Comparisons
Tracy Flick has been a frequent point of comparison in commentary on real-world political figures. Perhaps the figure most often associated with the character has been Hillary Clinton. A January 2008 video mashup, produced by Slate, combined campaign footage of Clinton with clips from Election to draw a comparison between Clinton's and Tracy's feelings about the inferiority of their opponents. The video was widely circulated and praised.
A Christian Science Monitor review of Clinton's 2003 biography, Living History, quoted an excerpt in which Clinton discussed her participation during high school in a Cultural Values Committee and noted, "There is obviously some truth here, but the tone of the passage reeks of Tracy Flick, the overachieving, overly serious high school student from the film "Election." Not to belittle the efforts of the Cultural Values Committee, but a brief aside to show that Clinton understands that high school sociopolitics is not exactly on par with race relations would be nice."
Later in 2008, following Clinton's defeat for the Democratic presidential nomination, multiple commentators likened Tracy to the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Alaska governor Sarah Palin. Actress and comedian Tina Fey credited Witherspoon's performance as Tracy as an influence for Fey's extremely popular Emmy-winning impersonation of Palin on Saturday Night Live.
Other political figures compared to Tracy include former U.S. vice-president and presidential candidate Al Gore; Seattle City Council member Helen Willis; and New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, whom Maureen Dowd wrote was nicknamed Tracy Flick by her colleagues for her "opportunistic and sharp-elbowed" manner.
Outside the political arena, several reviews of the 2007 film Rocket Science noted similarities between that film's character of Ginny, portrayed by Anna Kendrick, and Tracy. She has also been mentioned in comparison to Amanda Lorber of the MTV series The Paper.
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Famous quotes containing the word comparisons:
“I don’t like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, but it isn’t exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.”
—Bowie Kuhn (b. 1926)
“Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“The surest route to breeding jealousy is to compare. Since jealousy comes from feeling “less than” another, comparisons only fan the fires.”
—Dorothy Corkville Briggs (20th century)