Rachel Maddow for White House Press Secretary

When Patti Murray, Carol Moseley Braun, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein stormed into the Senate in 1992, the press dubbed it the “year of the woman.”

But I’ve always thought that the real mark of change came a year later, when Bill Clinton appointed Dee Dee Myers, age 31, as White House Press Secretary, the first woman to hold the position. For the next two years, she was–day in, day out–the face and voice of the administration, and of America.

It would be a riot to see Rachel Maddow – a former Rhodes Scholar, AIDS activist, butch lesbian with a PhD – take up that slot. On MSNBC and CNN, she manages to goad right-wing talking heads like Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson into fits of imbecility, but she never stoops to their level.

So come on Barack, ask Rachel. I doubt she’d abandon her journalistic post to become a political operative – but hey, it worked for Tony Snow.

Richard Kim is associate editor of The Nation.

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