly calculating, hedging, ethically obtuse and strident on the stump, Hillary does a great job of snowing phony humanitarians like the mama-seeking talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell (who organized this week's frivolous Broadway birthday bash for the first lady). But unlike Elizabeth Dole, who was Secretary of Transportation and president of the American Red Cross, Hillary has never successfully run anything in her life -- not even her dysfunctional family in their decades-long squat in government housing.

Salon reader Fred Dimond calls Hillary a "male chauvinist" because she is married to "a serial adulterer who constantly does her dirt" and because she "not only takes it but covers it up":

While Hillary masquerades as a defender of women's rights and upholder of oppressed females, she has been part of the group protecting and defending Bill from the just repercussions of his ruthless predatory behavior toward the opposite sex. In fact, we had a very credible rape allegation on television. No comment from Saint Hillary. No comment on Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, Kathryn Gracen and a boatload more. She would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to know of these situations, or pusillanimous not to react to them. Why doesn't she? Because Bill is her ticket to ride, and she cannot afford to get off the horse. She is willing to cooperate in Bill's subversion of women's rights for political gain and power.

Dimond calls Hillary's behavior "hypocritical" and "outrageous", and I thoroughly agree. In my interview with radio host Rush Limbaugh in the October issue of the Limbaugh Letter, I further explore Hillary's history of questionable behavior -- such as her perversion of her assigned role on the platform at her Wellesley College commencement to embarrass an eminent African-American guest, Republican Sen. Edward Brooke. (In this piece I also hail Rush Limbaugh's "tremendous intellectual influence" on the American mass audience -- which our snobbish fossil leftists, who pretend to speak for the people, of course know nothing about.)

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