Hillary Clinton's losing by a neck

Article taken from Stuff.co.nz.

ROSEMARY MCLEOD - Sunday Star Times Sunday, 27 April 2008
Looking at that photograph of Hillary Clinton last week, I sensed impending doom. No good can possibly come of wearing big silk scarves. She's bound to lose the Democratic Party nomination on this basis alone.

Hers has been a plucky fight, as even reluctant commentators admit. She plugs away there, tailing slick Barack Obama, willing herself to become the first woman American president, yet draping herself in those unfortunate hunks of cloth that declare the game's up already.

There comes a time in a woman's life when old age dances in middle distance. Once it was a remote impossibility; now it looms in every wrinkle.

Suddenly she falls for facial creams that cost a lot and do little; cuts her hair short in the deluded belief that this makes her look young, when it only emphasises her slackening jawline; and a facelift seems to make more sense than renovating her kitchen.

Some think of toy boys at this point. Others enter politics, that haven for the desperate and the redundant. It can't be helped.

I feel sure Hillary's had eye work done in advance of this campaign. The rest of us have a mass of wrinkles and soft skin draping what were formerly our eyes which, in the privacy of our own bathrooms, we can fiddle with and stretch in quiet alarm. Well, she can afford it.

She has taken the sensible path of perpetual blondeness, which I also intend to cling to till I pop my clogs, but in the quest for power she's also taken on that dreadful robe of office, the Hermes scarf and its near relations.

The nearly old - and the old already - wear them softly knotted and draped, as she did last week, over boring tailored suits. They are a declaration that if glamour must be denied them, or their old suit hasn't worn out yet, at least they can spend a fortune on a square of rag with pictures on it.

Then, God forbid, they take to poking pearl necklaces underneath them.
The square scarf is a strange thing with no legitimate function other than conferring blandness on all who wear it.

It has often been a gift, one of those neutral ones that go to aunts who people don't know very well, or to mothers-in-law who have to be given something after your overseas trip, or they'll throw a wobbly. It lives in dressing table drawers with bottles of 4711.

It means nothing unless its label is subtly visible, although those who love a designer scarf can spot their design from a hundred metres away. They have so little else to think about.
I don't know why Hillary wears them, unless it's to make her look sexless, which it does. A woman has to be sexless looking if she seeks power, or nobody will take her seriously.
Yet she can't be downright ugly, and her grooming should be immaculate. A scarf confers, I guess, an air of aunt- dom that makes a woman unthreatening, and makes it look as if she kind of weakly tried. How awful.

And what a mistake such outsized bibs have proved to be. They make you think of other doomed female leaders like India's Indira Gandhi, or Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto, who likewise draped fabric about them. And that brings me to the pashmina, a crime Hillary has also been guilty of.

Of all the horrors of the past 20 years that western women have taken upon themselves, surely this glorified bedspread is the most unfortunate. To wear a pashmina is to abandon hope. At best, it's to enter the camp world of an Oscar Wilde play, metaphorically bellowing, "A handbag?!"

A woman in a pashmina is a yacht in full sail without its beauty, a bosom rampant, an alarming baby in pastel swaddling clothes, a declared matriarch and scourge of all that is vibrant and young.

I would cross the street to avoid one headed in my direction, and I avoid literary gatherings for fear of being suffocated in their drapes.

I'd rather walk naked down Lambton Quay than submit to draping either a scarf or a pashmina about me. I have my tragic pride.

So why doesn't Hillary? Doesn't she understand that people don't really want to be governed by aunties? Hasn't she heard about the trouble it's caused us here, where it all began? The joining together of crones to warble tunelessly at Labour Party conferences is the least of it.

That photograph of Hillary makes me feel a slight fondness for Helen Clark. Whatever else she's done, she's surely never strutted the world stage in a spooky pashmina, and I doubt whether she's keen to humiliate herself with a strand of cultured pearls.