A Lipstick President

Dowd: "Luckily, the first woman president is tall, a shade taller than W., so she's eyeball to eyeball with generals and ambassadors. And she's a redhead. Redheads, a recent study showed, have a higher tolerance for pain. In the show's premiere, a lot of pain is dished up for Ms. Davis's character, Mackenzie Allen, the vice president of a conservative president who keels over before the first hour is over."

"He told me he modeled his female president not on Hillary Clinton but on Susan Lyne, the smart, elegant former president of ABC Entertainment who is chief executive at Martha Stewart Inc. He said he wanted someone "of rather unimpeachable integrity, very kind, very calm."

"But now Hillary's voice is often pianissimo on the current hot issue: how to get out of Iraq. Once we made sure Saddam was armed against Iran. Now we may have to arm an Islamic protégé of Iran if we want to pull out. But Hillary's not playing the vocal peacenik this time - she's the cagey hawk. She knows if she wants to be the first woman president, she can't have love beads in her jewelry box."

"But by hanging back and trimming her positions, by keeping her powder dry until a more politically advantageous time, she may miss the moment when Americans are looking for someone to emerge from her cowering party to articulate their anger about Iraq or their fear about a Supreme Court that will scale back women's rights and civil rights here, as Islamic courts do the same in Iraq. Hillary may get caught flat-footed. Or she may be right in betting that there's no need to do anything rash now, like leading." [NYT]