Clinton's gender argument doesn't stand up

The former first lady is suffering because she's unable to connect with voters in a meaningful way

SOMETIMES IT'S hard to be a woman, giving all your love to just one man. Ten years ago, Tammy Wynette's mournful dirges certainly fitted Hillary Clinton's situation, grimly standing by her man as the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke.

Back then, she claimed it was all a "vast right-wing conspiracy". The rest of us clucked sympathetically, because we knew it could not be easy being married to Slick Willy of the rovin' eye.

The conventional wisdom today is that sometimes it's hard to be a woman, particularly if you are running for president. Hillary herself believes it. On February 28th, she said on ABC television's Nightline programme that every so often she wished it were more of a level playing field. "It's hard being a woman out there. It's obviously challenging with some of the things that are said that are not so much even personal to me as they are about women."

This statement is proof that Hillary does not read her own exit polls. There is a very interesting phenomenon that is receiving little attention. Far from being hard to be a woman running for president, practically every time that Hillary looks like she is out of the race, women come out and vote for her in such numbers that she gets right back on track.

It happened in New Hampshire after she lost Iowa. It happened in Florida after she lost South Carolina. It happened in Ohio after she lost Wisconsin. Texas was a little different, in that the key factor was last-minute decider voters.

Hillary is a member of a party where female voters frequently outnumber the males 60:40. Every time she gets into trouble, the women come running to her aid. So, far from being disadvantaged by gender, she is the beneficiary of greater sympathy from women.

Of course, it is not the full story. She has a devoted following among white working-class men and Hispanics, too. But if there is a vast, right-wing sexist conspiracy out there, I don't see the evidence. Blue-collar workers are often characterised, generally unfairly, as a last bastion of sexism. Yet they are out there rooting for Hillary.

Sure, there are men (and some women) who will not vote for a woman as president, but for every one of them, it is a safe bet that there will be women (and some men) who will vote for her just because she is a woman. Either approach, no matter how you look at it, is irrational.

I have never understood "Vote for your woman" campaigns. So, does this mean it does not matter whether I vote for Mary Harney or Mary-Lou McDonald, just because both of them are women? Anyone voting for Margaret Thatcher because she was a woman was well and truly handbagged. What exactly did she do to advance the equality of women? In an equal world, the question should not be a woman, or not, for president, but the best candidate for president.

Sure, we do not have equality because patriarchy still exists. But in a world where millions of girls still do not get an education, or may be subject to female genital mutilation, it is galling to hear Hillary Clinton complaining about how hard it is to be a woman.

This is a Wellesley-educated, wealthy wife of a former president, who entered this campaign with an unprecedented level of name recognition, an inner circle of battle-hardened advisers, and a full campaign war chest. In comparison to so many women, she is unbelievably privileged.

There are factors that militate against women's involvement in politics, and they do include prejudice. However, other factors that are traditionally considered to make women's entry more difficult, such as the balancing act which constitutes family and work life, should also be the concern of any man, especially fathers, in politics.

Moreover, here's where I prepare to be burnt for heresy. The reason that there are not many woman in politics is because most of them find the jostling for power, the petty competitiveness and one-upmanship to be just too nasty and boring.

They have better things to do. You tend to find that women in Irish politics are there either as members of political dynasties, have already raised a family or have few or no children.

It is politics' loss. I don't subscribe to the idea that more women in politics would automatically make the world a better place, but it would bring a certain degree of balance. Depending on who the women politicians were, of course.

Hillary does have to face an irritating focus on her hair, her cleavage or lack of it, her alleged Botox job that turned out to be a genius TV make-up artist's work instead, and whether she should cry in public or not.

But given a choice between that and a focus on whether Obama is a closet Muslim just because his middle name is Hussein, there is little contest. Anyway, there was more focus on John Edwards's hair than there ever was on Hillary's.

Hillary's problem is not that she is a woman. Her problem is that she is not very likeable. She gets on people's nerves. She manages to sound like a phoney even on issues she is passionate about. She is reluctant to publish her tax returns. She is tainted with many of the scandals that affected her husband, and many wonder how the Clintons got to be quite so wealthy.

Also, she fights dirty. She attributes at least part of her success in Texas and Ohio to an advertisement featuring children sleeping while the red telephone rings in the White House at 3am. It implies that Obama is not up to the job of protecting America. The last great exponent of that tactic was Ronald Reagan, who crushed Walter Mondale in part through an advert featuring a bear that represented a threat to American security. See it on YouTube. Great advance, when a woman Democrat learns from a Republican icon.

Hillary Clinton is not suffering because of her gender. The vast right-wing sexist conspiracy does not exist. She is suffering because vast numbers of voters, to put it mildly, are just not that into her.