It seems increasingly obvious to me that the only sensible way to look at the US election is through the prism of Parks And Recreation. This American sitcom, which sadly came to the end of its six-year run last year, starred Amy Poehler as local government official Leslie Knope, and once you start seeing the parallels between the lovely fictional show and the horrible reality shitshow, it makes the latter feel more bearable. Obviously Hillary Clinton is Leslie, the blond politico, ambitious to her bones, who, whatever you think of her politics, is undeniably devoted to public service. Donald Trump is an amalgam of Leslie’s two worst male rivals: first, Bobby Newport, the spoilt manboy as rich in money as he is poor in self-awareness; second, the proudly offensive Jeremy Jamm, with a fondness for saying things like, “I love Chinese crap. Lucy Liu, Gangnam Style, sushi, etcetera etcetera.” That could so easily be a Trump quote, given that he semi-apologised for referring to Mexicans as drug dealers and rapists by tweeting a photo of himself eating a taco bowl, that I honestly had to check he hadn’t said it in a CNN interview.

It also seems increasingly obvious to me that the Clinton campaign needs to start screening Parks And Recreation at their events to solve what the media calls Clinton’s “likability problem”. This doesn’t refer to whether the electorate likes Clinton’s policies, but how they imagine her to be as a person. For the past three decades the answer to that has been, by and large, no, they don’t like her, with people hating her in the 1990s for being (if I remember correctly) an overly moralistic feminist who spat in housewives’ cookie dough, and people hating her now because they think she’s not moral enough, and that she will say anything to get elected. Clinton has generally seemed not to care about her personal unpopularity, which only made me like her more. But now she is running for the presidency against a tiny-handed Voldemort and so she is gritting her teeth and dealing with the issue. Last week she was asked, for the 10 billionth time, about her “likability issues”. Clinton replied that people like her once she’s allowed to get on with the job, which is true, given her popularity when she was secretary of state and New York senator. It was a more dignified statement than the one she gave at the Democratic national convention last month: “Through all my years of public service, the ‘service’ part has always come easier to me than the ‘public’ part,” she said, as though she were Boo Radley, who could help people only under the cover of night and then scurry into the shadows, so as not to offend anyone with her antisocial weirdness.

Yes, male politicians have to pass the “Would you have a beer with me?” test. But given that Clinton has been a successful politician for 15 years, the issue of her likability is clearly about more than mere appeal. The real problem is that, while she needs to be ambitious to get as far as she has, ambitious women are seen, still, as inherently unlikable. She’s supposed to pretend that she doesn’t actually want to be commander in chief, in the way female celebrities are supposed to pretend they don’t have to starve themselves to be thin. Such things are passively attained without any unfeminine effort. As Megan Garber recently wrote, the female presidents now seen in US TV shows (Selina Meyer in Veep, Sally Langston in Scandal, Mackenzie Allen in Commander In Chief) attain their powerful positions by fluke, not conscious ambition. In fact, when Veep’s Selina Meyer had to campaign for the presidency in the last season, she became absurd and duly lost the election. Women who strive for political power are evil, summed up by the character of Tracy Flick in the 1999 film Election, still cited as the embodiment of monstrous female ambition, even though Tracy never does much wrong besides tear down some banners in frustration.

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The one glorious exception to this rule is Leslie Knope, a woman who fights like hell for political promotion, and is applauded for it. There is no contradiction between her political drive and her personal appeal. Through the plotlines involving Knope, Newport and Jamm, the show’s point is that likability is nothing compared with capability. While sitcoms with cynical male characters are the cutting edge of current cool (Louie, BoJack Horseman), I’m hoping that Parks And Rec will be the one that foresaw the zeitgeist. Because given the number of female politicians currently in high positions, its depiction of political women should not be an outlier, but the harbinger of a sea change.