Touching. Threatening.

This is a gender-free issue for the most part --  the matter of touching, withholding, and threatening.  Members of both sexes are adept at the various dance moves of control.   

Today Maureen Dowd describes a Barack-Hillary moment which holds more personal and political information about the individual candidates than either would probably want to admit. 

In Dowd's column this morning is the story of a recent encounter between the two candidates on neutral territory in which they attempt to work out some differences.   But Hillary lost it.

In front of her plane, Hillary apologized to her rival about Shaheen. Obama replied that he was concerned at the pattern of insinuations and attacks from her supporters and that a message needed to be sent from the top that sharp attacks were not, as Hillary had put it, “the fun part.” He brought up another recent example: the Clinton volunteer in Iowa who had been asked to leave after forwarding sleazy e-mail falsely claiming that Obama was a Muslim.

Then, according to witnesses from the Obama camp, Hillary got very agitated and was “flapping her arms.”

Hillary almost always seems driven and a little defensive.  Barack has a more laid-back manner which seems to take precedence over a  certain tautness and wariness.  Something else about Obama which is important to how he behaves with others:  he is tall, very tall.  That's said to be a lucky trait, but tall people can also feel fragile, too easily observed, too easily thrown off balance.  That's how he may have felt when Hillary lost it.

All her simmering grievances spilled out during the 10-minute talk. At some point, an Obama intimate recalled, he “gently put his hand on her arm to chill her out.” The tall senator often leans down to put a friendly hand on the shoulder of his fellow senators — male and female — on the Senate floor, and they seem charmed by the gesture.

But Senator Clinton and her circle were not. They had been surprised and troubled by what they saw as his attempt to grab her arm and hold her in place while they talked, an unpleasant flashback to Rick Lazio getting in her space.

There it is.  The thing about Hillary many of us sense:  her apparent arrogance, her steely "get the hell out of my space." 

The truly experienced person learns how to keep things from getting to that point.  Others -- among them, notably, George W. Bush -- get furious, threatened and threatening.  For women it's often a justifiable reaction to often subconscious efforts of men -- visible in their body language -- to take control of the moment.  Royals of both genders do it.  There are protocols about being in the Queen's presence.   For the rest of us, it's simply the "I can't handle it" moment we find telling in a leader, a candidate, and in ourselves.  Dowd writes:

As Queen Bee of the Clinton hive, Hillary has created a regal force field that can be breached only with permission, so something that wasn’t even a jostle was perceived as a joust.

The encounter seemed to have steeled them both. Hillary, to knock back the upstart who had unexpectedly gotten in her way, and Obama, who came away feeling that, for all of Hillary’s outer strength, she was afraid of him in some ways, and for all of her supposed poise, she had a more spiky temperament than he had realized.

"Noli me tangere".

Comments

[plum]

I'm a big Obama fan, and am very skeptical that Clinton's public face is genuine, so you'd think I'd love reading this Down column. But I remember the way she (and Frank Rich!) were enthusiastic participants in taking Al Gore down a notch, and, you know, I just despise Dowd's Heather-ish writing style.

Short take: Just because it confirms one's bias is no reason to trust anything Dowd writes.

[PW]

I don't like her at all. Part of the "Heather" deal is her discomfiting self-consciousness. But sometimes she notices things others don't, and that's when she's interesting in spite of her bitchiness.