Paglia responds.

I agree that the male staff who Hillary attracts are slick, geeky weasels or rancid, asexual cream puffs. (One of the latter, the insufferable Mark Penn, just got the heave-ho after he played Hillary for a patsy with the Colombian government.) If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say Hillary is reconstituting the toxic hierarchy of her childhood household, with her on top instead of her drill-sergeant father. All those seething beta males (as you so aptly describe them) are versions of her sad-sack brothers, who got the short end of the Rodham DNA stick.

Wow. The Democrats version of Clinton-bashing is far nastier than anything I ever read from Republicans, I mean this is just brutal and exceptionally personal--one again confirming the obvious--the liberal-left are not nice people.

I'll just state the obvious: Hillary has taken the advice (and abuse) of an Alpha male for decades at this point, in the form of Bill Clinton. One wonders how any woman in her position would deal with male associates and what kind of male associates any woman would attract.

The leader-follower dynamic has two models; the charismatic, or natural model, and the authority model.

The former is a tacit acknowledgment of superior qualities in the natural leader. The leader emerges from the group as members defer the decision-making process to someone they perceive as wiser or stronger.

Both women and men, as groups, produce charismatic leaders, but its very rare to see a woman emerge as a charismatic leader acceptable to both sexes. Feminists--this is where you can blame men for being sexists creeps, but you can't fight Mother Nature--keep reading.

It does happen--witness Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir--but its comparatively rare. I've never personally met a woman I would consider sufficiently charismatic that I, as a man, would have become her thrall. I have on the other hand, met several men whose leadership I easily acknowledged.

Some of this is undoubtedly a matter of sex, but the exceptions suggest that social forces are also at work. My guess is that women would be more accepted as charismatic leaders if they gravitated towards fields and endeavors where their efforts could be measured by actual acheivement. That of course means risk, and typically men are far more comfortable with risk than are women.

Do you know anyone more risk-averse than Hillary Clinton? How is she commonly described? Scripted? Calculating?

Courageous?

Not so much.

Men in particular, respect achievement, and they can respect a woman along those lines--centuries of history have demonstrated that in the persons of Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great. Notably both of these women were comfortable with risk and had the ambition to seek concrete achievements, and thus garnered the loyalty of real men and not just obsequious toadies.

The Democrats are anxious to elect the first woman or first black man to the Presidency, but lacking an understanding of the quality of leadership, I am willing to bet that they'll be beat to punch by Republicans. The Democrats are culturally incapable of producing a candidate with charismatic leadership appeal from those two groups because race and/or gender and not achievement, is the basis for a successful political career by minority aspirants. On the Republican side, major players like Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell are only incidentally black and/or female.

That of course, is the ultimate measure of how far we've come on race and gender issues--when race and gender are irrelevant.

POSTSCRIPT: One of the reasons I'm glad Condoleezza Rice declined to be considered as a running mate for McCain is that it would recast her entire career as mere tokenism. It would be impossible to avoid the conclusion that she was picked on the basis of her race and gender. Someday, almost certainly within my lifetime, a black man and/or woman with real charismatic qualities of leadership will arise to be considered for the highest office in the land.

To date, that has not happened.