Consider this a preseason scrimmage for the 2016 season, when seeeeeeexism will replace raaaaaaacism as the standard retort for Democrats. Well, maybe not so much replace as eclipse, anyway. All of the criticism of her role in keeping Barack Obama insulated in the White House bubble is a result of having a woman break through into the top tier of presidential advisers, Jarrett told MSNBC’s Joy Reid. “When you break glass ceilings, you’re going to get scraped”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51YPqwOkTW8

White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett dismissed her critics Wednesday afternoon, suggesting broadsides directed at her way are a natural byproduct of rising to a powerful perch in Washington as a woman.

“When you break glass ceilings you’re going to get scraped — a minor scrape — by a chard or two from the glass,” Jarrett told MSNBC. “But what I really focus on is the hard work that we have in these last two years and I wake up every morning, as I know the president does, focusing on people who are really just trying to get ahead, who are counting on us to work for them.”

Donna Brazile runs to the barricades for Jarrett:

Withering criticism is something that is meted out regardless of gender in Washington. Attorney General Eric Holder has been called every name in the book, including the ones that have to be spelled using asterisks. But Jarrett is being subjected to a refrain of snipes and swipes that sound like they were cribbed from the Twitter feed of one of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey.” The litany of Jarrett’s run-ins with other White House power brokers reads like a plot synopsis for a new “Mean Girls” movie.

Even more telling are the descriptions of Jarrett that trivialize her position and the skills that got her to that position. The Politico article states, “If her role in this administration reflected reality, Jarrett would be called ‘First Big Sister’ to both Michelle and Barack.”

“Big Sister!”

Karl Rove may have been characterized as an evil genius, but he was never reduced to being called merely George Bush’s big brother figure. He was given credit for being good at what he did, not dismissed as a sycophantic surrogate sibling.

Huh? The knock on Jarrett is that she’s Svengali, not Billy Carter. That’s what is meant by Big Sister — that Jarrett controls Obama, enforces a bubble around the President, and basically runs the White House and makes all of Obama’s decisions for him. That’s precisely what people claimed about Karl Rove, who was notoriously referred to as “Bush’s brain,” when the Left wasn’t chortling over the Bush-assigned nickname “Turd Blossom.” They also claimed it about Dick Cheney during and after the Bush administration, and still demonize both to this day. If people thought Jarrett was inconsequential, no one would bother talking about her at all.

Brazile correctly notes that this characterization was applied to women in the Bush administration — but that recognition seems more designed as strategic than insightful:

Valerie Jarrett is certainly not the first woman who achieved power in Washington to be treated so disrespectfully. The shards of the broken glass ceiling cut both Democrat and Republican. When George W. Bush was President, The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd dismissed Bush female staffers Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes and Harriet Miers all as nothing more than “adoring work wives, catering to W.’s every political, legal and ego-affirming need.”

It wasn’t just Dowd. Rice got widely caricatured as Bush’s stooge, including at least one editorial cartoon that depicted her as something akin to Prissy from Gone With The Wind. That one came courtesy of the New York Times, too, not some fringe publication. People on the Left regularly caricatured women and minorities in Bush’s White House as dupes and PR stunts, and Brazile and her allies didn’t issue much opposition to those slanders then. And this doesn’t even get to how the media and the Left treated Sarah Palin in 2008, a woman who had risen outside the Ivy League clique to become governor of Alaska before joining John McCain’s presidential ticket. This admission is just self-serving tripe now.

As I wrote earlier this week, the Jarrett-as-Svengali argument is just silly. Presidents have advisers, not the other way around, and presidents have responsibility for the decisions that get made. Blaming the advisers is a pointless misdirection, but that role comes with substantial criticism no matter what gender the adviser is. Jarrett isn’t getting anything more than what the Left dished up on Karl Rove, and arguably less, unless I missed a “Fitzmas” or a frog-march demand or two.

As Harry Truman once said of his job, “The buck stops here,” not at the desk of his advisers. But as he also told those who want to involve themselves in politics, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” That applies equally to both men and women.

Update: Harry Truman, not Harry Reid. Goodness. It’s, er, been a long day. [headdesk]