Cookie rumble for the White House
It’s that time of the presidential election again. You can keep your “hanging chad” jokes in your pants—that’s for later. It’s the ladies’ turn to duke it out in the Presidential Bake-Off.
Spouses of presidential candidates submit “their favorite cookie recipe” to Family Circle magazine, then America votes for the best—or, as it often goes with such things, the least worst. The contest also gleefully boasts a perfect record in predicting the winner in November, thereby proving that able cookie-baking is a direct correlative for partnering the next POTUS.
I hate to admit: The cookie rumble does speak to my Susie Homemaker-side, the side that manically clips recipes with Sweeney Todd-like abandon. To think, these “Cowboy Cookies” are just what Georgie W. has before his full 8+ hour beauty sleep every night! The Prez is just like us.
The feminist (read: rationalist) in me, of course, can’t help but balk at the antiquated expectations that are present here. Requesting a favorite cookie recipe assumes that both Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain have a cultivated library of recipes at their disposal. (Indeed, McCain proved hers is called the Internet.) Sure, tradition is tradition, but the bake-off is hardly old: It began just four presidential cycles ago when Hillary Rodham Clinton matched her chocolate chips against incumbent Barbara Bush’s.
The relative newness makes perfect (reactionary) sense. Before Hill-Ro came into the picture to muddy things up, the office of the First Lady brought femininity and maternal graces and stylish skirt suits to the unscrupulous world of politics. But what happens when she has a career that doesn’t involve kids or committing the Dewey Decimal system to memory? Why, have her bake cookies, that’s what!
The oh-so-ladylike family-encircling competition is a pioneer in what’s become a separate but equally perilous campaign trail toward the feminizing of the First Lady—something that the amazing Megan Garber tracks over at "Columbia Journalism Review." Your Princeton-Harvard education? Pish-posh! We want to know the color of your Kitchenaid—and whether it’s matched to your cabinets or your linens. Oh, match to both? Well, isn’t that brilliant.
—Jiyeon Yoo