I can't help myself...

Last week Bob Herbert wrote what will not be the last attempt to convince us all that Hillary Rodham Clinton is unelectable.
http://www.thewhitehouseproject.org/v2/press/2006/May/2006-05-18-NYTimes.html

It's to be expected. She is Hillary Rodham Clinton. But here's why he and the other naysayers, including lots of polled voters, are wrong. Clinton has the best campaign war chest, the best solidity of her base, and the strongest tenacity of any potential candidate this early in the game. She also has more White House experience than any other candidate and she has had all of her skeletons exposed. And, yet, even with those skeletons, she still enjoys a high 65-70% approval rating in New York. If who I described was a man in either party, the party would be clamoring, begging even, for him to run, and they would be doing everything to shore up the nomination for this guy.

Instead, Clinton's "supporters" run around talking about how unelectable she is, virtually promising a self-fulfilling prophesy. The truth of the matter is she understands that presidential politics is not ideological and she has turned to the center. The result is something we haven't seen in politics in some time. Here is a candidate that is forging alliances across the aisle. Now, there are a lot of progressives out there who are trying to pit themselves against liberals and vice versa. Those progressives and liberals are worried about her policy positions. I am not a fan of her proposed legislation to criminalize flag burning, and I am certainly not a fan of her Iraq policies. But there are a couple of scenarios to consider.

1. Are we really going to bump a well-known, well-funded candidate for an unknown, underfunded maybe, just because he's a guy, not a Clinton, not polarizing, not [insert problem here]. I'll tell you what else he isn't. Fully vetted. In this day and age of the dirtiest politics, you can be sure that whatever little skeleton, no matter how well hidden, will be outed. With HRC we all know her skeletons. No surprises there. The best the opponents can do is re-hash old news.

2. If she is the nominee, are Dems going to not vote for her because they dislike her policy on Iraq or other issues that bring her more to the center? Does anyone seriously believe that she is going to be worse for this nation than the current administration? And does anyone seriously believe that the GOP is going to follow-up this administration with something more palatable?

Either way, if she were anyone else besides a Clinton, this conversation would not be going on. Certainly, if she were a man with these kinds of crendentials this conversation wouldn't be going on. Herbert thinks that despite all of these arguments, it's her gender (he means her sex) that will be her downfall, because he thinks America is just not ready for a woman leader. If it isn't, then we can stop pretending that America is the leader of the free world. Nations- third world nations- are electing women leaders all over the world. So, what's our problem?

Finally, as Marie Wilson of the White House Project put it, if her gender is the problem, then that simply means we need more women to be leading at all levels of government and business so that more women will be in the pool and we can all stop talking about gender and talk about qualifications.