Women In Iowa Politics (Part 4): Smiling without looking stupid

The late Arizona congressman Mo Udall, author of the priceless book “Too Funny To Be President” and a man who was just that, used to get off this great line during his run for the White House in 1976.

“I was in New Hampshire, thousands of miles from home with my car stuck in the snow,” Udall said. “My advance woman urged me to shake a few hands in a nearby barbershop. I stuck my head in the door and blurted, ‘Mo Udall, I’m running for president.’

“The barber replied, ‘Yeah, we know, we were just laughing about that this morning.’” 

Udall, arguably the wittiest politician the nation has known, always made the case that humility is attractive.

“My experience is that putting myself down is the best kind of humor: it creates empathy, humanizes any message, and puts people at ease,” Udall said. “Self-deprecating jokes have the added benefit of inoculating one against egomania.”

As a young speechwriter for Missouri Congresswoman Pat Danner in the mid-1990s, I devoured Udall’s book and speeches. He had it right, I thought, with the self-deprecating remarks. Knock yourself down, show the crowds and voters your candidate has a sense of humor, the confidence to be the butt of her own jokes.

The only problem: self-deprecating humor doesn’t work with female politicians because people are likely to actually believe the punch lines.

As far as recently retired Sandra Day O’Connor and Condi Rice and others have taken women, they still struggle to be taken seriously with much of the electorate, and can’t risk employing the kind of humor and speaking styles that warm crowds up to them. It’s terribly unfair but true.

When Udall joked about people finding his candidacy funny people found it folksy.

Hillary Clinton could never deliver that line. People would take it seriously.
Which it makes it far more challenging for the female candidates delivering speeches — not to mention their speechwriters.

My former boss, who retired from office after tremendous success at the polls, knew very well where those fine lines and trip wires were as a female politician, and she navigated them brilliantly, cultivating the image of a warm grandmother who had no problems getting tough in Washington for her kids (constituents). She also knew how to smile and look smart at the same time — something not all women can do.

In contemporary American politics, Michigan’s governor, Jennifer Granholm, is one of the more effective female politicians I’ve seen speak.

She looks presidential, and delivers her message in way that gets one to focus on the content. A native of Canada, she can’t run for the presidency unless a mad dash to change the Constitution from the Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sycophants and idolaters unintentionally opens the doors for Granholm.

Other female politicians would do well to watch tapes of Granholm’s speeches and television appearances over and over and with the intensity of golfers studying Ben Hogan hitting a 1-iron.

Audiences are far more conscious of body language and facial gestures, the appearance factor, if you will, with women. Smile too much and you look the part of the fawning cheerleader. Get too tough in your remarks and you come off as shrill, and risk getting the bitch tag. Come up with a whopping one-liner on a rival, and male voters, even many of those with you on the issues, instinctively feel emasculated along with your foe.

I caught myself falling into the world of double-standardom  in watching C-SPAN’s taped broadcast of Coretta Scott King’s funeral. I focused on former President Bill Clinton’s message, his words, but carefully watched Sen. Hillary Clinton’s body language and found myself thinking: she’s aging fast and seems, well, angry, like someone who just quit smoking two weeks ago and forgot their nicotine gum.

It would be easy to write this off as deeply ingrained gender bias that even a child of a single mother, and a politically active and progressive one at that, can’t fully shake. But there’s more to it.

The largest obstacle for women in politics may be, well, other women, former Lt. Gov. Art Neu, a Carroll Republican, once told me.

“I think it’s older women who think a woman’s place is in the home and they ought not to do that,” Neu says. “I suspect that’s still prevalent in the state, but it’s dying out.”

Neu says there have been exceptional women in Iowa politics on both sides of the aisle for generations. No one, however, has been able to crack the political glass ceiling.

Most voters would never admit to gender bias publicly, but will exercise their right to vote their minds, even if motivated by sexism, at the polls, a factor that may skew early polls in races with women candidates.

All of Iowa’s neighboring states have elected women to either the U.S. House of Representatives or U.S. Senate. We never have.

Moreover, Iowa has never elected a woman as governor, although the state’s last three chief executives have had female lieutenant governors.

Arguably, the highest-ranking female official in the history of the state — one who was elected of her own accord and carried real power — was former Attorney General Bonnie Campbell, a Democrat who tried unsuccessfully in 1994 to step where no woman has tread on Iowa’s political ladder in her bid to become governor.

It is this history and culture with which Hillary with have to contend as she pursues the presidency in 2008.

Democrats may want to consider using The Terminator as a straw man to make Granholm eligible.