It’s oldish, this tidbit about Hillary Clinton in March 17’s Newsweek, from a first-person, op-ed, inside-the-looking-glass piece by Tina Brown, but still telling, and true, in my opinion:

“What saddens boomer women who love Hillary is that their twentysomething daughters don’t share their view of her heroic role,” Brown writes. “Instead they’ve been swept up by that new Barack magic. It’s not their fault, and it’s not Hillary’s, either. The very scar tissue that older women see as proof of her determination just embarrasses their daughters, killing off for them all the insouciant elation that ought to have come with girl power in the White House.”

On the other hand, much more specious, I believe, is this half-reasoned assertion from Brown: “Am I alone in suspecting that TV’s most powerful 54-year-old woman (Oprah Winfrey) just might have endorsed [Obama] so fast for reasons of desirable viewer demographics as much as personal inspiration?” Think of her what you will, but Winfrey most assuredly isn’t a trend whore — she made a conscious decision to get out of schlocky, gutter-gotcha TV at its peak, when Maury Povich and Jerry Springer were still ratings giants — and to peg as merely “fashionable” or somehow otherwise (economically?) advantageous one’s support for Obama is utterly ridiculous. In fact, Winfrey has talked, though not at length, about getting no small amount of flak from many of her viewers for her endorsement of Obama.