Leadership Quote by Debbie Wasserman Schultz

A party power broker defending two ideological opponents is less about ideological charity than message discipline. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is signaling that the media’s treatment of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann isn’t just unfair to them; it’s corrosive to women in politics as a category. The line “on virtually anything” functions like a prophylactic: she scrubs off any suspicion of alliance before stepping into solidarity. That rhetorical move lets her critique the playing field without granting their platforms legitimacy.

Her real target is the narrative machine that turns female politicians into reality-TV archetypes: catfight, rivalry, “who wears it better,” the eternal horse race of personality over policy. “Unique scrutiny” is doing heavy lifting here. It’s an accusation that women don’t get to be merely ambitious or wrong or calculating in the ordinary way men do; their ambitions are treated as an aberration requiring explanation, and their disagreements are packaged as personal drama. The phrase “juicy storylines” is a deliberately unserious descriptor for a serious problem, which sharpens the insult: the press is accused of trading civic responsibility for tabloid dopamine.

The subtext is also intra-party and strategic. By calling it “inappropriate,” she’s positioning Democrats as the grown-ups who can condemn sexism even when it benefits their opponents, while nudging journalists to cover substance rather than spectacle. It’s not moral purity so much as a bid to raise the cost of lazy framing and to expand the space in which women can compete without being reduced to a plotline.