Tracy Flick for Principal

Tom Perrotta's '90s antihero returns.

- By Judith Shulevitz

Election, the satirical movie directed by Alexander Payne, met with critical euphoria when it opened in 1999. Election the satirical novel had occasioned less fuss when it came out the year before; indeed, its then-unknown author, Tom Perrotta, had barely managed to get it published. (“People don't know whether it's YA or adult,” his agent had told him. “They don't know what to do with it.) Both works used a gladiatorial high-school election to send up the national kind. But the movie had the magnificently chipper Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick, a relentless candidate for student-body president who was both drill sergeant and object of sexual desire. “A buzzing flytrap of determined overachievement ... ambitious to the point of dementia,” Wesley Morris wrote in the San Francisco Examiner. “Machiavelli-minded” and “pitiless, Manohla Dargis wrote in LA Weekly. Roger Ebert compared Tracy to Sammy Glick, the protagonist of Budd Schulberg's 1941 novel, What Makes Sammy Run?, and the Broadway musical of the same name. Sammy Glick was shorthand for “backstabbing Jewish Hollywood operator, until the anti-Semitism of the stereotype made it unacceptable. Tracy Flick, however, still has name recognition. If you want to say that a female politician is ruthlessly ambitious, you call her a Tracy Flick. The first Tracy was Elizabeth Dole. This year's is the up and-coming Republican representative Elise Stefanik. The ultimate Tracy, of course, was Hillary Clinton.