Does Tina Brown Think Hillary Looks Fat?

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. President Barack Obama. I love America. Although racism and sexism obviously still exist, in my lengthening lifetime, the civil rights and feminist movements have had distinctly measurable impact.

Speaking of Hillary Clinton, Nigerian election commentary aside, wasn't she great over in Africa? Finally sick of filtering her own achievements through those of her husband's behemoth persona, she put her foot down when some idiot in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, wanted to know more about Bill. As if her ears could not succumb to one more word about whatever the dickens Mr. Clinton had to say, she pulled off her earphones as she incredulously fathomed the translator's words.

I couldn't take my eyes off the confident stateswoman in the blue pantsuit while I watched Chris Cillizza and Politics Daily's Melinda Henneberger try to get a word in on Chris Matthews' Hardball recap Tuesday. The former first lady in a head band has again evolved and now wears her own brand of 21^st century diplomacy. Who says there are no second acts in political life?

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Sadly, despite feminism's long strides in the political evolution of our species, the way some women respond to other women still has a ways to go. I wasn't surprised when I heard from a colleague Thursday morning that celebrity editor Tina Brown, while seemingly being supportive of Mrs. Clinton, had just called her contemporary superwoman "fat." In the actual quote on Morning Joe, the Daily Beast editor-in-chief, who is a slim 56 years old, said she believed after a seven-nation, 11-day tour of the formerly dark continent, the sexagenarian secretary must be "feeling fat." Brown posited to Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski that perhaps Clinton, having stayed in Mogadishu a day too long, needed to "get back to the gym."

Notwithstanding their cattiness, in fairness to Tina, Joe and Mika, my husband also thought the hard-working public servant looked "tired" in the TV images from the Congo. To me, however, this solid, no-nonsense Hillary looked like a woman who had finally come into her own.

Oddly, she reminded me of Elizabeth Edwards in the days when Edwards added so much credibility to her spouse's political heft. "The reason you had to take him seriously, the reason you figured there was something more to him than met the eye, was that he had this phenomenal wife," Caitlin Flanagan writes in the September issue of the Atlantic. Flanagan's description of Edwards appears in an essay about "Sex and the Single Girl" author and Cosmopolitan magazine founder Helen Gurley Brown. The pioneering editor, a veritable Tina Brown of her day, "reshaped the way magazines and television shows for a female audience conceive of their mission and their scope," and, Flanagan suggests, was the figurative role model for "bad girl" post-feminist "single girls," particularly the one who temporarily poached Edwards' weak-willed husband.

Evidentially, both Ms. Browns have little regard for women they see as competition.