Convert.(The Talk of the Town)(Rosalind Wyman)

Rosalind Wyman--seventy-seven years old; doughty feminist; political fund-raiser and philanthropist; hostess to J.F.K., Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, and Hollywood types too numerous to count; youngest elected member of the Los Angeles City Council (at the age of twenty-two); first woman to run a national political convention (the Democrats in San Francisco, 1984)--may well be the most indomitable member of Hillary Clinton's Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants Suits. She was deeply sorry that Clinton did not win the nomination, and does not believe that she will ever see her become President: "Not in my lifetime." Nevertheless, she declares herself eager to work for Barack Obama's candidacy, and she believes that virtually all of Clinton's supporters will vote for him in November. "Absolutely," she said last Wednesday, at Bravo! Ristorante, at the Denver Sheraton. "I'll tell you one reason why. Those women are petrified about the Court--that Roe v. Wade is through. I will stake my sixty years in politics on this: they will come over."

Wyman's own pants suit that day was a cheerful robin's-egg blue, and she appeared more carefully coiffed and less weary than the average delegate. She had sharp words for the press. She has known Chris Matthews, the MSNBC commentator, "since he was a pup," working as a top aide to Tip O'Neill; last October, she wrote Matthews a furious letter after he told Obama, on "Hardball," precisely how to attack Clinton in the upcoming Philadelphia debate. ("Every word she has spoken says yes to the status quo"; "She just voted with the hawks to target Iran!") In her letter, Wyman informed Matthews, "Your mentor really would not have been pleased today."

As for the charges of sexism during the primary, Wyman said, "That's politics." She recalled, with some amusement, Richard Nixon's victory in his 1950 Senate race against Helen Gahagan Douglas, in which Nixon called Douglas the "Pink Lady"--"pink right down to her underwear." (Nixon's strategist, Murray Chotiner: "The ...