Hillary Clinton's Use of the Gender Card Isn't Working

UnionLeader.com:

Hillary Clinton is not a woman, and that’s a triumph for feminism and a problem for Hillary.

Let me clarify. Yes, technically she is female. But millions of Americans don’t think of her gender; they think of, well, Hillary Clinton. Some may think of her as a heroic liberal technocrat. Others as a deeply partisan politician. The list goes on: She’s a supportive (or enabling) wife, a great (or terrible) former secretary of state, a left-wing bully or a victim of political witch hunts.

What she is not is an icon for “womanhood.”

This is a significant victory for feminism, though not for professional feminists and Hillary Clinton.

Clinton, who on her best days is a workmanlike (workwomanlike?) politician, desperately wants to borrow some unearned excitement about her gender. And it’s not happening. In Iowa, Bernie Sanders crushed Clinton among women under 30 by 70 percentage points (84-14). He beat her significantly among 30- to 44-year-old women (53-42). Meanwhile, Clinton trounced Sanders among mature and, uh, very mature women. Women over the age of 65 backed Clinton 76 percent to 22 percent.

But in the lead-up to the New Hampshire primary, Sanders had opened an 8-point lead over Clinton among New Hampshire women, according to polls.

While a gaggle of female Democratic politicians and aging feminist writers and actresses have tried to gin up female solidarity, it’s largely backfired.

Gloria Steinem, a fading icon of a bygone era, said that Bernie Sanders is attracting young female supporters because they’re boy-crazy, and “the boys are with Bernie.” She later apologized.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was trotted out to issue her favorite quip: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!”

Albright’s defenders note that she’s been saying this for years. And that’s true. She traditionally aimed it at women who undermined other women in contests for the one token woman’s position.

While there’s surely still sexism out there, the days when women had to make do with token positions as representatives of their gender are largely behind us. Clinton herself was the third female secretary of state. No one thought she got the job because she’s a woman.

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