Voluntary immersion in contradictions of all kinds

It is the solemn responsibility of intelligent people to wrestle with contradiction. The month of May has served up a heaping load of contradiction while the Reasonable Reporter was busy with other things, not the least of which was exploring the inherent contradictions in police work and motherhood, for a news series on female cops with kids.

Contradiction #1: As that work was being done, a woman who operated quite outside the law chose to end her life, rather than go to prison. The suicide of D.C. Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey should have served to spotlight the nation’s schizophrenic public attitude toward the oldest profession. But it didn’t. Since we began to glorify ourselves by identifying and taunting hypocrites, news organizations are no longer occupied with analysis of victimless crimes.

A notable feature of Palfrey’s legal battle was the publication of phone records which were presumed to contain the identities of many high-profile Beltway customers. (While it yielded few that were considered “newsworthy” it caused some johns to scramble to the phone and order their attorneys to negotiate ways to keep their names quiet.)

Meanwhile, there are American cities where powerless, ordinary-citizen-johns are publicly humiliated through a program that publishes their names in newspapers, and forces them to pay money to attend federally subsidized “john school.” In john school, the customers are educated about the dangers of buying sex on the street. In some of the cities — the Planet San Francisco for instance, where political enlightenment dictates the designation “sex worker” rather than prostitute — the johns are chastised by former sex workers for the psychological harm their patronage causes the women. Sounds almost sexy, doesn’t it?

Did any of the late Deborah Jean Palfrey’s johns advocate, administer, or vote for the federal funding that pays for john schools? This contradiction has not been explored, and Palfrey’s suicide went rather unnoticed, as sex-and-politics stories go.

Contradiction #2: Hillary Clinton is offering up some finely-crafted contradiction, promising simultaneously that she will never give up the fight, and that she will support the nominee, implicit in which is that she will not be the nominee.

This seems to sum up a longstanding Hillary Clinton dilemma. She is the alpha dog who isn’t free to fully express her alpha-ness.

Recall the soft entry, with the chatty living room video and the pink suits. At Nevada caucus appearances, everyone who introduced Hillary or who spoke on her behalf reliably followed this three-part formula: Didn’t know her and I had no opinion of her. Then I met her, and was surprised by her intelligence. Oh, and I was really taken with how nice she is. She’s really nice. Really, she is.

The focus on nice was necessary, since Hillary was not considered likeable, and was generally not known for being nice.

Why didn’t they know what the rest of us smart girls know? It is not possible to be both the smartest girl in the class, and the most popular girl in the class. There are plenty of smart girls who can testify that nobody has ever pulled it off. The smart girls inside the campaign should have figured this out much sooner.

Hillary has gone from nicer-than-we-could-have-imagined, back to tougher- than-everyone-else. She broke down and cried in New Hampshire. Four months later she was touted in Indiana for having testicles. (The testicle talk was quickly put on ice, you should pardon the expression. It was just too amusing to be of any help.)

Contradiction #3: Apropos of nothing, except for voluntary immersion in contradictions of all kinds. iTunes has made it possible to spend a dollar and own a single song by an artist whose broader repertoire is not of any interest.

The Reasonable Reporter is not and has never been a fan of Bruce Springsteen. But as a student of audio production, she is prepared to credit him with one of the most perfect pieces of music ever produced, recently rediscovered through the miracle of iTunes.

For anyone who’s forgotten, and for anyone who’s never heard it, Tunnel of Love is a study in contradiction, swirling and bubbly on top, suggesting the ecstatic giddiness of being swept into love. Beneath the top tracks, there’s a strength and consistency that supports the song’s lyrics, which lay out the maturity and commitment required to stay in love once you’re up to your neck in it.

All the while, every sting and strain and guitar strum on every track is clear, and the song is subtly punctuated with the sounds of carnival rides. Subtly punctuated, she repeated.

In two decades since the song was produced, multi-track production technology has become so simple, anyone can do it. But nobody is engaging in this kind of artistry. Check it out, you can’t beat it for a buck.

Even an old guy like McCain would know better.

“Hold on a second, Sweetie,” said the Democratic front-runner to the female reporter. And Barack Obama says John McCain has lost his bearings! What’s next, for crying all night, “How’s it going, toots?” “Be right with ya, doll?”

The Reasonable Reporter is not particularly sensitive about misplaced terms of endearment from men. Most men mean well. And let’s face it, some of the things they say are just plain funny.

One former boss actually said, in the context of a formal review, “You know, you’re a very sharp gal.” That’s some damn funny material, and why squelch it? God knows, there’s little enough humor in the workplace.

But in politics, the guys who blast beyond the level of, let’s say, Commissioner of Traffic and Parking — they need to mind their manners when it comes to interactions with women. That’s because lots of women are touchy as hell about the way you treat them.

(And this is ironic, considering how an association to any sex-related misstep by just the right man can pay off in spades for a sharp gal. Consider Eliot Spitzer’s call girl, whose singing ambitions were discovered, and who racked up thousands of downloads from people curious to sample her music after the former New York governor’s prostitution scandal broke.)

Now Detroit TV reporter Peggy Agar has national profile as a result of having been double-dissed by a presidential candidate, who simultaneously ducked her question and addressed her as “sweetie.” Agar was presented with an interesting dilemma. Let it pass, and become the heroine of local newsroom folklore, or report it, which would inevitably put her at the center of the story.

Agar recorded her now-famous news package, in which she focused on campaign issues. She included audio of her own shouted question to Obama and the sweetie response, and tagged out of her report saying, “This sweetie never did get an answer to that question.”

This was not necessarily the wrong choice, given our American fixation with fake respect in politics, and given that Mr. Obama is beating the socks off of a classic 1970s feminist. The blunder needed to be reported, and by the way, it was reported by other outlets, something any first-year journalism student could have predicted.

But Agar took a cheap shot, which was the easy way out. When she decided to make herself part of the story, she put herself on the hook for pursuing the interesting question: Shouldn’t a law professor- Democratic politician- minority presidential candidate who came of age in the 1980s know better?

She might have been justified in breaking with protocol to chase down Obama and his entourage like a bunch of dogs, and throw a righteous fit — off camera — in order to end up with a great step-back piece about gender and power and elitism, topics which have become central to this race.

Of course, the Reasonable Reporter has no idea what Agar was up against in that particular situation. Sometimes it’s impossible to push, sometimes there are physical constraints, sometimes you really do need a moment to think. She may have lost the opportunity by pausing to ask herself, um, did he just call me sweetie?

As for Obama, he later called her and more-or-less owned up losing his bearings. He made a very skillful apology, and that’s why he’s the front-runner.

Gibbons divorce- we hope to honor the boundaries.

Hey wait a minute — isn’t this the state that made divorce into a commodity? Why the preoccupation with our governor’s failed marriage?

Here’s why: because there’s a lingering bit of neurosis in our American souls that says politicians should have solid marriages, while surgeons, college professors, accountants, hair dressers, and bus drivers can get divorced with no inquiry as to its affect on their job performance. This says a lot more about our attitude toward government than it does about our attitude toward marriage or professional competence.

Governor Gibbons has asked for privacy, and few details are available. That hasn’t stopped us from placing it at the top of the news, and won’t stop further probing into the most personal details from Jim and Dawn Gibbons’ marriage. Someone will get them, and someone will publish them.

What won’t be described, because it can’t be, is their personal anguish. Those who haven’t experienced divorce can’t do it justice, and those who have, if they’ve got a beating heart, would rather not try.

The Reasonable Reporter recalls an earlier chapter, when a chilly darkness descended over her own household while the daily business of life went on for more than a year. Weekends were planned, dry cleaning was picked up, friends were entertained, material obligations were met. But there was an odd emptiness to it all.

More strange, in retrospect, was the utter lack of eye contact. How do two people live under the same roof day after day, week after week, and never look each other in the eye?

Ah, the tidal wave of relief on the day the word was finally spoken. “Divorce.” It wasn’t until three months later, during the final sweep of the vacuum cleaner over the vacant floors of a vacant house, that the sadness finally set in.

As for job performance, it sharpened during and after the divorce. The job was a place to focus. Besides, when your worthiness as a life partner is called into question, professional competence takes on new importance. Hell, your boss always loves you as along as you deliver the goods. That’s one relationship where the rules are clear cut.

Probably, no two divorces are alike. But one suspects the broad outlines are similar. And one hopes we can honor the boundaries. It’s not up to us, of course, it’s up to our bosses, who love us as long as we deliver the goods.

Nevada GOP: Ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille

The hijacking of the Nevada Republican convention by Ron Paul supporters was not exactly a stealth attack. Let’s begin with the premise that people who unselfconsciously declare a revolution are very likely committed to make something happen.

Beyond that, all the indications were there. Although the GOP numbers were dwarfed by the Democratic Turn-Nevada-Blue campaign, and remained in its shadow for the purpose of news coverage, Republican pre-caucus registration surged. The overwhelmingly unifying characteristic about the new registrants was their support for Ron Paul.

How about the Washoe County convention? Fully a third of those present were Paul supporters, and they were not shiny, happy Republican attendees, but rather the in-your-face variety, pushing a string of unsuccessful and time-consuming fundamentalist libertarian amendments to the party platform. At last, the proposals became so frivolous that a Paul campaign official and one of his local stalwarts took the most vocal of their activists aside, and told him to give it a rest.

The most significant (and under-analyzed) sign that Nevada’s “Ron Paul Revolution” wouldn’t peter out — Paul’s second-place caucus finish behind Mitt Romney, and ahead of now-presumptive nominee John McCain, who still has only lukewarm support from the party’s base.

And what can be said about the established institution that knows a revolution is brewing, and fails to fend off the attack? In this case, the phrase that comes to mind is, “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”

Now comes the once-luminous Republican Norma Desmond, batting her giant false eyelashes and twirling her beach umbrella, assuming, ridiculously, that she’s still as commanding as she was in her prime, as the silent screen legend. The Ron Paul revolutionaries are her Joe Gillis, dressed as her boyfriend in the elegant clothing she provides, taking refuge in her mansion. For his own selfish purposes, Joe indulges the delusions of the no-longer alluring diva, who’s oblivious to a new world turning outside the walls of her compound.

How did the Nevada Republican party become Norma Desmond? First, by living in a state of apparent denial. Second, by cutting off communication with the outside world. Or perhaps they never were inclined to communicate, and now that the GOP’s best days seem to be in the rear view mirror, nobody in the party knows how to do it.

Many Republican politicians, as the Reasonable Reporter has previously noted, are loath to interact with the media, and conduct such interactions grudgingly when they deign to engage in them. The party has been slow to adopt advanced communication technology. It also seems blissfully unaware that in the street, there is the kind of disdain for its core philosophies that can be addressed only with vigorous communication.

Even in a year when they acknowledge they’re fighting for their lives, the Silver State’s Republicans can’t muster a communication strategy. Their missives are occasional, and mostly inconsequential to the day’s events. They tend not to try to drive the news, which is, by the way, an endeavor never abandoned for long by the Silver State’s Democrats, who are quite skilled at it.

Who can expect grassroots enthusiasm, when there’s such tepid public outreach from the organization? Recall that when Norma Desmond finally appeared in person at MGM to confront studio executives, the guards at the front gate of the empire her stardom helped to build didn’t know who she was.

The Ron Paul revolutionaries know they’re on a suicide mission, but they don’t care. They are there, no matter what they say, to disrupt the nomination process. In the end, they, like Joe Gillis, will float face down in the pool at Norma Desmond’s mansion, riddled with bullets from her gun. Norma, having snuffed the discordant element in her life, will descend the grand staircase, preening for the news cameras, convinced that they’re capturing her close-up for the movies, rather than her final exit from Sunset Blvd.

Dems have a rousing debate. Zzzzzzzzz.

Remember the summer of 2007, when the candidates had 90 seconds or less to answer a question and everyone wanted to hear more? Those were the days. The Reasonable Reporter tuned in late to the Philadelphia debate, and didn’t hear the ground rules. Apparently Clinton and Obama were instructed to drone on until snores from the audience reached their ears, or until the opponent had a birthday, whichever happened first.

Clinton provided the most memorable moment, suggesting that the GOP should simply apologize for the last seven years and withdraw from the general election. None of the punditry has dissected that remark, but then again, the pundits had dozed off by the time she said it.

Just when you thought there were no new ways to show contempt for a reporter… Along comes the BlackBerry.

The Reasonable Reporter has been kicked out of offices, stood up for appointments, and chastised for stories that didn’t comport with the world view of the subject. Once, a bureaucrat who spotted the press badge blurted out, “I hate reporters,” before any conservation had begun. One copes, and one tries to remain gracious.

Technology, though, provides ever-expanding opportunities for rude behavior. Last week a young spokesperson – with a hot microphone in her face and the reporter’s question half-spoken — grabbed her BlackBerry and tapped out a rather lengthy response to an incoming message. Her eyes glazed and she uttered a disengaged “uh-huh” to (sort of) acknowledge that the reporter was still speaking to her, (haltingly at this point, stunned by her rudeness, and wondering whether it was a signal of dismissal).

The BlackBerry’s purpose is to facilitate instant communication. So far as we know, such communication is not disrupted by a polite word to any persons who might be conducting actual face-to-face communication with the user. Something on the order of “Excuse me, I have to answer this right away. One moment, please.”

By the old-fashioned standards of the last century, a mere nine years ago, communication deferred by two minutes or so is still fairly instantaneous. The young spokesperson might have waited until the reporter, who was part of a group summoned by the young spokesperson for a briefing, had departed. But there was something apparently more pressing than the questions of the reporter who had responded to the young spokesperson’s invitation.

Technology has evolved so fast since the young spokesperson’s generation left home, that the Mommies and Daddies – even if it had occurred to them — didn’t have a chance to incorporate BlackBerry etiquette into their training about such things as table manners and thank you notes. So maybe it’s now the job of the bosses. This must-respond-now behavior is not confined to conversations with reporters. It’s widespread, it’s most prevalent among younger users, who seem oblivious to its alienating effect, and it’s rude. Someone needs to point out that the connection with the human beings in the room is not, and should not be secondary to the wireless connection.

Lost and found and lost again: The art of the basics in corporate communication

“Of course you kick your opponent when he’s down,” said a wise friend over cocktails one evening, discussing an issue-oriented political campaign he’d led to success.

“And then you kick him again. And again. And again.”

The Reasonable Reporter recalled his words this morning when the Reno Gazette Journal arrived. Someone, who may now be in line for a raise and promotion at Saint Mary’s Hospital, had issued a swift kick to Renown Regional Medical Center.

Top-of-fold in the RGJ –- coverage of the campaign orchestrated by the SEIU against Renown, central to which has been repeated assertions by Renown nurses that the quality of patient care at the medical center is suffering due to short staffing.

Obscuring the headline and part of the photo –- an advertising sticker, affixed like a post-it to the front page, declaring Saint Mary’s to be “Ranked #1 in Quality in Northern Nevada.” Ouch.

Not complicated. Not high tech. Not expensive, relatively speaking. Not fair.
But this little guerilla tactic revives a lost art in corporate communication. Twenty-first century communicators have become so preoccupied with trying to out-tech the other guy that they’ve forgotten the basics. They’ve forgotten how to bob and weave, and how to dance with real feet on the real ground.

On the ground. That brings us to the sure winner of this year’s Duh Award for Corporate Event Planning. Apparently none of the planners for the Olympic Committee bothered ahead of time to research the political proclivities of San Francisco, the site of the first Tibetan Freedom concert, where “Free Tibet” bumper stickers graced the back of every third vehicle for the latter half of the 1990s. It is, moreover, a city where anyone will protest anything.

So yeah, it’s kind of predictable that running the torch for the Beijing Olympics through San Francisco would cause, at minimum, some consternation. At worst, all hell could have broken loose. Can you say “Duh?”

In fifty states, they couldn’t find a more suitable city to host the torch? It’s not hyperbole to suggest that this event could have erupted into something resembling the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, causing a marketing calamity. (Although the Canadian business mag Financial Post reports the Olympic sponsors tend to hang in there through political turbulence, and even expect same.)

Someone in the Olympic planning cohort woke up just in time to avert outright chaos, which was the good news. The bad news is, a lot of McDonald’s and Coca Cola customers truly excited to see the flame were disappointed when the route was changed, and the concluding ceremony amounted to hustling the torch onto a waiting airplane.

There’s more good news, though. Call it an unintended consequence. Americans who might not have been able to find Tibet on a map have gotten a lesson in global politics. Zimbabwe’s mysterious election results may have eluded them. Hugo Chavez might preside permanently in Venezuela. Um, is he a contender in the World Wrestling Federation championships? Hey wait a minute, where’s the torch, and what’s Tibet?

The beloved Olympic torch, like a good teacher, brought the subject home, even for the students who usually don’t care.

Sounds like 1998, on the OTHER radio station.

Dispatch from the Planet San Francisco, where one needn’t rely on cable news networks to feel the pulse of politics. Everything from walking the dog to shopping for groceries is a political act. A dose of political vibe is available just strolling into a café to buy a bagel in the morning.

It would be better, says the man stirring cream into his coffee as he awaits his bagel, to make the bagels here in the community, rather than trucking them in. Imported bagels send the community’s jobs and money elsewhere, and the trucks ruin the pavement. Do we need to guess where he stands on NAFTA?

This is the town where, for a short time in the 1990s, egg-throwing anti-SUV terrorists became underground heroes by stalking parked vehicles in the night, damaging countless paint jobs in an overt expression of hatred for conspicuous consumption. The public controversy arising over this destruction of property? Whether the egg-throwers were, indeed, justified.

Here, politics is served raw. So the Reasonable Reporter scans the San Francisco talk radio menu, on which, long before the advent of Air America, there existed robust outlets for all political points of view.

On this night, listeners to KGO’s Ray Taliaferro — arguably the hard left – are at full tilt bashing the Clintons. Not just Hillary, but Bill, and Chelsea, too, for her “none-of-your-business” response to a question from a college student about her father’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky.

The talk show context is the Obama-Reverend Wright controversy, one clearly relished by the Clinton camp. The Clintons are pounded by caller after angry caller. These radio listeners, obvious Obama supporters, don’t like Hillary’s attitude toward Obama. But their outrage has a larger moral basis. This discussion is dominated by anger left over from the Clinton White House years.

“They embarrassed this country, and it’s time for them to get off the stage.”

“Hillary says ‘you can’t choose your relatives, but you can choose your minister.’ How dare she? She chose her husband, and then she turned a blind eye while he abused women.”

“Chelsea says it’s none of our business. What the President of the United States does in the oval office is our business.”

These are the approximate words of the callers, scrawled into a notebook as soon as the opportunity presented itself, so as to preserve them as faithfully as possible. Yikes. The Reasonable Reporter is having a flashback, in a Twilight Zone sort of way. Or maybe it’s true that if you live long enough, you hear everything.

The words of these callers, minus any references to Obama, could be lifted straight from tonight’s tape and dropped into a movie depicting talk radio, circa 1998. But it would be a movie about the other kind of talk radio. You know, the kind that carries Rush Limbaugh. These were almost precisely the words a decade ago of the callers to conservative talk radio.

In 1998, it was the right-wingers who decried the moral implications of Bill Clinton’s sexual behavior, with all its outward ripples affecting American dignity and equal protection in the workplace. Angry radio listeners from the left were outraged at the right’s outrage. In those days, they agreed with Chelsea. It was nobody’s business.

While tonight’s KGO radio listeners didn’t lament the use of presidential privilege as a tool to deny Paula Jones her day in court, the fat lady has not yet sung. Stranger things could occur, and well they might.

Of Guns and Frightened Women

Eight unsavory characters are blasted into eternity by a gun-wielding Jodie Foster. She’s making her way through a dark period, after a horrifying assault in Central Park by thugs who killed her boyfriend and put her into a three-week coma. She kills some people along the way. That’s the plot, and the body count, without ruining it for anyone who still intends to rent The Brave One.

The film calls to mind other stories of women and danger. North Reno women, whose rational anxieties have been fanned into a raging inferno by news coverage of a prowling serial rapist turned murderer. Some of those women are carrying pepper spray and taking self defense classes. Surely, determined rapists everywhere are shivering in their boots.

Back to Reno in a moment. The Brave One also causes the Reasonable Reporter to reflect, from her calm perspective in Nevada, on the surreal facts of life back on the Planet San Francisco. Was it really so common to hear gunfire out on the street? Was it really routine to speculate, based on the sound of the sirens, about the distance between our living room and the spot where the body lay? The speculation became ritual after a shooting that left a bystander lying about 25 yards from the front door. Did that really happen? Seems like a bad dream now.

And this was a desirable neighborhood, where newly-arrived young professionals lined up to pay exorbitant rents. Less affluent college students and would-be artists with day jobs packed in four to a flat. Unflinchingly, they wrote the big rent checks, in exchange for the gritty panache that came with a Mission District address. Many were surprised when their fantasy of a loft-and-cafe existence in the hip inner-city was punctured with bullets and bodies, and yes, the occasional bystander was caught in the crossfire.

Official word from the San Francisco Police in 2001 was that no permit to carry a weapon had been issued in the city for a more than a decade. This was the official word, but without much effort, the Reasonable Reporter tracked down a firearms trainer who had recently prepared a key figure in a high-profile criminal case to pass muster for a permit. The recently-permitted person provided off-the-record confirmation.

So much for the official word, which was so much official crap if you were well connected, or if the city had a compelling interest in your survival. It was true for ordinary citizens, though. Like the divorced mother of two in the Richmond District, whose menacing ex-husband ignored the restraining order and showed up at her apartment to kill her in front of their children. She would have been ineligible for a permit, had it occurred to her to apply for it. Yet guns were everywhere.

In The Brave One, Jodie Foster’s New York City heroine is freaked out and alone, and feels the need for protection. She’s unable to legally purchase a firearm, but when she walks out of the gun shop empty-handed, a stranger who overheard the unsuccessful transaction taps her on the shoulder. The need is met, and Foster becomes a vigilante.

Here’s another inner-city fantasy. An ordinary citizen gets her hands on a gun, and what follows naturally is that she embarks on a killing spree.

A variation of that fantasy is now extended to college students, as a spate of campus violence fuels debates about how to protect them. In the fantasy, armed students get drunk, and engage in a dormitory shoot-out. A competing fantasy has a lone woman in a dark campus parking lot — perhaps a UNR parking lot — defending herself by drawing a gun on a would-be rapist. Each scenario remains a fantasy until the day it occurs. And each could occur, irrespective of the law.

The difference as things currently stand – and this is where poor Jodie Foster got off to a bad start in The Brave One – is that the parking garage attack will go unreported. Any reasonable college freshman can figure out that it’s not worth risking a weapons charge in order to report that everything turned out OK.

Back to Reno, where the female population is jumpy, and police are imploring women to help in the capture of Brianna Denison’s killer by coming forward if they’ve been attacked. Who’s going to report her on-campus tangle with the man who might be most-wanted, if she also has to report her own criminal activity? Hiring a lawyer isn’t in the budget for most college women, never mind the hassle and the stigma and the famously invasive questions.

(If you’re interested, here’s Jodie Foster’s own commentary on The Brave One, from an interview in Entertainment Weekly:

“I don’t believe that any gun should be in the hand of a thinking, feeling, breathing human being. Americans are by nature filled with rage-slash-fear. And guns are a huge part of our culture. I know I’m crazy because I’m only supposed to say that in Europe. But violence corrupts absolutely. By the end of this, her transformation is complete. ”F— all of you, now I’m just going to kill people with my bare hands.”)

The most interesting Clinton success story has not been shared.

The Reasonable Reporter can only wonder what it’s like to be so influential that highly-placed campaign officials make a personal appearance to flog you for the tone of your coverage. The vicarious experience is available thanks to Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who shares an account of a meeting where an angry Clinton spokesman cited a skit from Saturday Night Live to a group of major-league political journalists, as proof that they’ve shown a bias in favor of Barack Obama.

(In the SNL skit, located on YouTube, three worshipful journalists grovel before Obama on the set of a debate. He forgives them their favoritism, as Hillary Clinton looks on, never given the opportunity to speak.)

Milbank relates the incident to make a point about the degree to which the Clinton campaign is grasping for a way to explain failure. One way is to blame the media, where Obama shines brighter as a projection of collective hope than Clinton as a workhorse for better bureaucracy.

But who’s fault is that? When they made Hillary less toxic, her handlers also made her less interesting, in the mass-market sense. Having now filed down all the sharp edges that made Hillary fascinating,  her pre-campaign bout of self-improvement might be one of her greatest success stories.  But it hasn’t been shared.

Eighteen months ago, Hillary Clinton was one of the most cruelly caricatured people in the country. Talk shows used to drop the sound of cawing crows behind her voice. Whole subsections of joke websites were devoted to her. She’s been analogized to the Wicked Witch of the West; she’s been portrayed as a dominatrix dragging a dog-collared Bill around on a leash; she’s been productized as a doll with a nutcracker between her thighs.

Few of the caricatures are surviving at the mass level, because her campaign persona doesn’t support them. And this is the interesting story. You want change? Female viewers could be glued to the tube watching how Hillary Clinton made the transition from perceived she-monster to smiling, accessible PTA mom with a hairdo that never droops and a flattering executive wardrobe.

This is not about fashion, although fashion isn’t an unimportant element. It’s about a Pygmalion-like transition that must have begun with appearance, but clearly extended to voice coaching, cadence training, and body language adjustments. Who knows what else was involved, or how many people played Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle? The point is that it worked.

This is no small accomplishment, and in fact, it capsulizes the strong-woman struggle the campaign has labored in vain to convey. Many’s the tough, competent woman who’s been told to “pull back” if she wants to succeed. To curb her assertiveness, to smile more, to be more feminine. It’s advice that goes down hard for smart women who grew up with the drumbeat of feminism always in the background. It’s also hard as hell to do. Try changing your natural demeanor for even an hour-long meeting.

American women support a magazine industry that thrives month after month,  shouting self-improvement instructions to us while we’re in line at the supermarket. Some of the instructions are about our physical appearance, but many are about changing our relationship to the world. We have also supported the creation of a new television genre – the makeover show. Judging from the way those shows are proliferating, we must love them.

Hillary’s problem is her insistence that voters want meat and potatoes when they are showing a clear preference for something more creamy and less filling. Telling the story of her reinvention might seem risky, but it’s no more so than any other imaging gamble. If Obama can run from event-to-event with Oprah on his arm, and still be taken seriously as a potential commander-in-chief of the American armed forces, then why not?

Do you all need your mouths washed out with soap?

Jane Fonda. Wasn’t she married to a man who owned a television network? Seems like she’d know there are words you don’t say on TV.

But on a visit to the Today Show, Fonda dropped one of the most vile words in the English language. Fonda said the C-word on a fluffy morning news show watched by millions of women who think dodge ball is too violent a playground pastime for their kids. Effortlessly, she said it, and without an apparent second thought. The word rolled right out of her mouth, like it was the primary ingredient in a cookie recipe, or the name of the shop where her hair stylist works.

Feminists of Fonda’s generation have a love-hate relationship with the C-word, and some have declared that it’s liberating to say it. Letting it slip on the Today Show was a verbal malfunction of major proportion, brought on by Fonda’s involvement in a much-acclaimed stage play with the unfortunate name “The Vagina Monologues.” The Reasonable Reporter has never seen the Vagina Monologues, and is unable to say whether the show is as revolting as its name.

In other news of 1960s feminists versus the English language, Hillary Clinton got huffy with MSNBC when one of its reporters suggested the Clintons “pimped out” their daughter, Chelsea, by putting the young woman on the campaign trail. Hillary scolded MSNBC for allowing the P-word to be used in conjunction with her daughter. “I became Chelsea’s mother long before I ran for any office,” she said in a letter.

Hillary’s outrage was, of course, momma-bear posturing, but it says two interesting things. First, that she is quite out of touch with pop culture. “Pimp,” a word once doubly loaded for its sexual and criminal connotations, has been defanged and defined downward through repeated use in other contexts. (That doesn’t mean reporters acting in their professional capacity should use it.)

The second thing it says is how damn smart Condi Rice was to resist Republicans who wanted her to seek the presidency. Some in the party thought she’d make a great candidate. We’ll see your first viable woman, and we’ll raise you a viable black woman with actual foreign policy experience.

But Condi squelched the idea immediately, and the Reasonable Reporter wonders whether she foresaw the endless situations in which momma-bear could have favorably compared herself, because she is a mother, to Condi, who isn’t. Childless women know one thing well. We know that our key deficiency, in the eyes of many parents, is childlessness.

Dr. Rice is a brilliant scholar, Hillary might say. But does she know what it is to sit up at night with a sick child and wonder whether her health insurance will cover the problem? Dr. Rice has built an admirable career, but has she ever had to worry about whether her child is reading at grade level? Ad infinitum.

This disqualifying technique would rock the Richter scale with Hillary’s target demographic. It would be pulled out at every opportunity, and would come without the kind of blowback that resulted from the Martin Luther King- couldn’t-do-it-without-LBJ potshot.

Finally, Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin said on a radio show that John Edwards thinks Obama is “kind of a pussy.” For crying all night, people, do you all need your mouths washed out with soap? The Reasonable Reporter is a First Amendment absolutist, and, by the way, has more than a passing acquaintance with profanity. But not on the air. People who appear on news programs – reporters, hosts and guests – have a responsibility to exercise some judgment when they choose their words.