You can find just about anything on the web these days.  These 14 pointers on how to walk a tightrope ought to be required reading for political candidates, especially candidates who are any sort of historic “first”.   

The key instruction is: “Don’t look down”.  That’s less about technique than about having the courage to keep going, to be true to your mission and not allow either internal fear or external forces to disrupt your balance. This is a hard lesson, and history is littered with candidates who have teetered and fallen from their precarious high wire hike.  

Last weekend, Courtney Martin asked me to participate in a panel she moderated, “The American Hero and the American Dream” for the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. We talked about the life paths walked by the presidential and vice presidential candidates, and how their personal narratives played into their quest for office. Campaign 2008 takes the prize for fascinating tightrope stories in which gender, racial, an ideology politics threaten to knock candidates off balance at any second.

Charlton McIlwain , NYU Assistant Professor of Culture and Communication (he’s speaking in the photo above), raised the tightrope metaphor in explaining why Barack Obama lists to the cool, calm, collected side. John McCain can get away with being an angry white man with impunity. But as a black man, Obama has to reassure voters by standing ramrod straight and looking unflappable, in an almost stereotypically WASPy way, up there on that shaky tightrope.

McCain has his own tightrope to walk, perched as he is between the raging right of his party and the independent voters he must woo to win.

Ironically and unwittingly, Hillary Clinton paved the way for Sarah “Pitbull” Palin. Ironically, Hillary’s uphill battle against overt sexism (the Hillary Nutcracker, the KFC Meal with its fat thighs, the way Chris Matthews excoriated her for expressing confidence in her candidacy, comments on her pantsuits, her cackle, her cleavage, her whatever) made Sarah’s path easier.   Also because of Hillary’s candidacy, the American public is more accustomed to seeing that leadership can come with breasts and a higher pitched voice. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that Palin’s worldview represents the most cynical co-opting of feminism. As author Robin Morgan put it:

Nor can you just slot one (qualified) woman out and slot a different (unqualified) one in: women are not building-brick toys.  Regrettably, some of my colleagues in the media seem unable to grasp this. Having faced justifiable fury for their treatment of HRC, they now tiptoe crazily around Palin for fear that to criticize her at all will be—whoops!—“sexist.”

Palin, for her part, seems oblivious that she’s on a tightrope, though she acknowledges she chose those glasses to balance those red peeky-toed high heels she’s fond of with a touch of dowdiness. Thanks to Title IX, she has the competitive athleticism to best any man, and she always looks perky. People like for a woman to look perky.

But Joe Biden, the most traditional of all the candidates this year, the “clean and articulate” Mr. Smith Goes to Washington guy, might just end up with the most challenging tightrope walk of all when he goes up against Palin in the vice-presidential debate tonight. She could eat his lunch just by showing up and smiling adorably while he puts his foot squarely into his mouth as he is prone to do. If Biden displays his knowledge experience too much, he could appear arrogant; if he fails to clearly demonstrate his knowledge and experience, he will have missed his opportunity to define himself as—to coin a term—ready to lead.

When walking a tightrope, the real trick is not to let it become a noose with which to hang oneself.