Showdown at the OK Corral

"We can't be a new story, I'm sorry. I can't make [Hillary] younger, taller, male.''

-- First Husband candidate Bill Clinton at a bar in New Hampshire last Sunday.

Apparently Bill Clinton can't make his wife honest, likable or trustworthy either.

Bill is right about one thing, however. The Clintons can't be a new story. They are yesterday's news. Their life is a bad soap opera trying for reruns. They are the past. And a particularly slimy one at that.

Hillary may very well get the nomination. She is the establishment Democrat after all. Her gender should be irrelevant but she plays the gender card whenever she is in trouble. Hillary uses it alternately to fend off legitimate criticism and engender undeserved sympathy. Parenthetically, when she was elected Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi said it takes a woman to clean up the House (get it?). Think about it.

The intellectually lazy are quick to slap the "misogynist" label on anyone who opposes Hillary's regressive liberal views or questions her dubious qualifications to be President of the United States.

Have you read Maureen Dowd's Wednesday column in the NY Times? If you haven't, you should. Maureen is a woman, by the way.

Among many of Dowd's characteristically scathing statements, you'll find the following:

At the Portsmouth cafe on Monday, talking to a group of mostly women, [Hillary] blinked back her misty dread of where Obama’s “false hopes” will lead us — “I just don’t want to see us fall backwards,” she said tremulously — in time to smack her rival: “But some of us are right and some of us are wrong. Some of us are ready and some of us are not.”

There was a poignancy about the moment, seeing Hillary crack with exhaustion from decades of yearning to be the principal rather than the plus-one. But there was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking up. What was moving her so deeply was her recognition that the country was failing to grasp how much it needs her. In a weirdly narcissistic way, she was crying for us. But it was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing.

As Spencer Tracy said to Katharine Hepburn in “Adam’s Rib,” “Here we go again, the old juice. Guaranteed heart melter. A few female tears, stronger than any acid.”

Gloria Steinem wrote in The Times yesterday that one of the reasons she is supporting Hillary is that she had “no masculinity to prove.” But Hillary did feel she needed to prove her masculinity. That was why she voted to enable W. to invade Iraq without even reading the National Intelligence Estimate and backed the White House’s bellicosity on Iran.

Yet, in the end, she had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim, both of Obama and of the press. Hillary has barely talked to the press throughout her race even though the Clintons this week whined mightily that the press prefers Obama.

Her argument against Obama now boils down to an argument against idealism, which is probably the lowest and most unlikely point to which any Clinton could sink. The people from Hope are arguing against hope.

Liberal logic (or what passes for it) dictates that Maureen Dowd must be a misogynist as well.

Still, another pro-choice feminist writes,

Now, I've never been a centrist Democrat and everything I have seen of Clintonism and the Democratic Leadership Council confirms that women are far down their priority lists. But there must be some small space in the political world in which women are important. It is also not to say that Clinton doesn't care about women -- of course she does, and she has supported and will support many policies that improve women's health, employment and education. Perhaps one hears so little of that commitment on the campaign trail because it is assumed that the woman candidate does not have to talk about those issues. But whatever the reason, there is no evidence that Clinton's feminist history currently influences her thinking about women, or that it is any further advanced than Obama's and Edwards' thinking.

The sad fact is that Clinton has felt compelled to run as a stereotypical male. In her own mind it is only a certain kind of man who is qualified to be president and she will be that man: tough on everything from war, flag burning, kids' access to video games, illegal immigrants and Palestinians. She has missed the opportunity to talk about what it really means for women to be equal in this country. She has shown no interest in using her extensive international experience to push for more women in party leadership, state legislatures and even the Senate. A woman candidate who considered her gender a strength (as opposed to something she needed to overcome) would announce a series of measures specifically designed to ensure that women's needs and rights were at the forefront of her agenda.

The women's movement, along with other progressive movements, did little to challenge the Clinton administration to live up to its campaign promises. And now it seems that the longtime women's movement is falling into the same trap over Hillary Clinton's candidacy. Just read the feckless and stale defense of Clinton's record on the war posted on the National Organization for Women's Web site to get a sense of how willing some in the feminist establishment are to defend any woman, regardless of her track record.

Tsk, tsk. Such misogynists, these pro-choice feminists.

I actually want Hillary to be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. I know I should be careful what I wish for but, if she does get the nod, the contest wil be less like an election and more like the 21st century version of the showdown at the OK Corral.

It's time to bury the Clinton "legacy" once and for all.