What makes for a great first lady?

Are they the same traits that make for a great woman (as opposed to a great “lady”)?

First ladies — particularly younger first ladies — are often thrust into their nations’ fairy tales, representing their nation’s hopes and desires. They must become the people’s princess, which entails a series of contradictory and often impossible-to-achieve expectations.

It seems that first and foremost, most nations want their first ladies to be beautiful or at least supremely feminine/elegant. A first lady must be strong yet vulnerable and lady-like. She must be out of reach of the average male voter but somehow transmit accessibility. She must be classy but humble. Men must want to ravish her, and women must want to be her. Most importantly, she must never forget that her rightful place is at best next to (and usually behind) her powerful husband, who is the commander-in-chief. (It’s ironic to note how different the situation is when the wife is the person running for President. One of Hillary’s biggest appeals to many Democrats is that Bill Clinton comes as part of the package.)

In this sense, the quintessential First Lady is Jacqueline Kennedy, who claimed elegance by conjuring the spirits of her French ancestors (the Bouviers).

Carla Bruni is at least as pretty, as elegant and as learned as Jackie O. So how then do we understand all of the controversy and excitement about her planned engagement to French president Nicolas Sarkozy?

On paper, Bruni has it all:

• She is beautiful: She was one of the most highly paid models in the 1990s. She was the face of Dior and Chanel, and shot over 250 magazine covers.
• She is rich: She is the heiress to an Italian tire fortune.
• She is “well-bred”: Her stepfather is an Italian tire magnate and classical composer, and her mother is a concert pianist. She is well-educated and speaks three languages.
• She is successful: In addition to being a supermodel, she won the French equivalent of a Grammy as the country’s best female singer in 2004.

So what is it about Bruni that turns some French people off? Is is that she already has it all, and no one likes to see the genetically lucky get luckier? Is it that her relationship with Sarkozy started so soon after his divorce from his ex-wife? Is it the difference in age and sex appeal between Bruni and Sarkozy? I’m sure all of this has something to do with it, but I don’t think it’s the main reason.

Bruni’s biggest drawback, presumably, is that she is (as Beyonce might say) an independent woman. She has been quoted as saying that “love lasts for a long time, but burning desire, two or three weeks“. As such, she prefers polygamy and polyandry to monogamy. She has also described herself as a “cat” who knows how to tame men. And, of course, she has often been photographed throughout her career in her underwear.

In this sense, Bruni is a highly sexualized, unconventional woman.

Shakespeare might call her a shrew in need of a good taming. That’s not exactly high praise for an aspiring first lady.

A similar argument was made about Hillary Clinton when she first entered on the world’s stage. Before the designer pant suits, blond highlights and expensive hair cuts were the images of an asexual, humorless, fashion-illiterate Hillary with coke-rimmed glasses, a headband and not one ounce of glamour.

It is arguably this enduring image of Hillary — and her statements implying that she felt no need to “stand by her man” like some “little woman” and the disdain with which she contemplated being a housewife rather than becoming a high-powered lawyer — that explains why many “traditional” men and women have been uncomfortable with Hillary and why her tears were such a powerful statement of her renewed status as a woman.

It would be like Carla Bruni saying that she was a born-again virgin.

Though one was a top fashion model, and the other seemed to resist any desire to be fashionable, both Carla and Hillary share the fact that their unwillingness to conform to traditional gender roles arguably renders them inappropriate first ladies before large sections of their respective publics.

But maybe Carla has started a new trend. There are rumors in the Spanish and Latin American press that Naomi Campbell is the new sweet thing of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. The official version is that Naomi is meeting with various Latin American leaders as part of her new role as a contributing editor of GQ Magazine, and that one of her interviews was with Hugo Chavez, who supposedly fell head over heels inlove with the tempestuous model. Now that Carla has conquered Nick, it seems that the tabloids think that love is in the air whenever a model is in the vicinity of a horny, middle-aged politician.

These arm-chair discussions about race and gender are one thing.

But let’s seriously hope that Naomi is not that crazy.