When will the American press grow up and realize that America may at last be adult enough to catch up with the 21st Century and elect a woman as president. One doesn’t have to support the candidacy of Sen. Hillary Clinton, or her positions to take a little pride in that possibility and to consider that the U.S. might regain some stature in the rest of the more mature world if she were elected.

Yet the American press just can’t get over and around the idea of a woman president. Breathlessly the mainstream press and television pundits have commented on her femaleness or the lack of it, her ambition and whether there is too much of it, and urged us to consider, in all seriousness, these pressing questions among others I have not thought of:

Is Hillary Clinton too much of a woman, or not enough of one? Is she a man-hating woman, or a woman-hating man dressed as a woman? And why does she always wear suits? Is she too cold? Too smart? Genuine? Phony? Should she make special appeals to women because she is a woman? Is that fair? Or should she aim to win over men because she is a woman? Is that fair? If men attack her, should she defend herself as a woman or as a candidate who happens to be a woman? Does she dress too severely? Or should she be more feminine? Was that cleavage? And did she show it purposely to prove she has breasts and that she is a woman? But because she’s a woman, is she tough enough to wage war on terrorism? Or is she too tough to end the war in Iraq? Is she too ambitious? Too hard? Not hard enough? Why didn’t she divorce her philandering husband? Will he be the real president, if she wins? But can she win because she’s a woman?

Reporter Libby Copeland did a fine job in the Washington Post, Nov.7, ridiculing the ambivalence in the way the press and Sen. Clinton’s opponents and supporters treat her candidacy. But the piece, “The Rules for A Fair Fight,” was in the Style Section, and followed the Post’s breakthrough analysis of the Clinton cleavage. But in her ridicule. Copeland seemed to perpetuate the nonsense with “rules for female candidates,” i.e., “be tough, tough, tough.” and male candidates, ie., “to attack or not attack.” Women candidates, she warns, should never cry. Remember what happened to Ed Muskie?

Television is ridiculous (and vicious) in its treatment of the Clinton candidacy. Chris Matthews has obsessed about her laugh; Tim Russert could not take her yes for an answer in one debate and evoked laughter. Then there is boy conservative Tucker Carlson, who seeks to pass as a journalist, comparing Sen. Clinton to Lorena Bobbitt, who cut off her abusive husband’s penis. Clinton is “playing the gender card, you can’t hit a girl,” he suggested during his Nov. 1 program on MSNBC, but “she’s pandering” to the resentment among woman towards men with “the castrating quality of her rhetoric.” He asked why not “just take gender out of this and fight fair?” Most of this elicited the nodding agreement of his guest, the impartial political expert, Pat Buchanan.

Would these talking heads have discussed such things about Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi or Golda Meir? True, they were not heads of state. Well, how about Elizabeth I? She would have had their heads, not their…