Diane Sawyer brought together 16 of the nation’s most powerful people this week for a two-day special on Good Morning America. The group included the leaders of several Senate committees and leaders within their parties, the top Democrat for president in 2008, learned politicians on the military, business creation, the environment and government oversight.

Sawyer had them sit in a semi-circle, the better to lob fluffy questions their way in what turned out to be a startling waste of political talent.

The 16 are the women of the Senate, a number that increased by two last November when Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota were elected, and that, naturally, includes Maine’s Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. In the media’s more saccharine and less pleasant moments, the senators collectively are called “The Sweet Sixteen.”

The interview started badly when Sawyer asked, or actually asserted in the form of a question, whether they thought there would be fewer wars if more women were in leadership positions in government. (Apparently, she hadn’t heard of Condoleezza Rice.) The senators danced around the question a bit. Maria Cantwell of Washington described women’s tendency toward greater cooperation. New York’s Hillary Clinton added cooperatively to that by talking about “collaboration and collegiality. And that in and of itself can cause positive results, not that, you know, it’s going to end all wars or something.”

But it was Collins who put an end to the drivel. “I don’t want to leave the impression that a woman president wouldn’t do what is necessary to defend this country,” she said. “If Elizabeth Dole had been successful and had been president, I’m sure that she would have reacted very strongly and effectively to the attacks on our country on 9-11.”

Exactly. What is wrong with the idea of interviewing all 16 of these senators together, as if they ran in a pack, is that it diminishes their individual abilities, which are considerable. It ignores their individual politics – does anyone think Snowe’s opposition the other day to the troop surge in Iraq was based on her sex rather than the facts of the war? And it slights their achievements. Collins just concluded the best year of her legislative life – passing a FEMA overhaul, port and chemical security bills, postal reform and more – not because she is a woman but because she is a smart, hard-driving senator.

But by defining them, first, as women-in-a-group (pioneers, Sawyer called them twice, as if Sen. Laura Ingalls Wilder were in the room) instead of senators with their own politics and own agendas, they were confined to a role that diminished them.

Seven years ago in a book called “Nine and Counting” about the then-nine women in the Senate, Snowe said, “We certainly don’t want to communicate that all of the women in the Senate are homogenous, with the women sitting on one side and the men sitting on the other. That would be a pretty antiquated point of view …” Antiquated plus seven, the view is worse because there are more women in positions of power, with all the success and failure that brings.

This isn’t to suggest we’ve reached equality, or that a woman’s abilities no longer will be doubted by some because of her sex. That still happens, and pay disparities and glass ceilings still infest some fields while hostile work environments still limit women’s choices in others. Nor is it to doubt that women and men can indeed bring different sensibilities to legislating.

But rounding up female senators for an interview primarily about them being women ghettoizes the group. While Sawyer never said the 16 were a credit to their sex, that was the implication. Want to do away with the glass ceiling? CEOs don’t get hired because they are a member of a group. They get hired because they stand out from a group. As for the different sensibility: Competence matters more.

Once, that wasn’t necessarily true. The mere fact that a leader was a woman was notably inspirational to women and girls and instructive to men and boys. If the woman happened to be good at her job, so much the better. If she happened to be Margaret Chase Smith, rare and splendid. Those days ended when? Fifteen or 20 years ago?

The Good Morning America interview seemed heavily edited, so I don’t know what was said and not shown, but on the second day, Collins again had the final and best perspective on the premise of the interview: “I reject the idea that there are ‘women’s issues.’ Every issue is a woman’s issue,” she said. “I think that all of us have made a real effort not to be pigeonholed, but to work on a wide variety of issues. So there isn’t one voice that women represent. We span the ideological spectrum, just as men do.”

Spoken like a real senator.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News. His e-mail address is tbenoit@bangordailynews.net.