The good people at The Daily Beast were kind enough to ask me to do some thinking about Scandal, a show I first though I would love, then got irritated by, and now am slowly becoming addicted to again, in the context of the election and the Petraeus email kerfuffle. I appreciated the assignment, in part because it let me get to the bottom of my frustration with Shonda Rhimes’ portrait of a Washington fixer who ought to be a female power fantasy: as a whole, the show limits the role of women in Washington to their ability to destroy or support a powerful man. I explained:

When Olivia’s firm takes on clients, they are often women with that same ability to destroy the reputations of powerful men, or, as Olivia puts it, “These girls, they come here thinking they’re going to change the world and then they get involved with some man.” She takes care of Amanda Tanner, a young woman who, like Olivia herself, has had an affair with President Grant, and believes herself pregnant by him. Her team helps steal the records of Sharon Marquette, an influential madam who is trying to keep her client list private. She represents a rapist against a victim who is attempting to make sure he goes to jail for an earlier attack on a dear friend. She helps get justice for a wild young woman murdered by an arrogant diplomat. Olivia and her team even reconcile the wife of a famous civil-rights leader and the mistress the man was having sex with when he died suddenly. Women may not run themselves into much trouble in Washington as Rhimes understands it. But they also remain off to the side much of the time, pulled into the great debates of the day when they have the capacity to humiliate the men who actually participate in them.

Even Olivia, for all that she has President Grant’s ear, does so because she’s both the source of his own potential bombshell—they became lovers on the campaign trail, and he continues to seek her out for late-night conversations, for stolen kisses in the Oval Office and country retreats—and of advice on how to handle sticky situations, to project power, even how to manage his own wife. And even there, Olivia is curiously removed from the actual debates of the day. Though there’s some suggestion that she and Grant have differing political views, the advice she offers him, and the influence she wields, is solely strategic. Like Dick Morris, the political animal in Olivia is a creature solely of the news cycle. She appears to hold no passionate perspectives on the issues, to be animated by no cause other than the call of her own gut and her undeniable attraction to Grant.

Women, believe it or not, have passions and authorities in Washington that don’t concern their intimate relationships with men, or that don’t even primarily address women’s issues. Part of the set up for the show means that Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), the show’s fixer protagonist, almost always has more official or implied power than whatever woman she’s dealing with, even though she has less formal power than almost all of the men. It’s be nice to see her have to help another woman who isn’t the mistress or the screw-up or the cause of disaster for a change, and give some crisis management assistance to a woman whose role in Washington has nothing to do with who she’s sleeping with, but has gotten herself in trouble the same way powerful men seem to, over and over again.

Amanda Marcotte and I are usually on the same page when it comes to pop culture, and I think this season of Parks and Recreation has been a bit rocky. But I think she’s somewhat off in tracing the show’s problems to Leslie’s relationship with Ben:

Then the writers decided Leslie needed a boyfriend. This shouldn’t be a problem in itself; Leslie has had boyfriends before without any meaningful compromises to her character. For some reason, however, the writers decided that hooking Leslie up with Ben, a nerdy assistant city manager played by Adam Scott, meant returning to tedious Hollywood clichés about how women can’t have both their careers and their love lives. To drive the knife in, throughout season four, Leslie stops being the hero of her own story and spends much of her time being rescued by her new boyfriend…the formerly competent administrator needed Ben to rescue her at every turn. When Leslie, who once swiftly dumped a boyfriend to keep the job she had, finds herself unable to break up with this new boyfriend to get the job she has always wanted, Ben saves her by dumping her first. Ben also comes to the rescue when their relationship is revealed to their boss; he quits so that Leslie doesn’t lose her job. Ben immediately goes to work as Leslie’s campaign manager, because by this point in the show, it’s just assumed that he’s her natural caretaker.

I think this argument underestimates the extent to which running for office is not just a big deal for Leslie, it’s a big challenge. And it is for all women. A 2008 Brookings report found that “men continue to enjoy more comfort, confidence and freedom than women when thinking about running for office…Women are less likely than men to be willing to endure the rigors of a political campaign. They are less likely than men to be recruited to run for office. They are less likely than men to have the freedom to reconcile work and family obligations with a political career. They are less likely than men to think they are ‘qualified’ to run for office. And they are less likely than men to perceive a fair political environment.” The “tedious Hollywood cliches about how women can’t have both their careers and their love lives” are a little bit more true in Hollywood than they are in other settings. It’s one thing to be Gabby Giffords and be married to a freakin’ astronaut: it’s another to be a chipper bureaucrat who got caught dating her boss, who is still trying to get rid of his reputation for being arrogant and reckless with public funds. I’m not saying that’s fair for Leslie to be judged by who she dates, but I don’t actually think it’s unrealistic to say that it would be a small-town scandal.

Now there’s no question that Leslie’s overcome some of these obstacles: she’s confident in her abilities and qualifications, she’s willing to work hard to stay in the race, and she was recruited. But she was also dropped by her recruiters as a likely loser, which no matter how willing Leslie was to bull on without their support, must have been a blow. And even though she’s in the race, Leslie might be right to perceive some challenges and to feel real nerves about them. As Brown University political science professor Jennifer Lawless wrote “Voter bias against women candidates also appears to be on the rise: nearly one in every four Americans agree that ‘Most men are better suited emotionally for politics than are most women.’” So it makes sense that as Leslie enters this stage that’s new not just to her, but to her friends, that she’d hesitate, vacillate, misjudge conditions, and make wrong decisions out of justifiable caution and nerves.

And speaking of first-time candidates, I don’t think that Ben is Leslie’s campaign manager because he’d a dude. I think he’s her campaign manager because Leslie tried to foist the job on Ann, who is totally unsuited for the position for reasons that are specific to her character rather than to her gender, and comes to realize that it makes much more sense that for the only person she knows who’s run a successful political campaign (and who, by the way, needs something to do with himself) to coordinate her efforts. It’s not as if Leslie’s just kowtowing to Ben’s decisions like a vulnerable kitten, either: she pushes back against his negative ad, and ends up coming up with a much more powerful idea. During “Bowling For Votes,” Leslie was wrong and Ben was right about how she was spending her time, but the reasons she was wrong were understandable. Almost all of Leslie’s victories while at the Parks Department have come when she’s been able to win over one person or give a one-off good performance. And Leslie’s fantastic at striking deals with Ken Hotate, or helping get to the root of Kelly Larson’s Twilight obsession, but she has less experience with people who don’t like her, or with the need to conserve her emotional energy by connecting with a lot of people at a much shallower level. There’s no question that Leslie is at a core level hyper-competent, but that doesn’t mean that running a campaign or switching jobs doesn’t require new skills—and it would be a pretty boring gambit if Leslie didn’t have to learn or grow by shifting settings, something that’s been good for characters like April and Jerry, too. Having the campaign be a hard, transitional, vulnerable experience doesn’t mean it’s anti-feminist.

All of this said, I do think the show has struggled with how to handle the having-it-all dilemma. It’s not so much that I think that the question of how women balance work and love is a silly one to ask as I think that Parks and Recreation has struggled, like some of its network cousins, to figure out a new and meaningful answer to that question. On The Office, Pam’s essentially given up on the career half of the equation, reconciling herself to work at Dunder Mifflin and avoiding dealing with her problems in sales. On 30 Rock, Liz has reached a point of decidedly modest expectations, laboring away on a lowest-common-denominator show and dating a guy who’s good-looking but whom she essentially supports. Parks and Recreation, I think, would like to reward Leslie with a happy outcome, even though it’s not necessarily easy when your dream job opportunity and your dream guy arrive at the same time (Leslie is, I think, far more involved with Ben than she ever was with Dave, which makes the choice more difficult). And I’m sympathetic to that as a narrative challenge: in a world of antiheroes, it’s hard to think of a television character who I’m more emotionally invested in than Leslie Knope. Finding a way to give her realistic challenges that help her grow is something the show’s struggled with this season, even as I think they’re right to recognize the difference between catching a possum and achieving not just a functional but idealized adult life. With luck, Parks and Recreation will continue to find ways that Leslie’s campaign can expose the ways in which she and Ben are different, while giving them both opportunities to grow into different versions of themselves.

The 1979 political drama The Seduction of Joe Tynan has been in the back of my mind as a movie I ought to watch just about forever. It’s early Meryl Streep, it’s a nerdy political procedure movie, it’s Alan Alda. But because, for whatever reason, the movie isn’t treated as part of the first tier of political movies, it was never high on my priority list. But with Anthony Weiner’s sex scandal percolating away, it flitted back into my mind, I checked Netflix for it, and there it was. And it’s really an excellent movie, both about political machinations and about the psychology of people who go into politics and find themselves unable to resist things they really ought to stay away from.

From almost the opening scene of the movie, we know Joe Tynan’s marriage is headed for trouble. “You know how many people have tried, and I got it passed,” he brags in bed, telling his wife about a public works bill. “I got clout!” She’s visibly bored, not just in this instance, but permanently. “I may not like politics, but I love you,” she tells him shortly after. The problem is Tynan is politics, and so when Meryl Streep slides on screen as a sultry Southern political operative with the goods on a Supreme Court nominee with a segregationist past, Tynan is toast.

It’s a sign of Andrew Breitbart’s influence that I spent much of the movie assuming that the goods—video of the nominee opposing integration obtained by a black woman running for Congress in the Deep South, who is using it as leverage to win support from local Democrats—was fake, and that was what would take Tynan down. It turns out that subplot’s really only a vehicle for the affair, and for Tynan’s decision to sell out his mentor, who would prefer him to oppose the nomination quietly, and use the nomination hearings as a platform to turn himself into a national politician and a presidential contender.

And the movie is very, very good at capturing the dual vanity that both leads men into affairs, and leads them into thinking they can lead the nation. In an eerie prefiguring of Weiner’s Congressional gym snaps, we’ve got Tynan working out with his colleagues when his mentor wanders by and declares “You look too good, you’re going to lose votes.” The Supreme Court nomination fight is a convenient cover for Tynan’s affair with Streep’s Karen Traynor, but their work, their common interests, her ability to and interest in making him a great man are genuinely a turn-on for the couple. “You remind me of John F. Kennedy,” Tynan tells Traynor as he seduces her. “When you get there, clip a rose from the Rose Garden and send it to me, okay?” she tells him later, simultaneously stroking his ego and keeping the possibility of their liaison alive for the future.
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