Clinton Plays the "Poor Wittle Woman" Card

On tonight's Nightline, Clinton will ask for a sympathy vote because she is a woman. (Warning: there are 400+ comments to the linked post and it can take a long time to load.) Of course, she says that she wants no sympathy, but is there any other way to describe this?

Asked why she thinks so many women may be feeling sorry for her, Clinton said, "I think a lot of women project their own feelings and their lives onto me, and they see how hard this is. It's hard. It's hard being a woman out there. It is obviously challenging with some of the things that are said that are not even personal to me so much as they are about women.

[...]

"Every so often I just wish that it were a little more of an even playing field," she said, "but, you know, I play on whatever field is out there."

Over on the flip side, we see race-mongers implying that blacks who don't support Obama are standing in the way of a "genuine historical moment." I guess they don't care as much that there are quite a few other shades of human that are also standing in the way of history.

Clinton wishes she could leverage that kind of sentiment from women voters. Voters who are, apparently, dumb enough to believe that the person who was the frontrunner in national polls for the first twelve months of the election season; the person who was the presumptive, "inevitable" nominee; the person who has all the power of a former president's entrenched political machine behind her is somehow suffering because of a systematic bias against women. In other words, she's depending on the vote of people with long term memory damage.

ABC's Jake Tapper drolly adds:

Of course, it might be observed that it likely hasn't exactly been a complete walk in the park for an African-American to run for president, either.

In the identity politics of the Democratic Party, the black card always trumps the woman card.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 01:01 PM

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