Getting it off my chest

At the risk of being criticized as sexist and/or partisan (I plead innocent to the first, gleefully guilty to the second), I must express my resentment of a sentiment echoed by some--and I emphasize only some--Clinton supporters who seem miffed by Barack Obama's candidacy. Or maybe by the fact that he's giving the New York senator a tough tussle.

A number of women, and some men, seem to have the attitude that it's Hillary's turn: After all those years of walking a step behind, all the pain and humiliation that Bill heaped on her, it's her time to be President. I sense that mixed in with this attitude is the feeling that it's time for a woman President.

I have no quarrel with a woman as candidate or President. If Hillary Clinton wins the nomination--and she well may--I'll work enthusiastically for her election. But she's not owed anything because of her personal history or her sex, any more than Obama is because he's black or John Edwards because he came out of a poor working-class background, or John McCain because of his heroic military service.

There's another strand to this that I've heard from time to time--not, let me make it clear, from Sen. Clinton or her campaign--and that is the view that Hillary would make a better President because of her sex. Would that it were so. History, however, shows no grounds for believing it. Think Margaret Thatcher or Indira Gandhi. Or, to take a happier example, Golda Meir: Ms. Meir was a colorful and effective prime minister for Israel, but did she govern differently from her male predecessors and successors? It is hard to see anything that we might regard as related to her being a woman. And in Hillary Clinton's case, given her relentlessly centrist history of careful political calculation, it is especially difficult to believe that her sex would make an iota of difference in how she would handle the presidency.

OK, I've got that off my chest.

(Disclaimer: nothing in this post, or any other post on this blog, represents inside information from any campaign; TONE doesn't have any of that. Nor does TONE speak for any campaign; the opinions expressed here are solely those of the editor, and all comment and criticism should be directed to and at him.)