(Ameri)Canniest of them All?
There was, in the whiteness of her teeth and slight overbite, the quintessential quality of Americanness. Leaving aside her prodigious energy and can-do spirit and lively Protestantism -- that she was an American's American was revealed in her teeth alone.
Too "w.t." to be taken seriously by coastal elites, she was from a land empty, which they translated to mean intellectually barren. What America was to Europe she was to the Lower Forty-Eight, and despite possessing a sharp intelligence and sharper survival skills many underestimated her, as if jadedness was the mark of greatness.
She was not educated to the point where it led to paralysis as it had with the French. If at first glance she appeared a flower in bloom that might be easily harmed by too much rain or sun, it was merely a surface impression for she was the hardiest of the garden and would survive even an education. Though she might've been patronizing to the patronizing, she mostly held her fire. Disastrous interviews with media royalty were like the failures of etiquette shown by colonists toward Queen Elizabeth.
She was of healthier stock in the way a mixed breed is healthier than a purebred, in the way Churchill wouldn't have been Churchill had he not had the steel supplied by an American mother. You could imagine her in thirty years on the cover of a newsweekly with the title "The Lionness of Winter", or maybe pictured holding a pitchfork while standing by her husband in an Arctic version of American Gothic.
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