Dear heart, you sound upset. Maybe it will help you to learn that as a Senator, Barack Obama voted the same as Hillary Clinton on every single war issue. In fact, he only voted differently than Hillary on one vote, and that had nothing to do with the war.

Relax. If Hillary wins, you'll be fine.

Hillary's supporters are willing to throw any and all principles overboard to win.

If they need to be poor widdle old wadies or victims of the "guys ganging up" so be it. If they need to go racists against affirmative action secret muslim "empty suits", so be it. If they need to disparage Obama as a girly man versus tough, mach, uber-testicular Hillary, so be it.

Hillary and her hardcore supporters are ruthless assholes who do anything to win. I'm not sure it gets deeper than that.

I think it would be better for feminists to have a decent, respectable woman be the first president. Someone for the ages, for our daughters and granddaughters to look up to. Hillary is not that person.

If you want true equality, one of the prices to pay is that you will have people of your gender appear idiotic and stupid.

Men deal with that every day.

Welcome to the club, ladies!

Hillary behaves like she doesn't know who she is, and can't decide who she wants to be. The way she's overcompensating for her shortcoming, real or imagined, makes her seem very insecure.

I started out the primary season as a supporter of Hillary Clinton. I am a big supporter of Speaker Pelosi. The reason why I switched to Senator Obama is because Hillary decided that she was going to campaign as the most macho War Mongering Man in the bunch. If I wanted that type of candidate, I had plenty to choose from in that cluster of rabid war mongering Republican candidates.

I would love to have a genuine feminist candidate to support. Hillary is not one. Genitalia alone does not make one a feminist. There is a lot more to being a feminist that running around the country saying: vote for me because of the way I pee.

I hope Senator Obama picks one of the self made women Governors as his running mate.

In fact Candidates - you really want to impress me? Fire up a blunt and tell the country you're legalizing marijuana.

Thank you for the excellent post! I wrote several novels on the backdrop of male vs. female strength (under the name "Vaughn") and did a lot of research for them. Of particular interest is a book called The Chalice and the Blade , which notes that patriarchies are usually more hierarchical than matriarchies, which are more relational... and in fact, all historical evidence of "matriarchies" shows that they gave equal respect to male and female, as opposed to trying to subordinate the males.

Obama runs a more relational campaign. Clinton runs a more hierarchical campaign. She is deliberately trying to mute the best strengths of being feminine... and I hate it.

Thanks for the excellent post.

Looking at it from an astrological perspective:
Hillary is behaving in the old-Age Piscean way - individualistic, competitive and divisive, while Obama's approach is more Aquarius orientated - unifying, cooperative, and inclusive.

This is the new direction that the world is moving, and hopefully the USA will hop aboard and lead from the front.

At the outset:

Finally a women candidate, who will have a great chance to become president. Great I thought. I am all for that. I am going to support Hillary. I will overlook her vote on the Iraq war, since John Kerry and John Edwards did the same thing, and I am sure that she no longer buys into the Bush saber rattling confrontational form of foreign policy.

I was wrong. Hillary choose to present herself to the nation as the Democrat's version of Mitt Romney. For God's sake folks, she now has James Carville hailing her for having three testicles. Some feminist indeed.

Hillary's campaign; in a nutshell: I am not women, hear me roar. I shoot down ducks. I down shooters. My paw thought me how to be a good ol' boy. That Obama guy does not understand we country folks. He will take away your guns. I have defied a nest of snipers. I will obliterate seventy million men, women, and children from the face of the earth.

Hillary is not a man, but she is now trying to pass as one. That means that Hillary does not believe in her own identity as a Woman. She has become a minstrel show performer. It is too appalling to watch.

I would posit that none of the women you mentioned would have governed like women, but more like men.

Actually, I'd posit that the difference between "men" and "women" politicians has less to do with gender than some comments on this thread would have us believe. Male and female politicians are held to different standards, both of them gendered (look at how Dukakis was pilloried for being "wimpy", or the gay-baiting aimed at Obama in the lower echelons of the blogosphere -- sorry, was that elitist?). But they respond to those gender expectations so differently that maybe gender just doesn't tell us much about how a politician is going to govern. Maybe we shouldn't expect gender to predict how a politician is going to govern.

I am not women, hear me roar. I shoot down ducks. I down shooters. . . .

Hillary is not a man, but she is now trying to pass as one.

In other words, women shouldn't drink or learn to shoot a gun. Because those are exclusively "male" activities.

Now that you put it that way, liam (et al), I see how Hillary defies gender stereotypes. I've never really thought of her that way, so thank you. I mean that. I'm impressed.

And that's what she has always been criticized for: for not knowing her place, for not following the social norms dictated to American women. Obviously, many Americans still want to cling to their gender stereotyping, as this blog and comment thread demonstrate. Hillary's laugh isn't feminine, she's not nice, she's not charming, she sits down to pee, she's macho, she is "deliberately trying to mute the best strengths of being feminine," she doesn't exhibit "classically 'female' skills."

From the bio of another norm-bucking, "classically unfeminine" woman, Michelle Bachelet, president of Chile:

Driven by an interest in civil-military relations, in 1996 she began studies in military strategy at the National Academy for Strategic and Policy Studies (Anepe) in Chile, obtaining first place in her class. Her student achievement earned her a presidential scholarship, permitting her to continue her studies in the United States at the Inter-American Defense College in Washington, DC, completing a Continental Defense Course in 1998. That same year she returned to Chile to work for the Defense Ministry as Senior Assistant to the Defense Minister. She subsequently graduated from a Master's program in military science at the Chilean Army's War Academy.

Beautiful post, Denni. And don't let the Clintonoid swine affect you in the least. They have nothing better to do.

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=BDBFBDA1-3048-5C12-003A760DEF7A0BF3

Swing Low, Sweet Hillary
By: Ben Smith
May 6, 2008 01:09 PM EST

INDIANAPOLIS — Evan Bayh was halfway through telling a story about "a steelworker in Northern Indiana" on stage beside his Senate colleague, Hillary Clinton.

"Anybody know what he said?" Bayh asked at the Saturday rally, starting to quote the
steelworker: "Our candidate is the one in the race –."

Clinton cut him off with a whisper and an urgent gesture.

"She doesn't want me to go there,” Bayh told the crowd. “OK. I won't. Alright, alright.”

Clinton may not like the story, but her supporters love it: The sheet metal workers union official in Portage, Indiana cited by Bayh had praised her "testicular fortitude" before lighting into unnamed "Gucci wearing, latte-drinking" opponents.

Also last week, a New York Post columnist wrote that she'd won the "cojones primary."

And James Carville, the Clintons' ubiquitous former aide, booster, and informal adviser made
the point even more vividly, giving Clinton a two-gonad edge on her primary rival, Senator Barack Obama.
"If she gave him one of her cojones, they'd both have two," Carville said.

The ballsy fighter is the newest persona for a woman whom public life has taken from a liberal policy wonk to a devoted wife, from a wronged woman to a cerebral senator.

Just as this campaign, a campaign that began obsessed with showing strength, was revived with a show of vulnerability in New Hampshire. Last fall, she was the ultimate wonk; this spring, she's emerged as a beer-swigging, never-say-die populist—proud of her toughness above all, mocking out-of-touch elites and deriding economists as a class.

Skeptics might say these kaleidoscopic transformations have been, themselves, a bit ballsy.

Now, the candidate who would be the first woman president is being described as, metaphorically, a man.

Her pitch to voters has followed a similar arc: She began as a tough-minded centrist with a feminist appeal to women across the spectrum of class and race. But as her rival, Senator Barack Obama, took control of the race in January and solidified a base of African-American and well-educated voters, Clinton slid into the countervailing space: tribune of the working class.