Hillary, Peggy Olson, and the 'Mad Men'-ization of politics

There are two scenes from last week's Primary Day in Pennsylvania that I can't get out of my head. The weird part is that neither of them happened in Pennsylvania. One of them didn't even happen in real life. And yet I think they say quite a bit about who will soon get elected the 45th president of the United States. Let me try to explain.

You probably saw the first scene, at Manhattan's Trump Tower, where the building's developer and most famous resident held a news conference to celebrate his LBJ-sized landslide victory in the so-called Acela primary in five Atlantic states, including ours. It was a chance of a lifetime for Donald Trump to be magnanimous in victory, to fulfill his promise to be "so presidential you'll be bored." And he would have got away with it, until some pesky reporter asked about his evolving back-and-forth with the Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

Suddenly, orange was the new red, as The Donald lashed back at a verbal challenge from the would-be first female commander-in-chief.

"Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she'd get 5 percent of the vote," Trump bellowed. Mary Pat Christie, the wife of the New Jersey governor, seemed to cringe in the background, like she were acting out one of those Southwest "Need to get away?" commercials.. Repeating an earlier dig, Trump added: "The only thing she's got going is the women's card. And the beautiful thing is, women don't like her."

The other scene took place in an elevator...in the fict-o-sphere. Actually, for me it happened on a flat screen, on the morning of the Pennsylvania primary, at a place called Kelly Writers House on a leafy corner of Locust Walk on the University of Pennsylvania campus. Maybe the timing was too perfect -- on a day that screamed out for a brief vacation from political obsessions -- here in a small and stuffy Victorian room was a bona fide genius, Matthew Weiner, the creative mind that birthed TV's just-wrapped-up Mad Men about life, advertising, the 1960s and everything.

During his talk with Al Filreis, the faculty director of Kelly Writers House, Weiner screened a much-discussed scene from roughly the mid-point of Mad Men's seven seasons. In it, the two men female protagonists -- the-upwardly-mobile-for-a-woman-in-the-1960s Peggy Olson and the resourceful office manager Joan Holloway Harris -- have it out where the show's most poignant moments so often take place, in the elevator.  It summed up their world where no one overtly cares about politics, and yet in some strange way everything is political.

Peggy has taken it upon herself to fire a male artist, Joey, in the creative department of the agency, because he'd drawn a crude, sexualized portrait of Joan and a co-worker. She thought Joan would be grateful; instead, she was furious.

"Now everybody in the office will know that you solved my problem, and you must be really important, I guess… I'd already handled it," Joan said. "You want to be a big shot. Well, no matter how powerful we get around here, they can still just draw a cartoon. So all you've done is prove to them that I'm a meaningless secretary, and you're just another humorless bitch."

There's a lot going on there. Weiner noted that the scene shows how "oppressed people" aren't always on the same side, but most importantly there's "that statement -- that no matter how powerful you are that you're subject to be sexualized in a way that you are subservient ...your authority is being undermined. Your status is being undermined, no matter what."

It was just about 12 hours later that the short-fingered vulgarian of the 2016 presidential race came on our flat TVs to prove how little -- and by how little I mean nothing, essentially -- has changed since 1965. That you can be a U.S. senator and a secretary of state and that you can still be dismissed for your gender, your authority undermined, written off as a humorless you-now-what. That the likely Republican presidential nominee can draw a cartoon.

Talk all you want about paid leave, or fracking regs, or trade deals with Columbia. As much as those things may matter, how many votes in the 2016 election will have nothing to do with any of that? How many votes will instead be decided in these kinds of "elevator moments," where the politics with a small "p" is about strength, weakness, or, especially, R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and finding out what it means to "me," the voter?

It's something that's been on my mind, even before I heard Weiner's talk in Philadelphia. While I was watching Clinton go on her Shermanesque march across the Deep South, setting Bernie Sanders's hopes of a breakthrough on fire in state after state (#FeelTheBern?), I listened to a lot of folks who backed Bernie wondering why black voters couldn't respond to a man who'd gotten arrested for civil rights in the early 1960s, who had the "best position" on criminal justice.

But I suspected that a lot of older black female voters -- who were about as unanimous for Hillary as a voting bloc has ever been -- looked at her and, despite her millionaire success, saw someone whose lifelong battles  to gain respect mirrored their own struggles in some way, and whose success would be a kind of a vindication of what they'd accomplished. Sanders didn'tt stand a chance against something like that, and now here comes Trump pouring gasoline on that blaze.

But that's not the only place where the personal becomes political. Just one week ago, I spent a day outside Trump's rally in West Chester and talked to a number of supporters. Most folks want you to know that they like Trump's policies, but it's always the same. "The wall." The only policy Trump supporters can name. The only policy Trump has.

But dig deeper and they'll tell you, in their own way, that it's how he makes them feel. That he sounds strong and that makes them feel safe. That he blows the lid off their frustration with what they call "political correctness," that it feels so good, as one 76-year-old woman from Gladwyne told me. when he bellows, "Get 'em out of here!"

One thing that I loved about Med Men was the way that it melded the tumultuous politics of the 1960s with the characters' lives, mostly by burying it deep in the background. "Honestly, I don't think politics is a daily conversation anywhere," Weiner said at Penn. "We have a war that been going on in Afghanistan -- 12 years, 14 years? --  the longest war in us history. Le'ts see how many times it comes up today. If you go back and want to capture the day in a document like The New York Times, it looks like we're all talking about it. But we're not."

Weiner was discussing the Mad Men episode that deals with the 1968 Martin Luther King assassination. The characters had strong reactions to MLK's death -- but often in regards to how it affected whatever drama was in their own lives. Don Draper was worried about his mistress in riot-torn D.C., Harry Crane fretted about lost TV ad dollars -- and so on. Said the Mad Men creator: "I'm always interested in how the political affects you in a personal way."

So am I. In 2016, you have to wonder if Draper's firm Sterling Cooper would be cutting TV spots for Trump as it worked for Richard Nixon in 1960 -- and whether even Draper's mercurial brilliance would be enough to cut through a whole Kodak Carousel of emotional snapshots that Trump's non-stop misogyny has rained down on the female electorate. On Nov. 8, 2016, the office elevator door closes and becomes the curtain of a voting booth. Trump will be playing the role of Joey the cartoonist.