Mighty Mum
"We must have an extremely strong diplomatic action to prevent Iran from getting nuclear power, which would be very dangerous for the whole region."
Who said this? A French politician. And why is it important? Not just for the clarity of opinion with regard to the threat of the messianic mullahs, but also for the fact that the speaker is the latest dynamic, experienced, media-savvy, iconoclastic female politician to step onto the world stage and take command of a critical electorate.
Marie-Ségolène Royal, born in Senegal and at 53 easily the most gorgeously charismatic socialist in 100 years, has just won her quaint party's nomination to face the troubled Nicolas Sarkozy of the center-right and the undead Jean-Marie Le Pen of the loony right in the imminent French presidential election. She is called "Ségo" by the smitten French journalists, who also call her "Madonna of the opinion polls." And because the camera worships her, she can say anything, even the most clichéd of socialist genuflections to statism, such as, "I find excessive the share of nuclear in the French electricity production. …," and it is presented as a fresh wind.
If Ségo were alone in the world of grunting alpha males, she would present a subplot worth exploiting. The woman is gifted. It feels like a Mozart opera when she steps into French sunshine and smiles. However, Ségo now joins a regiment of women who are not phenomena of cozy secondary states but rather are potentates of major world democracies, which make up one-quarter of humanity.
These ladies are vote getters who are asserting expensive policy now. Last week Sonia Gandhi, who is the Italian-born widow of the assassinated Indira Ghandi's assassinated son Rajiv Gandhi, breathed fire at her own Congress Party, and at the rest of India's self-made maharajas, when she accused them, in English, of "delusions of grandeur" in the pursuit of superpower status while the true health of the nation was darkened by poverty and "inequalities at home." The hierarchy not only listened closely to her — she is the star of the ruling party —but also sweated in their chairs and consulted their BlackBerry devices for comfort.
Meanwhile, the other European iconoclastic female, Angela Merkel, the improbable leader of the Germans, finished her best week ever as referee of a grand coalition of quarrelsome grudge-bearers — socialists, Greens, leftists — when the jobless rate fell to the lowest since 2004 and the polls showed her Christian Democrats leading all rivals. Mrs. Merkel topped her popular success by declaring that it remains "an absolute priority" that the United Nations grant her, and Germany, a veto-bearing seat at the Security Council.
Ségo, Sonia, and Angela, admired as hard-minded while also keen-eyed for the weakest among us, where the votes are, now are joined by what resembles a chorus of American dream girls who dominate the Democrats in the campaign to capture the imperial crown of the White House. From the moment she was elected speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi demonstrated firepower when she backed the troubled Pennsylvanian Jack Murtha for majority leader against the manicured Marylander Steny Hoyer. The lesson was that Mrs. Pelosi will use her office to discomfit the old boys, and the old boys, especially the gaggle at the editorial pages, are sweating and consulting their BlackBerry devices for comfort. Also, Senator Boxer of California, who is as on-target a voice as can be found in the stem-winding Senate, will take command in the 110th Congress of the Environmental Committee, which she intends to remake into the Global Warming Committee in order to reinvent international energy policy and construct the hot policy issue in the next election cycle. All this prep fire by Speaker Pelosi and Senator Boxer will have the lads with their heads down when the Elizabethan Mrs. Clinton takes the party's nomination by voice vote in the winter of 2008 and squares her shoulders for the not so fresh, not so camera-adoring John McCain.
"To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature," declared the Scot Protestant John Knox in his infamously prejudicial "The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women" in 1558, unsafe in his anonymity at Geneva, aiming his tongue at Mary Tudor of England and Ireland, at Mary of Scotland, and at the imminent entrance of Elizabeth Regina of England, Scotland, and Ireland. For half of a millennium, Knox's peculiar preaching has stood like a bodyguard of lies to justify the males who have ascended to lordship. Most softly in this war-drumming new century, unheard till it was done, comes a strange muting of that trumpet blast and an ear-catching new song that sounds much like mighty mum.
Mr. Batchelor is host of "The John Batchelor Show," now on hiatus.
