The women we love in popular culture are the good girls.
Cinderella. Sleeping Beauty. Girls who don't rock the boat. Pretty, demure and corseted. These are the models we let our little girls believe are the ideal.
And that's Hillary Clinton's problem. She's not the "good girl" in that fairy tale princess sort of way. That makes a lot of us a little uncomfortable.
Hillary is more Princess Smartypants than Princess Aurora.
More Mulan than Madeleine.
For some reason, we can't get past our lingering, underlying obsession with the idea that girls are for rescuing, not ones to be cast in the role of smart problem solver.
In addition to not voting for her or supporting her candidacy, many have started to call for Hillary Clinton to gracefully bow out of the presidential race for the sake of Democratic party unity. I'm the last one who wants to see a nasty fight between her and Barack Obama, and I really do want the Democrats to get focused on how to beat John McCain.
But why is Hillary the one people are calling on to step aside? Yes, she is behind in the delegate count, but not by that much. It's not like she's the Democratic version of Ron Paul.
The current delegate tally looks like this:
Obama -- 1515, Hillary -- 1424.
That's only a spread of 91 delegates. One of them needs 2025 to get the nomination and there are still plenty of delegates out there to put either one over the top.
If the political shoe was on the other foot, no one would be calling on Obama to step out of the race for the benefit of the woman who was ahead and possibly more qualified. Have you ever seen something like that happen in any workplace setting?
"Say, Joe, I know you're considering me to be the next CEO of ABC Corp., but you know, we've never had a woman running our corporation and Jane is just as qualified as I am and more people on the Board of Directors think she should have the job, so I say she should take that CEO slot! You know, I think it would be in the shareholders' interest for me to step aside so Jane can just get on with the work of leading us to bigger profits. "
Yeah, in my dreams.
No one has a crystal ball. Sure, some things might be more likely to happen than others in this crazy political atmosphere, but, in all honesty, can we really expect someone who is a viable contender for the White House to willingly and gracefully step aside if there is still a realistic chance of victory? No one called on Mike Huckabee to step aside in the GOP race, and he wasn't anywhere close to catching McCain.
You can also bet that if the pundits started calling for Obama to withdraw, no one would ask him to do it "gracefully."
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