The sex and the presidency analogy.

"Running for president is like sex... No one ever did it once and forgot about it," says James Carville, talking to Maureen Dowd, who inserts a few paragraphs — for decency's sake? — before getting to this additional Carville quote:

"[Hillary]’s gone to hell and back trying to be president. She’s paid her dues, to say the least. The old cliché is that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. But now Republicans want a lot of people to run and they want to fall in love. And Democrats don’t want to fight; they just want to get behind Hillary and go on from there."

What's with all this love and sex analogizing? I hear in it echoes of Barack Obama's crushing "You're likeable enough, Hillary."



Going back into my own old "likeable enough" posts, I find this 2010 link to Instapundit:

ELIZABETH WURTZEL: “I suppose I should confess: I like Sarah Palin. I like her because she is such a problem for all these political men, Republicans and Democrats alike, with their polls, and their Walter Dean Burnham theories of transformative elections, and their economy this and their values that–and here comes Palin, and logic just doesn’t apply. . . . The Democrats are total morons for not finding their own hot mama before the Republicans did so first, or maybe I should have left off the qualifiers and called it straight: the Democrats are just plain morons, at least where women are concerned.”

... But the very essence of old-line Democratic feminism is to reject feminine appeal. It’s Bella Abzug and Hillary Clinton as role models.

Politics is like sex, and people want to fall in love, but it gets complicated when it's women in politics. Think about sex/don't think about sex. A paradox. A quandary.