"Isn't that just like a woman?" the misogynists will surely mock. But that's off the mark. That she couldn't make up her mind to make tough decisions had nothing to do with her being a woman, but with what kind of manager she would make. She was a vacillator, perhaps too smart for her own good, always dawdling over the merits of both sides of the question. Isn't that just like an intellectual?
Adlai Stevenson, defeated twice by Dwight D. Eisenhower, never overcame the taunt that he was "too intellectual," the egghead so open-minded that his brains were likely to fall out. Voters were afraid he wouldn't make up his mind because he saw too many reasonable options. They wanted someone like Harry S. Truman, who having heard his economic advisers talk of "on the one hand this, and on the other hand that," exploded, "Get me some one-armed economists!"
Hillary, like Stevenson, showed herself to be less the pragmatist than the intellectual, waiting like Hamlet for more arguments, more evidence, more reasons why not, until the issue was moot.
She couldn't make up her mind whether to address "the gender issue" after Barack Obama's March 18 speech on race. She was afraid her speech would inevitably equate sexism with racism, which radical feminists have done for years, but perceived by many, particularly blacks, as unacceptable moral equivalence. She dithered until it was too late to exploit the opportunity Obama gave her, demonstrating a fatal weakness of her own.
She will speak at the Democratic Convention in Denver on the 88th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote. That's no coincidence. We've come a long way, baby -- to the happy point that a woman in politics is judged on many things, and being a woman is the least of it. That may not be gender politics, but it's gender progress.