Justin Lee: POP CULTURE'S TAKE ON A WOMAN PRESIDENT

POP CULTURE'S TAKE ON A WOMAN PRESIDENT

Posted by GOP LEE on 7/23/2007, 4:55 pm

TV provides poor signal for Hillary
By: David Paul Kuhn
Jul 23, 2007 06:05 AM EST
When Hollywood producer Rod Lurie created fictional president Mackenzie Allen in 2005 for the show “Commander in Chief” he made no mistake about one of his goals: tilling the soil of popular culture so that it would soon be easier for a real woman to take root in a nonfiction Oval Office.
CBS News had no such goal in 2006 when it gave Katie Couric the anchor’s chair once occupied by Walter Cronkite. But it was a vivid example of the glass ceiling being shattered in one of society’s most prestigious platforms.
So will television be a leading indicator of politics in 2008? Hillary Rodham Clinton had better hope not.
The ratings of both the struggling “CBS Evening News” and the now-canceled ABC drama “Commander in Chief” call into question one of the premises of Clinton’s political strategy: that women are eager to reward role models who break down gender barriers.
On TV, at least, it hasn’t happened.
An analysis of ratings by Nielsen Media Research for Politico showed that competitors to the “Evening News” and “Commander in Chief” scored better with female viewers. The results undermine calculations by ABC and CBS that placing accomplished women in roles traditionally owned by men would be a ratings hit because of the number of female viewers drawn to one of their own.
In particular, white women--a key swing bloc Clinton’s campaign says it intends to focus on should she win the nomination--responded with a shrug to both Couric and “Commander in Chief.”
Efforts to extrapolate political implications from Hollywood studio sets and network news desks should perhaps be taken cum grano salis. But some commentators say the experiences of Couric and Geena Davis, who played the president on the ABC drama, do indeed offer a cautionary tale for Clinton.
“You can’t simply plug a woman into a drama, a sitcom, or an anchor position and expect women are going to watch it,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “The same is true for a female candidate. The presence of a woman does not make women vote or watch just because it’s a woman.”
Polling also underscores the complexity of the gender dynamic for Clinton.

Clinton wins roughly the same number of male voters as Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in the Democratic primary race, according to a variety of surveys. But she wins Democratic women nearly 2-to-1 over Obama, who remains her closest challenger.
But the support she expects to win from Democratic women in the primaries does not necessarily translate to big benefits in a general election. In a hypothetical matchup against former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the Gallup Organization found women favoring Clinton by a modest margin, 53 percent to 47 percent.
But Giuliani had a 16 percent lead over Clinton among male voters—a margin larger than President Bush’s lead over Democrats Al Gore and John F. Kerry in the previous two presidential elections.