Dear Madam President

There is a line from the 1973 movie The Way We Were, where Katie Morosky, played by Barbra Streisand, talks about Hubbell Gardner, played by Robert Redford. She says of Gardner/Redford, “In a way he was like the country he lived in; everything came too easily to him.”

And that has been a narrative, albeit, often a false one, of ease and grace that the public often seeks to buy into with respect to its leaders. Certainly Kennedy successfully exploited it, maybe even laid the political predicate for it, in his race against Nixon in 1960. In a way it was even a part of the Obama narrative.

On the flip side, it may have very well worked against Hillary Clinton in 2016. It seems that for Hillary Clinton, nothing came easily. Everything she had ever achieved was, or appeared to be, a struggle. One that played out on the public stage for more than 40 years.

Jennifer Palmieri got to see this up close and personal as Hillary Clinton’s Communications Director, and herself a veteran of many years in politics and in the White House. She brings it all into focus in her new book Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World

My conversation with Jennifer Palmieri:

Big Girls Don't Cry

The 2008 Presidential election may have changed the political landscape for generations. Hillary Clinton's 18 millions cracks in the glass ceiling, Barack Obama’s transcendence of race and Sara Palin’s emergence as a political force, all shape our politics today. The irony is, that for all the drama and cultural upheaval caused by the election an African-American President, and the splendor of that election night speech in Grant Park, it was perhaps Clinton's loss and Palin's attempt to co-opt it, that may now have the most far reaching impact on our politics and our culture.

How did this happen? How did all of the primary campaign's angst and tension between Obama and Clinton supporters lead to John McCain’s spawning of Sara Palin, which has in turn lead directly to this weeks elections and will politics or feminism ever be the same?

This is the backdrop for Salon's senior writer, Rebecca Traister's eye opening new book Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women. Even if you were paying close attention, Traister brings us up close and personal with people and ideas we probably missed and should be thinking about.

My conversation with Rebecca Traister:

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