Chunky, dorky Olive Hoover in "Little Miss Sunshine" calls to mind another nerd whose determination and singlemindedness once made adults do a serious double take. I'm referring to the stocky, studious Hillary Rodham who was BWOC at Wellesley. With her oversized glasses, too-thick eyebrows, and dowdy mismatched clothes, the collegiate Hillary was a Sixties grownup version of Olive in "Little Miss Sunshine." (See "separated at birth" photos here.)
Once upon a time Hillary deliberately cultivated an unpampered, unshorn and earthy look--but in time she realized this particularly unstylish presentation wouldn't one day earn her the right to boss around White House employees and later win leadership of the free world. So she started with a complete makeover, or rather an endless series of hairdos and new clothing choices. This decade-by-decade transformation culminated in an I'm not-going-to-talk-about-it facelift before she became U.S. senator.
In the film, Olive was a sweet, good-natured child whose fixation on being crowned Little Miss Sunshine led to her being coached to do a faux striptease by her heroin-snorting Grandpa. Yet she approached her beauty-pageant mission with pluck and mad innocent glee. Unlike the other Jon Benet Ramsey highly sexualized clones, she possessed blind, clueless faith in her own chances of winning despite her distinct lack of talent and physical beauty.
Hillary, too, is staking everything to be crowned champion...in America's top political beauty contest. Her chances of winning far outstrip that of the myopic Olive. While Ms. Clinton is all smiles and crowd-pleasing bromides on the campaign trail, backstage and off-camera she is feared as a brawler and bare-knuckled competitor. Hillary is skilled at being both a stage princess and stage mother.
As someone who maintains airtight control of everyone around here and everything that emerges from her top-down campaign, she paradoxically remains in the thrall of her advisers and consultants. While this peculiar manifestation of passive-aggressive behavior might appear baffling to those outside her inner circle, at the end of the day, she demands loyalty and uncompromising fealty from her staffers and supporters. Cross her and you're dumped. Hillary's and her hubby's political rivals fare worse; they are pummeled in the press by hired guns. (Former Clinton adviser Dick Morris has made a cottage industry cataloging these incidents in his books, television appearances, columns, and email newsletter.)
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan recently nailed Hillary's have-it-both-ways brand of politics: "What Mrs. Clinton is trying to establish is this: to criticize her--to speak of her critically as a human being, as a person with a record and a history and a style and attitudes--is, ipso facto, to be dirty, and low, and destructive. To air and raise questions about who she is, how she operates, and what can be inferred from her past actions is by definition an unjust act."
This disparity allows her to publicly distance herself from the politics of personal destruction which she routinely and disingenuously denounces at every opportunity. But who authorized sending in a Doberman like campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson to go after David Geffen and by direct implication, Barack Obama? This is the rabid rapid-response norm, not the exception, to how Clinton Inc. deals with foes and those who stand in their way to power.
Hillary's ruthless return march to the White House embodies all nine lock-and-load principles of Olive's father's Refuse to Lose program. It says: Ignore the past. Focus on the present. There's only winners and losers. It's a zero-sum game. By the film's end, however, this self-empowering gibberish is discarded for something more ennobling and uplifting.
Yet Republicans have always seemed better equipped to embrace Refuse to Lose. It's part of their political DNA. They play for keeps. Perhaps that's why they fear Hillary so much. This Little Miss Sunshine is their dark cloud.
This essay is cross-linked with www.politixxx.com, which debuted March 2, 2007