If so, however, she figured wrong. There are few things less presidential than victimhood. And—and here’s the rub—there are even fewer things less presidential than complaining about that victimhood. (As Dowd rather elegantly had it, “Beating on the press is the lamest thing you can do.”) That’s where Clinton is really stumbling; the word “voice” itself, as applied to her, has become, if not fully synonymous with, then at least analogous to…“whining.” When the candidate asserts herself, the liability isn’t (just) the standard one—being seen as a bitch; it’s also, and more so, being seen as a grouch.

Take Pat Buchanan, speaking on Morning Joe on Tuesday:

PAT BUCHANAN: It’s very tough for a woman. You see two men going back and forth at each other, you say, “Boy, they’re really going at it.” You see two women, or something, and you say, “Boy, what a catfight this is.”

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: That’s what’s so unfair….You think about what she said over the weekend, the sound bites that have been isolated, and imagine those coming from the mouth of a male candidate. And he’d look strong, and aggressive—like a fighter. And what’s happening here, with Hillary?

BUCHANAN: Well, frankly, it’s the voice. To be—look, Barack Obama’s got a very deep voice. He can go out, he can use mockery and ridicule, and he comes off very smooth and pleasant. But when she raises her voice, and when a lot of women do, you know it’s, as I say, it’s—it makes you support what every husband in America has heard at one time or another.

BRZEZINSKI: Oh, Pat, you’re lucky you’re not here in the studio. I’m telling you…

BUCHANAN: …I know that’s a sexist comment—

BRZEZINSKI: It totally is!

BUCHANAN: —but there’s truth to it. There’s truth to it. It’s very difficult for women to reach those kinds of levels effectively as it is to make them sort of a rally speech. They’re not good at that.

Indeed. I believe the word Buchanan is dancing around/groping for, in all his talk of husbands and voice-raising, is…“nag.” Which is telling. Because, to state the obvious, Clinton’s voice isn’t just Clinton’s voice; it’s also a woman’s voice, and everything else that that implies. That fact may not be the point of all the voice-overing when it comes to Clinton, but it’s certainly the subtext. It seems that we—myself included—spent so much time fixating on the traditional Woman in Power problem (and where we, as a society, will draw that classic, fuzzy line between assertiveness and bitchiness) that we initially missed the other side of the problem: the even fuzzier, and even more classic, line between self-assertiveness and victimhood. Because Hillary’s biggest problem, due respect to Tina Fey, isn’t that she’s a bitch. It’s that she won’t stop complaining about people calling her one.

In that sense, Clinton’s voice—metaphorical and literal—has become, perhaps, a little too revealing. About her, but especially about us.

Compare Clinton to Obama, who, in matters of timbre, is, apparently, MLK, JFK, and Mel Tormé rolled into one velvet-voiced demigod. Salon has an entire piece today analyzing Obama’s voice (“Does Obama’s baritone give him an edge?”)—complete with expert testimony as to the voice’s being, no joke, “the window into the heart,” and other such profundities—and illustrated with a doctored photo that casts Hillary as Lucy (her voice high, thin, and often—yes—shrill) and Barack as Ricky (his voice smooth, bold—and good enough, after all, to be a basis of his career). The piece summons the spirit of Chris thrill-up-the-leg Matthews in its treatment of the visceral splendor of Obama’s voice:

When it happens that something within us shivers or tingles at the words of a great and moving voice—Martin Luther King Jr. for my generation, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt for my parents, or even perhaps for some others Benito Mussolini—it is because there is something that leaps forth from the very anatomy of the speaker, revealing the innate grain that vibrates with a receptive grain of our own.

Now, compare that to one of the piece’s analyses of The Meaning of the Female Voice:

We wouldn’t want our hectoring mother speaking to us from the White House for the next four years.

Indeed. That says a lot—in whatever voice you say it.

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