Hillary Clinton was never demure enough to make a convincing first lady. Now she may be the only Democrat with the balls to become president

When The Ttuth About Hillary was published in June,
its beleaguered author, Edward Klein, appeared on The Al Franken Show to defend his book against a uniformly negative critical reception. The liberal talk show seemed an unlikely soapbox for the author of a lurid best-selling compendium of every rumor— Liar! Liberal! Lesbian?—ever whispered about Hillary Clinton, but Klein came prepared with an equally unlikely defense. "This book, which I've written, is a book that could be written about a man," he told Franken. "It treats her as I would have treated a male subject of a biography."

With that remark Klein came close to conceding the tacit mission at the heart of his book. If Hillary's performance on 60 Minutes during Bill's 1992 presidential campaign showed voters that she would stand by her man, The Truth About Hillary suggests, on the eve of Hillary's own presidential run, that she is a man. As a child, Hillary's "parents and brothers treated her like one of the boys," Klein reports. She beats up the male students in her elementary school. A voter says of her, "You get the sense that she doesn't think like a woman. She thinks like a man." A dinner companion reveals, "She doesn't come on with any cuteness, any feminine qualities. She's not taking advantage of being a woman. You could have the very same conversations you have with her with a man." And Richard Nixon, in the book's closing anecdote, even casts doubt on her maternal instincts. Describing an encounter with Chelsea, he says: "I could see that she had a warm relationship with [her father] but was almost afraid of [her mother]. Hillary is ice-cold. You can see it in her eyes."

Even the manliest Republican would be confounded if the next Democratic nominee for president turned out to be a tomboy instead of a sissy Questioning a female politician's womanhood is a classic rightwing maneuver. In state and local races across the country, women who run for offi ce face campaigns, whisper and otherwise, implying that they're insuffi ciently feminine. "When my mother ran, she was either a lesbian or a hooker," says Cecile Richards, the president of America Votes, a coalition of the biggest liberal interest groups, and the daughter of Ann Richards, the former Texas governor. When U.S. senator George Allen — a presidential hopeful in his own right — first ran for Virginia governor, his Democratic opponent, Mary Sue Terry, had to bat down rumors of girl-on-girl action less than a month before the election.

But as Hillary Clinton gears up for 2008, Republicans have begun to worry that these tried and true tactics won't work against the not-so-junior New York senator, who has proved herself to be an unexpectedly savvy politician during her four years in offi ce. Even before Klein's book hit the shelves it stirred a barrage of criticism from unlikely quarters, from conservative blogs to Rupert Murdoch's New York Post. The problem with The Truth About Hillary, Republicans fretted, wasn't that its sensational, thinly sourced charges were irrelevant to how Hillary would govern. Quite the opposite: Klein made her look all too presidential.

"For people who like their presidents ruthless, expedient, and very smart (in a dangerous time, those are not all bad features), the portrait Mr. Klein paints may well not be seen as negative," wrote former Newt Gingrich press secretary Tony Blankley in his Washington Times column. "In terms of political impact," warned the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan, Klein's book "is not a takedown but a buildup." National Review's John Derbyshire confessed to briefly wondering whether he would vote for Hillary. "Admit it, there's a case for cold-blooded ruthlessness in the White House," he wrote on the magazine's website. "Say what you like about her: She's no bleeding heart, no Jimmy Carter." While some Democrats remain skeptical of candidate Hillary's chances in a general election, Republicans have grasped her biggest strength: The former first lady may be the only Democrat man enough to take back the White House.

For years Democratic presidential candidates
have been vexed by a simple problem: They run like girls. The Republicans and their ruthlessly efficient message machine quietly foster the perception of their liberal opponents as stereotypically feminine: weak, irrational, sentimental. During the 2004 presidential campaign GOP operatives derided John Kerry as a foppish, Botox-injecting nancy who relied on his wife's fortune to advance his career. They sissybaited John Edwards by nicknaming him "Breck girl." The campaign crested when the Democratic running mates were depicted—in pictures that percolated from the Drudge Report to the mainstream media—as lovers in a gay embrace.

Democrats are busily devising strategies to lure men back into the party. But even that exercise—Are you mad at me? Can we talk about it? Does this policy position make me look fat?—seems desperate and whinyIn the high-testosterone political climate that developed after 9/11, such tactics have been particularly effective, but the notion of Democrats as effete pantywaists long predates the terror attacks. An enduring Washington cliché, usually credited to Chris Matthewsof Hardball, paints the Democrats as the "Mommy Party" and the Republicans as the "Daddy Party": Democrats want government to hug you and kiss you and make everything all right; Republicans want government to spank you and send you to bed without supper. (Political analysts briefl y abandoned this formulation in the late '90s, when Bill Clinton's tomcatting transformed the Democrats into the Who's Your Daddy? Party, but the past two presidential elections have reconfi rmed its utility.)

When the gender gap first surfaced, during the presidential election of 1980, it was seen as a problem for Republicans: Those creaky reactionaries just couldn't score any chicks. In fact it's the Democrats who have suffered, as sisterly solidarity has proved illusory. The sex that votes as a bloc is men. With the exception of Bill Clinton's two campaigns, when Ross Perot divided the men's vote, in every presidential election since 1980 men have voted overwhelmingly—by double digits—for the Republican candidate.

Not surprisingly, the exodus of white males has become something of an obsession on the left, and Democrats are busily devising strategies to lure men back into the party. But even that exercise—Are you mad at me? Can we talk about it? Does this policy position make me look fat?—seems desperate and whiny, exactly the sort of thing to keep Hank Hill from pulling the Democratic lever. As psychologist Stephen J. Ducat writes in his book, The Wimp Factor, many men eschew the liberal label because they have a "terror of being feminine." Being a liberal means being a sissy. Which raises an interesting question: How will these men respond in 2008 when, as almost everyone expects, the Mommy Party actually nominates a mommy for president?

Despite her considerable political baggage,
the former first lady will surely amass more financial support than any of her prospective rivals. But even as prominent Democrats concede her ascendancy, many privately worry that her candidacy would be a disaster because it reinforces stereotypes about women and Democrats. "Any woman running for president will face a toughness conundrum. She will constantly have to prove her strength and be careful about showing her emotions," wrote Time's Joe Klein in a much discussed column last spring. "She won't have the luxury of, say, Bill Clinton's public sogginess." Hillary, he concluded, lacks the political chops to navigate those treacherous straits.

That not-too-hard, not-too-soft balancing act explains why it's an article of faith in Washington that the first woman president will be a Republican, someone whose conservatism provides an injection of testosterone to offset the fear that she's too weak. In Madam President, Eleanor Clift and her husband, the late Tom Brazaitis, predicted that "the first woman president will be a 'Sister Mister,' having the body of a woman with the character traits of a man."

Even though she's a Democrat, Hillary fits the mold. As first lady she was pilloried as a mannish harridan who is stronger than her husband. Republicans fed this sentiment in the 1990s, believing that it emasculated Bill, but they may come to regret this strategy if Hillary decides to step into the ring. "The Democrats have become the Androgyny Party, whose cultural trend is to blur gender differences," wrote Noemie Emery in Commentary after Bill Clinton's inauguration. "The Clintons are the natural leaders of this party. Sharing the office, they shift gender roles. He insinuates. She orders. He seduces. She demands. He wants people to love him. She wants to be feared."

When she emerged as a candidate for the Senate, Hillary shrewdly countered this sentiment by campaigning in a distinctly feminine style, beginning with her statewide "listening tour" and ending with a stump refrain that alluded to her loyalty during the Monica Lewinsky scandal: "When I say I'll stick with you, I'll stick with you." That line helped puncture the skepticism among women voters who wondered why she'd decided to stay with Bill.

When she got to the Senate, Hillary was just as strategically coquettish, fetching coffee for her male colleagues during meetings and wooing old enemies like South Carolina's Lindsey Graham, a former House impeachment manager. At the same time she has worked the other side of the gender equation with a hawkish voting record and a seat on the Armed Services Committee. Among Republicans she evokes memories of Margaret Thatcher, another Iron Lady underestimated by her peers. "Margaret Thatcher carried a purse," notes Peggy Noonan. "But when you got out of line she hit you on the head with it."

If they portray Hillary as a conniving shrew, they'll make her seem tough as nails. If they emphasize her womanhood, they risk seeming loutish. Though voters comfortable with assertive female politicians, they still expect a degree of chivalry from their male opponentsRepublicans aren't the only ones suspicious of Hillary's femininity. In a 1996 article for the New Republic, Camille Paglia even went as far as calling her a drag queen. "Hillary had to learn how to be a woman," Paglia wrote. "It did not come easily or naturally. What we see in the present, superbly poised First Lady is a consummate theatrical artifact whose stages of self-development from butch to femme were motivated by unalloyed political ambition."

In her autobiography, Living History, Hillary implicitly concedes Paglia's point, if not the motivation behind her makeover. For most of her life, she admits, she went without makeup, wore "jeans and work shirts most of the time," and "trimmed my own hair (badly) to save money." Only when the gilded cage of national hostess forced girlish things upon her did Hillary learn to enjoy them. In her telling, the White House years marked the onset of her long-delayed adolescence, a chance for a late-blooming tomboy to shock everyone by showing up on the cover of Vogue.

It's this versatility that promises to bedevil Republicans in a face-off with Hillary. If they portray her as a conniving shrew, they'll make her seem tough as nails. If they emphasize her womanhood, they risk seeming loutish. Though voters have become more comfortable with assertive female politicians, they still expect a degree of chivalry from their male opponents. "Kind of like the old rule for your brother," says Sarah Leonard, Howard Dean's Iowa press secretary during the 2004 presidential campaign. "You just can't hit her in the face."

In today's TV-dominated politics the old complaints of female candidates—they get judged on their looks, not their policies—seem outmoded. Every candidate gets treated like a woman now. It was Nixon, after his sweaty, unshaven performance in his televised debate with John F. Kennedy, who was first criticized for not wearing enough makeup. Al Gore was critiqued for his earth tones, man-tan, and hair dye. In 2004 pundits engaged in a frenzy of phallophilia as they sized up George W. Bush's package. (No lie. Here's G. Gordon Liddy on Hardball: "You know, he's in his flight suit, he's striding across the deck, and he's wearing his parachute harness, you know—and I've worn those because I parachute—and it makes the best of his manly characteristic.")

But even the manliest Republican would be confounded if the next Democratic nominee turned out to be a tomboy instead of a sissy. After the 2004 election conservative activist Grover Norquist suggested that Democrats accept their emasculated status. "Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant," he told the Washington Post. "But when they've been 'fixed,' then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful." Unfortunately for Norquist, you can't castrate a woman. It's okay to run like a girl if you are one.