House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton surely will rank for placement there someday. For now, they are making history, and on Thursday, at a reception in that hall, the two took an hour to celebrate together.
Pelosi opened her arms wide to Clinton and they hugged tightly, cheek to cheek, two brilliant red-lipsticked smiles. It was an exuberant display of girliness from two formidable women nearing the end of an extraordinary week for both.
Brilliant smiles and momentous history, claimed The Washington Post, and if that wasn't enough, they brought in a California ultraliberal to speak for the assembled twitterpated reporters:
"Whoever thought that on this day of all days, I'd be standing on this podium to celebrate Women's History Month and sharing the stage with two of my role models and two of the greatest female pioneers and role models for all of us?" said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), to cheers, applause and whistles from a crowd of 300 women and men.
When you're a liberal feminist, you can do a liberal version of the Mission Accomplished aircraft-carrier landing and know that no reporter will mock you for it, and no one in the press corps will even mock it later, if these "historic achievements" go sour.
Gerhart wasn't going to allow Lynn Woolsey to be the only liberal feminist to add a tribute to Nancy and Hillary:
Pelosi and Clinton are a testament to women's capacity to compose their lives alongside, rather than distinct from, those around them. One is the first female speaker of the House, a woman who didn't run for office until the youngest of her five children was a high school senior. The other is the first former first lady to become a U.S. senator, a woman who initially derived her political power from her husband and then went on to run for president, winning more than 17 million votes in primaries and caucuses.
One traveled to Mexico and Moscow in the past week and helped to negotiate a deal announced Wednesday that could slash the number of nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia. The other finally brought her disputatious membership to heel and succeeded, where the first had so famously failed, at achieving the sweeping health-insurance reform Democrats had sought for half a century.
Touting Hillary's "historic achievements" is more of a stretch in this story, since they "could" reach a new arms-control agreement, and the most recent blast of Mexico news was three Americans gunned down by narco-guerrillas.
