Sister, Sister

Heels on, gloves off. Pitbulls with lipstick. Cleavage controversies and baby dramas. For more than a year, we've been talking about women in politics, and, still, we're not tired of it yet. Get any group of women together, of any political stripe, and Sarah Palin, with all her complexities and contradictions, becomes topic No. 1. And once you mention Palin, someone will bring up Hillary Clinton. And feminism. And whether mothers should work. And whether there will ever be a day when we don't talk about a female candidate's hair.

Even with an economic crisis on the front pages, these are irresistible topics—as evidenced by the conversations at NEWSWEEK's annual Women & Leadership conference, held this week in New York. Dee Dee Myers, White House press secretary for Bill Clinton, praised Palin's fortitude and, yes, intelligence: "I think she's both smart and resilient and optimistic and courageous and all those things ... Her confident and completely unfazed response to being criticized is great because she didn't run from the stage crying. She sort of shrugged it off and when on to the next event, in a way that didn't seem callous, and it didn't seem unfeminine, and it didn't seem like she was acting like a guy, it was just her way."

Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway had no problem acknowledging the debt that her party owes to a Democratic star: "I don't think you could have Sarah Palin's meteoric rise without Hillary Clinton coming before her."

But these women disagreed on whether Palin belongs in the White House: "Is she ready to be vice president? No." Myers said. "But it's not because she doesn't have these other qualities that make a great politician—things that you cannot teach as easily," such as the ability to connect with voters and deliver a speech with Reaganesque aplomb. "If she'd been allowed to work as governor of Alaska, stand for re-election, maybe be involved in something like the National Governors Association, travel around the country, travel around the world a little bit, develop a world view that's more clearly thought through than the one she has now, she could have been a formidable candidate. And she may still be. But as it stands right now, to say that Barack Obama is no more qualified than Sarah Palin is laughable in my view."

Political commentator Bay Buchanan thinks Palin would have been attacked in the media no matter how much experience she had. "A woman like Sarah Palin, a socially, pro-life conservative woman who is extremely feminine, and a mother, and all of these things that one thinks about when they think about a traditional woman, was unacceptable [to the media and critics on the left]," Buchanan said. "Was totally unacceptable. It didn't matter if she had 10 years or two years [of experience]. They were going after her."

But author and editor Tina Brown said that Hillary Clinton was also subject to an unrelenting storm of criticism for everything from her cleavage to her ankles. "The moment that Hillary wept was a hugely transformative moment for women in a strange way," Brown said. "Because she was so extraordinarily abused by the media—I do feel that strongly—and she was so stalwart and she is so stalwart and so valiant, and she had this moment of breaking down, and there was a collective acknowledgement: what are we doing? I even felt sorry for Sarah Palin last night when I saw her on television, she looked so beat up that you had to say, this process is so grueling. Are we right to put our public figures and our politicians through quite such an ordeal, and what does it do to their values and their sense of themselves by the end?"