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The reality is is that Congress is a very male-gendered oriented institution. Out of the, you know, more than 10,000 people who've ever been elected to Congress, you know, only about 250 of them have ever been women.

Every congresswoman surely endures the same strains that drive some of her male colleagues to have affairs: lots of travel, families far away, heady work that makes a domestic routine seem distant and boring. But the stakes are much higher for women, because they are still judged by a different standard.

Washington is a city of important men and the women they married before they grew up.

I'm not a career politician, so the ways of Washington may be a little obscure to me.

Washington is still very much a male-oriented culture. Being from Los Angeles, I think it is less so there - there is less attachment to tradition, perhaps, there is more flexibility, more acceptance of change generally. That is partly because of Hollywood.

Washington is a place where people have always been suspect of style and overt sexuality. Too much preening signals that you're not up late studying cap-and-trade agreements.

States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.

When men organize themselves into groups, and they make rules based on common or self-interest, it's always tangled and political.

Women in Washington - and in positions of power anywhere - should be subjected to the same criticisms and held to the same standards as men. That does not include the assumption that any successful woman has attained her position through flattery, feminine wiles, or her ability to provide maternal comfort to a more powerful man.

There's a void of leadership in a lot of Washington. I think one of the reasons why there's so much angst across the country.