When it comes to core issues, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are Donny and Marie. She's a little more country and he's a little more rock 'n' roll, but they're both singing the same song. Their differences come down to personality, experience, and phenotype. Personality makes subtle shifts from state to state and experience can be exaggerated, but no matter what the candidates do they can't alter their observable physical characteristics. As Bill Clinton once said of his wife, "I can't make her younger ... taller ... male."
But I can.
Here's a brief exploration of how the candidates' resumes, and our reactions to them, might change if they'd been born in each other's skins.
If Barack Obama Were White and Female ...
• When he was growing up, no one would have questioned that his mother was his mother.
• He wouldn't have been the first female editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review. Susan Estrich smashed through that glass ceiling in 1977--13 years before Obama became the journal's first black editor.
• It wouldn't be as big a deal that he "passed up a job on Wall Street," since the wage gap means that women earn only 77 percent of what men make.
• He'd be slammed as a bad mother for spending month after month on the campaign trail while his two young daughters are left at home.
• He'd get a lot more criticism for wearing the same suit over and over again.
• Reverend Wright would not have been his pastor, since the Trinity Church's website asserts, "We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black."
• He would have shaved a couple years off his real age instead of adding them, as he did in the recent debate when he implied that he was 48. (He's really 46.)
• It would have been even cooler that he sunk that three-pointer on camera in South Carolina.
If Hillary Clinton Were Black and Male ...
• She never would have been admitted to Wellesley College.
• She would have been charged with flagrant sexism for elbowing Westchester politician Nita Lowey out of the race for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's seat, back in 1999.
• Celine Dion's "You and I" would never, ever have been selected as her official campaign song.
• Wearing those bright yellow suits would really make her look like Chelsea's pimp.
• Misting up in New Hampshire and mewling, "I just don't want to see us fall backwards," probably would have cost her votes, not gained them.
• She and Bill Clinton would be on the "down low."
• In 1994, she might have pressured her presidential spouse to intervene during the Rwandan genocide that took an estimated 800,000 innocent lives.
• According to Geraldine Ferraro, she'd be lucky.
This post was originally published at vanityfair.com, where Scovell writes regularly