What's your take on this blogger's take on...........

[IowaGirl]

Hillary Clinton's experience as a presidential candidate?

(snip)

"When Senator Clinton announced her campaign, there was no great outpouring of anti-Clinton or anti-female sentiment. Quite the contrary - most of the media, including the blogs, treated it like a cute idea. She was one of many candidates, and that seemed OK, at least in the press and among my acquaintances. During the early, pre-Iowa, debates, Senator Obama made some snarky sexist comments - the claws coming out, etc. - but they were ignored in the media; no one seemed outraged at a snide anti-woman comment, and no one seemed outraged that she was a candidate. That all began to change when Obama won Iowa.

With hindsight, it seems to me that Iowa was where Senator Clinton crossed the line in male sensibility. As long as there was no clear candidate ahead of her, it was OK for a woman to run. But when Senator Obama emerged as a winner, it was no longer OK. The right thing for a woman to do when Prince Charming appears is to step aside gracefully. An ambitious woman who does not step aside is offensive. The sexist rhetoric in the campaign increased a little. Next, however, she won New Hampshire. This established her as not only a woman who could not be trusted to stay in her place, but an outright threat. At that point the campaign rhetoric got really nasty. That's when the Obama campaign played the race card (or the racist card). The charges of Clinton racism were factually not supportable, but it did not matter. The media picked up the racist theme, and ran with it; the pro-Obama blogs began to feature postings with serious Clinton Derangement Syndrome.

It got worse. Next she won Super Tuesday, and proved herself in the CDS mind to be capable of anything - a woman who would do anything at all to win the campaign. The radio and TV crazies and the blogs went ballistic.

Without bringing up every detail, I think it is clear that the degree of woman-hate shown toward Senator Clinton's campaign had little to do with her tactics or character or politics, and a lot to do with how serious a threat she was to a viable male candidate. If no male candidate had emerged as competitive, or if Senator Clinton had run less successfully, I do not believe we would be seeing the hysteria directed against her. In the sexist mind, the goal is not so much to injure women as to control them. A woman safely and visibly under control, or operating within male parameters, is not an object of hate. It's when women start operating with a different set of rules, like the same rules that men accept for themselves, that the hate-reaction sets in.

Posted by: Brownell on April 9, 2008 at 3:31 PM http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_04/013495.php The Washington Monthly

[IowaGirl]

1. I mean her experience with sexism just to clarify.

[Ellen Forradalom]

2. beautifully stated.

And too goddamn true.

[IowaGirl]

3. Well, that was my feeling, too. It is pretty good considering this is the sort of thing that people

only kind of tend to figure out after the fact. I guess to me the sense of dislike for Hillary has just seemed too out of proportion, but I couldn't really express what bothered me about it.