A hat tip to the Washington Post for this AP article noting the figure on the cover of this week’s Time magazine: District education czar Michelle Rhee. One item that’s sure to make waves in D.C., where, earlier this month, voters overwhelmingly indicated that they favored Barack Obama: Rhee strongly considered voting for Republican candidate John McCain. According to the report, Time quotes Rhee saying that she is “somewhat terrified of what the Democrats are going to do on education.”

Does Rhee fear that President-elect Obama is likely to weigh in on the side of the teachers’ union in the District’s ongoing royal rumble in the schools? Or does she merely prefer the platform outlined by John McCain and the Republicans? Back in July, the New America Foundation’s Sara Mead at the Early Education Watch blog observed that McCain’s education plan “emphasizes school choice, alternative teacher certification, teacher performance pay, bonuses for teachers who work in high-need schools, and greater school-level decision making authority.” That certainly sounds like Rhee. And although both Obama and McCain said during the final presidential debate that Rhee stood with him on the issue of school vouchers, only McCain was right (says Marc Fisher).

This cover illustrates a couple of interesting phenomenons: fame-for-D.C. and outright sexism. Rhee may be a bureaucrat with a lot of authority, but with all due respect, she is still, at the end of the day, merely a bureaucrat. Yet by nabbing the cover of Time and a profile in this month’s Atlantic Monthly, Rhee appears to be this city’s biggest celebrity.

And yet her high profile does not afford her much respect. No celebrity not famous for flashing her underwear can expect quite such negative treatment by the media as Rhee. In both Time and the Atlantic, she is depicted as a mean old schoolma’am. In the Time cover, at least, she is symbolically (if cheesily) projecting authority. The Atlantic picture is a deliberate effort to make her look like a wraith. A caption underneath a photo accompanying one September 2007 Washingtonian profile mentions that Rhee is mounting a “charm offensive,” but by the photo alone, you wouldn’t know it.

Now, no one is owed a pleasant smiling photo by the press and an editorial photo ought to capture something of the story in the subject. But isn’t this humorless, ball-busting teacher stereotype tired? Does Rhee really need to be captured holding a broom? And do you think a man in her position would be depicted so?