Following her dismal performance in the Philadelphia debate (Drudge all-capped it: "SCORN: AS THE MEN GANG UP"), Senator Hillary Clinton appeared at her alma mater, Wellesley College, where she told the wildly enthusiastic audience:

This all-women's college prepared me to compete in the all-boys club of presidential politics.

Senator Barack Obama later chided her for resorting to the gender card, saying, "I hope that Senator Clinton wants to be treated like everybody else... When we had a debate back in Iowa, we spent the first fifteen minutes of the debate hitting me... and I didn't say, look, I'm being hit on because I look different."

Who's really grandstanding here? Our resident female Laurie Kilmartin puts Clinton's comments in perspective with a 23/6 Ladytorial.

She was at Wellesley
Hillary was talking to women. And not normal women, but earnest young women who attend an all women's college. Women who just finished a semester-long examination of A Room of One's Own, and are fucking pissed. Believe me, you don't want to be on campus when they screen The Hours. Thrashing sharks like these need chum, and phrases such as "all-boy's club" get the job done.

"Pile-on"
At the Philly debate, Hillary got hammered for hemming and hawing through an answer about driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. Said Obama, "Senator Clinton left us wondering where she stood on every single hard question from Iran to Social Security to drivers' licenses for undocumented workers."

Listen up, Senator Obama. Hillary is unable to answer questions directly, and you and your buddies on the dais can't make her. Sure, it must be nice to be Chris Dodd, for example, who leans into the mic with conviction and proclaims the driver's license to be "a privilege, not a right." Well, Hillary doesn't answer that way. She squirms and wiggles and evades, and the rest of you need to stop trying to "pin her down" on issues
because it really does look like you are trying to rape her on a pinball machine. If you need a direct answer from Hillary Clinton, her spokesperson will provide it for you the following morning. That's how she works.

The Gender Card
The Democratic nominee will be running against a Republican, and those guys do not fuck around. They can make a deserter into a war-time President and an adopted Asian into a black lovechild. All candidates who have cards should play them, hard. Fifty percent of the country is female, that's half the deck.

For Senator Obama to congratulate himself for not playing the race card is disingenuous, because blacks make up just 11 percent of the presidential vote. That card won't help. Additionally, Hillary and Barack are not equal oddballs when they stand along side white men on the Democratic stage. As the first black female Representative, Shirley Chisholm, once said, "I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being black." And this was in the '60's, when being black sucked, and women were on the pill, banging like animals (or so my mom tells me).

In the electoral landscape, a woman is much more of an "other" than a black guy. If Hillary keeps playing the gender card, it's because of the eight candidates running for the Democratic nomination, she's the only one with cankles.