From the moment it was released ten years ago, Election--the movie directed by Alexander Payne, based on the novel by Tom Perrotta (who later wrote, and helped adapt to the screen, the novel Little Children)--had the feel of something that might have more lasting cultural repurcussions than you might guess at from its $15 million gross an brief run in theaters. And now, Greg Veis, it does seem as if "any ambitious female politician with the ability to make men see starbursts--or at least whose hair is blond--will invite comparisons to Tracy Flick, the hyper-driven and not a little bit demented student body president Reese Witherspoon made famous." Last year, during the presidential campaign, videos likening Tracey to Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin began cluttering up YouTube. These and other comparisons, manufactured with varying degrees of professional polisj and convincingness of argument, are more double-edged than those making them might recognize. After all, if Election has a hero, it isn't Mr. McAllister, the upright and uptight high school teacher played in the movie by Matthew Broderick, who convinces himself that his personal animus against Tracey (which at one point expresses itself by having him imagine her face before him while he's screwing his wife) justifies his subverting the democratic process, high-school-government division. The film, like the novel on which it's very closely based, doesn't let anyone off the hook, and it speaks well of our current chief executive that he's told Payne that it's his favorite political movie. (We'll assume, for the moment, that if Obama were trapped in an elevator with Buck Henry, he'd at least exhaust all other potential topics of conversation before telling his new friend that his favorite political movie is First Family.)

Interviewed by Veis, Tom Perrotta showed an admirable mixture of pride and unease over the ongoing life of his creation. As he puts it, "there's certainly a flattering aspect to it--not a lot of characters become a cultural shorthand. The thing that strikes me is that Tracy really has become an all-purpose point of comparison for a certain type of female politician: She's either an all-inclusive character, or people aren't thinking hard enough...There is a slight worry that references to her are colored by a certain type of sexism, that she's become a cudgel. But I also think that there were already a number of other cultural references points for men. What I was responding to with Tracy was new: a generation of hard-charging women, the daughters of first-generation feminists and unapologetic achievers. This was the late 80s and early 90s, and they were different than the girls I had grown up with, more willing to compete. The only other cultural reference points for women like that then were movie stars and entertainers. People like Madonna. Who was it going to be in politics? Golda? Indira? Thatcher? By default, there are few female political touchstones." As for specific politicians who have been tagged by detractors as being Flick-like, Perrotta recognized "the storyline similarities with Hillary last year: There's the hard-working, doggedly ambitious female character being challenged by the affable guy who seems to have just waltzed in and claimed it by being. But that's not entirely fair to either Hillary or Obama. As far as Palin, her accent really connected people back to Reese Witherspoon's character, I think. And like Tracy, she has a perkiness that masks some real aggression. On the other hand, Tracy would've been someone whose resume looked more like Hillary's: Ivy-league track, always at the top of the class. Especially with Palin, I don't feel as if Tracy Flick was the best comparison. I just think people are made uncomfortable by ambitious women." It remains to be seen what kind of life Tracey will have as Americans either begin getting better used to seeing women in positions of political power or settle down to a long clueless future of gumming their mush. Meanwhile, we eagerly look forward to the first time somebody accuses his opponent of being eerily reminiscent of Ronnie James McGorvey.