Bee in my bonnet

Something's been bugging me with regard to the expectations for this presidential season's groundbreaking candidates. Way too much is being expected of them. Obama has pretty much been unofficially canonized (he's already been all but knighted by Oprah, so an official canonization is probably not far off) and Hillary is bearing on her shoulders well over two centuries of American women's once only wistful hopes. Talk about baggage.
It's not surprising that it was (white) women writers and activists, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who set the moral bar for black men as higher than their white oppressors, because women have been saddled with that role from time immemorial, up to and including the American feminist past rooted in the Temperance movement.
The novelist Angela Carter, most famous for her updated fairy tales and lauded as "the high-priestess of postgraduate porn," was attacked by fellow feminists for her assertion in The Sadeian Woman that women cannot be genuinely equal until they can be equally reprehensible. Understandably perhaps, Utopian feminists were not wanting to hear that. But time has somewhat vindicated Ms. Carter.
Or has it? Maybe politics is the last-conquered realm of any social trend, but until we can have a black or female candidate who is seen as just another candidate with a big question mark over his or her head, instead of the weight of the world, who is permitted flaws and skeletons and even a bad hair/tie day, we still have a ways to go, baby.