THE H-BOMB (Long with an embedded lib plan & doesn't her skin look great)

People talk more trash about Hillary Clinton than any other living American. So much so, it just might get her elected president.

Type just about any misogynist insult into Google with “Hillary Clinton” and up come hundreds of thousands of links. Promiscuity might not be the first sin that pops to mind when you think of her, but last time I checked, “Hillary Clinton” plus “slut” brought up 208,000 results. True, a lot of these are aimed at her husband or his various women friends, but prim and proper Hillary gets plenty of her own, as in “I will never vote for that corporate slut” and “HILLARY CLINTON IS A SLUT.”

To you, to me, to a professional political analyst, Hillary Rodham Clinton may be a wonkish centrist Democrat, a believing Methodist, a people-pleaser, a trimmer. But to a lot of people, especially men who spend an inordinate amount of time online, she taps into some deep Jungianunconscious well of evil female archetypes: She’s Snow White’s evil stepmother, Jezebel, Lady Macbeth, Marie Antoinette, and Nurse Ratched all rolled into one. In other words, she’s a powerful liberal woman. An older powerful liberal woman. An older powerful liberal woman whose power is illegitimate because it is bound up somehow with sex—how else could a woman get power over men, its rightful possessors? In a country where it is still controversial for a married woman to keep her name (something Hillary Rodham was unable to do without making her husband look henpecked in the eyes of Arkansas voters), women with power are automatically suspect. Even on the supposedly P.C. left, prominent right-wing women attract far more vitriol than comparable men, and of a more personal nature—remember Katherine Harris and her makeup? Or the rumors that she slept her way into office? But a powerful woman who is perceived as liberal, perhaps even feminist, awakens at many different points on the political spectrum a kind of free-floating late-night hysteria that would be funny if it didn’t have reallife consequences, such as making large numbers of smart people think that Hillary Clinton is unelectable.

Robotic. Dragon lady. Castrating. Lesbian. Pig. Hillary Rotten, daughter of Satan.

It isn’t just anonymous nuts who talk like this. Don Imus referred to Hillary as “Satan” constantly (“that bucktoothed witch, Satan”; Bill Clinton’s “fat, ugly wife, Satan”)—11 times on just one show. CNN’s Glenn Beck called her “the Antichrist.” Michael Savage called her “Hitlerian.” Chris Matthews called her “sort of a Madame Defarge of the left.” Rush Limbaugh, who devoted many hours of radio raving to floating the charge that Vince Foster had not killed himself but had been murdered at the Clintons’ behest, described her as “the woman with the testicle lockbox,” whatever that means. “When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs,” said CNN’s Tucker Carlson, in a jokey segment about the Hillary Nutcracker, which crushes walnuts between its steely thighs, yours for only $19.95.

The ballbusting theme looms prominently in the male Hillaryhating imagination—that’s why she can be both a lesbian and a siren who has Bill by the short hairs. But it isn’t just men who get a bit unhinged by Hillary. Maureen Dowd has compared her to Tony Soprano, “so power-hungry that she can justify any thuggish means to get the prize.” Peggy Noonan: “Cold and ambitious.” Ann Coulter: “Pond scum.” “White trash.” Well, okay: For Ann Coulter, that’s fairly restrained.

In any ordinary primary, I’d probably vote for John Edwards on straight policy grounds, or for Barack Obama as the slightly lefter, fresher face, the candidate who can bring in the most new voters and give America’s relations with the rest of the world a new start. Or I might just say the heck with the top three—who are much less different from one another than their self-branding would have you believe and who would probably do equally well (or not) if elected—and vote for Dennis Kucinich, who actually stands for things I believe in, like single-payer health care and not bombing Iran. But then I come across one of these sulfurous emanations from the national collective unconscious and I want to sit down and write Hillary’s campaign a check immediately. I want to knock on doors for her every Saturday from now until primary day, on which I want to vote for her twice. Sisterhood is powerful! We are all Hillary Clinton! After all, the hysterical insults flung at Hillary are just franker, crazier versions of the everyday insults—shrill, strident, angry, ranting, unattractive— that are flung at any vaguely liberal, mildly feminist woman who shows a bit of spirit and independence, who puts herself out in the public realm, who doesn’t fumble and look up coyly from underneath her hair and give her declarative sentences the cadence of a question. I’ve found a Hillary-with-apenis photo in my inbox more than once, to say nothing of anonymous e-mails calling me a “fat, ugly bitch” from people who I doubt know what I look like. Every woman I know who calls herself a feminist, or is even just doing especially well in a field in which men also contend, deals with some version of this, an underlying unease she evokes merely by being a woman who doesn’t devote every waking minute to making some man feel 10 feet tall. Sure, you can brush it off, but that brushing off, over a lifetime, has psychic costs. And anyway, why should you have to?

Think of it this way: If all the castrating bitches voted for Satan’s daughter, we might actually move the feminist revolution out of the parking lot where it has been sitting, low on gas and with major transmission problems, for the past decade and a half. As long as women in positions of power are as rare as Florida panthers, their femaleness, with all it connotes, will be the lens through which people see them. We’ll never be equal as long as ambitious is a dirty word when applied to women (as if male politicians are modest and self-effacing); as long as serious and businesslike read as cold. It works the other way too: We’ll never be equal as long as the president has to be the national Daddy. Maybe the only way to defuse the immense fear so many Americans have of a woman assuming the quintessentially masculine mantle of the presidency, her delicate, manicured index finger hovering over the nuclear button, is for them to experience it and get over it.

Women are just as much—well, almost as much—a part of this double standard system as men are. Women don’t like “cold,” “ambitious,” “angry” women either. That’s why Hillary Clinton goes on the morning shows and girltalks about dieting and clothes. For every woman who is excited by the prospect of voting for a woman in the presidential election—and let’s not forget that Hillary, as of this writing, has a substantial lead among female primary voters— there’s another who feels it’s somehow dishonorable to take gender into account. I know, because I used to be one of them. In 1992, when Elizabeth Holtzman and Geraldine Ferraro were running in the New York State Democratic senatorial primary, I managed to find reasons to reject both of them—Ferraro favored the death penalty, I think it was, and Holtzman had gone after Ferraro’s husband’s business dealings in a way that felt sensationalist to me. I cast my ballot for low-key, humane State Attorney General Robert Abrams. I felt so lofty, so just, so rational. Abrams won, ran an invisible campaign, and lost to Republican Alfonse D’Amato in November.

This time around I find myself thinking, What’s wrong with putting the thumb on the scales for a Democratic woman, all else being equal? Just to balance out the surprisingly large swath of people (fortunately, mostly Republican) who tell pollsters they won’t vote for a woman, however qualified? I’d never support an antifeminist woman, a rightwing woman, a Margaret Thatcher. But Hillary has stood up for women’s rights for 40 years. In the context of American politics, which to a European would seem to offer a continuum that goes all the way from moderately conservative to insanely reactionary, she’s a liberal. Many people think she’s not electable, but the last time Democrats voted in the primaries for the candidate we thought would have the widest appeal in November, we got John Kerry. We think we can handicap Hillary’s chances because she is the only candidate voters know well. But maybe Obama or Edwards would be the Robert Abrams of 2008, great on paper but lacking what it takes in real life. Maybe Obama will read too young or too black, or Edwards too slick or too one-note, to win over the undecided voters of Ohio or whatever demographic sliver will hold the key to victory.

Think of it this way: Hillary Clinton has been at the top of the list of Democratic candidates since the list began. She has a powerful campaign machine, which she began putting together more than a year before any of the other candidates got started on theirs. In fact, she has sewn up so much talent that the conventional wisdom has it that Al Gore would have a hard time finding good staffers if he decided to jump in. If she were a man, there would be no doubt she’d win the primary, and the general election, too. Oddly, it’s rightwingers who seem most able to acknowledge, albeit unhappily, the strength of her position. “Looks like it will be President Hillary,” one blogger wrote on the archconservative website humanevents.com. “Marxism, here we come!”

Harridan. Virago. Whore. Ballbreaker. Stalinist. Hellcat. Evil Queen of Darkness.

As I write this, the New York primary is far in the future, so I have lots of time to see how the candidates and their campaigns play out. In the end, I wouldn’t choose Hillary just because she’s a woman. The issues facing our country—Iraq, health care, education, poverty, civil liberties—are too crucial for me to treat the election as primarily an opportunity for national gender reeducation.

Don’t try my patience, though, Rush, Chris, Peggy, and all you anonymous posters and bloggers out there. I’m only human. You might just push me over the edge.

It used to be you heard things about Hillary like, “I’ll vote for her, but I’ll be holding my nose.” But lately, we’ve sniffed a change in attitudes. Herewith, Andrew Goldman gives us 12 ways the presidential hopeful has pulled off her own extreme makeover

1. Stay above the fray When, in February, Hollywood powerhouse and Obama booster David Geffen said of the Clintons, “Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease it’s troubling,” it seemed like the first rivulet in an approaching anti-Hillary tsunami. But her campaign performed some adroit jujitsu to create the impression that it was Obama, and not just a mouthy supporter, who had ditched his polite “message of hope” to start hurling mud balls. It worked; while the substance of Geffen’s critique was largely forgotten, what remained was the sense that St. Barack had tarnished his halo.

2. There she is, Miss America So if presidential campaigns aren’t beauty contests, someone should break the news to all those burned-out hair dryers buried behind Edwards’ campaign headquarters. Could Hillary’s people really be upset when their candidate—long mocked for her collegiate coke-bottle glasses, changeable hair, and the shape of her legs, no less—was practically pronounced Babe-raham Lincoln for her dewy, youthful skin in June’s New Hampshire debate? The cover-girl face, applied by a former Miss New Hampshire freelancing for CNN, even got Hillary-flayer Arianna Huffington to concede the candidate had gotten a “killer makeup job.”

3. Take my husband, please! During an Iowa town hall meeting, an audience member asked Hillary how she’d deal with all the “evil” men in the world like Osama bin Laden. Hillary paused, hmm… “What in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men?” A full 30 seconds of laughter and applause followed, and Hillary joined in the merriment herself with a well-timed raise of her eyebrows. Although she later hedged and said she hadn’t been making a joke at the expense of Bill’s zipper-control problem, the perception was that the world had finally gotten a peek at the self-deprecating Hillary that friends say she’s never been able to fully convey. “Hillary’s extremely wry, sort of deadpan,” says author and Hillary chum Ellen Chesler. “She has a great way of understanding laughter as a revenge against despair.”

4. Who you calling Slick Hilly? The rap on Bill Clinton was that Socks would’ve gone hungry if some pollster hadn’t first tested how the Heartland would react to the cat’s eating Fancy Feast versus Tender Vittles. Hillary, on the question of Iraq at least, has managed to liberate herself from her husband’s slippery reputation. Last winter, despite polls showing a vast majority of Democrats opposing the war—and Obama and Edwards rallying crowds with bring-home-our-boys rhetoric—she steadfastly refused to use the M-word to describe her vote to authorize the war. “If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” she told a New Hampshire audience, to tepid applause. “The conventional wisdom was that her campaign could end based on her refusal to say she was wrong,” says Time magazine’s Mark Halperin, author of The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President. “Instead, she enhanced her standing on national security and also avoided the charge of being a for-it-before-I-was-against-it Democrat or a Clintonian waffler.”

5. Anger management In 2006, when Hillary told parishioners at a Harlem church that the Bush administration would “go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country,” detractors eagerly pounced on this as an example of the well-worn trope of Hillary as the West Wing’s brittle bitch in heels. “Hillary Clinton seems to have a lot of anger,” the GOP’s Ken Mehlman said, in what sounded like a prophecy that, in any long campaign, Hillary would boil over in ways that would make Howard Dean’s scream seem like a lamb’s bleat. “Her campaign has gone out of its way to steer her rhetoric to turn the anger into strength and resolve,” says Charlie Cook, editor of The Cook Political Report. On the trail, she hasn’t…cracked…once. When Tim Russert, in September’s New Hampshire debate, got her to disagree with a quote favoring torture, only afterward revealing it had been uttered by her husband, few would’ve faulted Hillary for breathing some fire. She just paused and said firmly, “Well, he’s not standing here right now,” a line that proved the most memorable of the night.

6. Remind them you’re a woman …very, very carefully The “go girl” message of Hillary’s campaign takes care of itself simply by virtue of her being the first woman with a real shot at the Oval Office. Start arguing that she’s entitled to the job because “it’s time” and she risks turning off male voters and undercutting her claim that she’s better qualified than her guy competitors (and indirectly makes a case for a first-of-its-kind Obama presidency). But when, in July, a Washington Post columnist discussed the smidgen of cleavage that Hillary revealed on the Senate floor, it gave her campaign an opening to highlight the daily crap that Hillary—and all women—periodically take merely because they have lady parts. Clinton adviser Ann Lewis dashed off an indignant fund-raising letter: “Frankly, focusing on women’s bodies instead of their ideas is insulting. It’s insulting to every woman who has ever tried to be taken seriously in a business meeting.” Instantly Hillary—viewed warily by some feminists for standing by a man who’d so publicly humiliated her—seemed to be just a gal doing her best in a sexist world.

7. Use Bill well The conundrum for Hillary’s campaign has always been how to harness the power of Bill Clinton, with his near 90 percent approval rating among Democrats, while not having the old charisma machine make his wife look like she’s playing Oates to his Hall. (Bill’s virtuoso turn at the 2006 Coretta Scott King funeral represented exactly how not to do it.) The solution: Keep him on a short leash on the stump. In July, in Iowa—one of the few states where Hillary was trailing Edwards in the polls—the usually loquacious Bill introduced his wife at a series of campaign events and, as if outfitted with a shock collar, consistently delivered the same eight minutes of scripted niceties. “Bill Clinton doesn’t get up and give the exact same speech at the exact same length by accident,” Halperin says. “But it worked, because no one came away saying he overshadowed her.”

8. Use Bill well, part II Though Bill may be seen as the cuddlier Clinton, he’s a little like a koala bear—real cute until you piss him off. We got a sneak preview of how effective a general-election street fighter he’d be in September, when Anderson Cooper asked him about the Republicans’ denunciation of Moveon.org’s ad labeling David Petraeus as “General Betray Us.” Clinton, conjuring his most fearsome voice, called the kerfuffle a cynical effort to distract the country from the debacle in Iraq, brought to us by the same bunch who’d Swift-boated John Kerry and run a TV ad in Georgia likening disabled vet Max Cleland to Saddam Hussein. Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Edwards may be tough, but Democrats who want to take back the White House—and who still remember Kerry’s painful inability to defend himself against Republican attacks—can’t underestimate the persuasive power of stompin’ mad Bill.

9. Politician, heal thyself—then cure the rest of us The last time Hillary introduced universal health care, she was literally burned in effigy at a pro-tobacco rally, and many feared that if she tried again as a presidential candidate, voters would only be reminded of how she’d almost run her husband’s administration aground in 1993. So how to do it? First, let your rivals roll out their plans, photocopy the better one, and slap your own name on it. Elizabeth Edwards derided Clinton’s September proposal as “John Edwards’ health care plan as delivered by Hillary Clinton,” but how many points could her husband’s campaign really score by labeling Hillary a copycat? Next, stress that your past errors render you uniquely qualified to tackle the thorny issue again, as Hillary has with her line about “having the scars” to show from her earlier battle. And finally, make the largest possible splash with your own proposal. After declaring her candidacy in January, Hillary declined to appear on any of the Sunday morning political shows…until she unveiled her health plan, that is. Naturally, all five programs leapt at the offer to put her on, and suddenly, polled Democrats were deeming her the candidate most qualified to fix health care.

10. Stick your own flag in 9/11 Though it frequently seems that Rudy Giuliani is running for president of 9/11, as The Onion satirically noted, Hillary has refused to let voters think he was the only New York pol photographed atop that burning pile. While Giuliani weathered searing attacks from Ground Zero workers who say he failed to warn them about dire health risks and never insisted crews wear protective masks, Hillary was busy making deals in the Senate to funnel tens of millions of dollars their way. Last year, she tried to secure $1.9 billion more for medical bills, proclaiming, “We’re going to rescue the rescuers.” On the trail, Bill’s big finish has been a story about bumping into a New York City fireman who says Hillary was the first politician to help ailing first-responders, and in an ad released in October, Hillary is at Ground Zero, wearing the mask that has come to symbolize Rudy’s 9/11 vulnerability.

11. To know me is not to hate me While Hillary has long been maligned for telegraphing all the spontaneity and warmth of Bruce, Jaws’ animatronic great white, her campaign has cannily promoted the notion that people just never realized how much fun knowing Hillary could be. “I’m the most famous person you don’t really know” was the opening salvo in the charm offensive, which included her folksy “Let the conversation begin” campaign-kickoff slogan and the woodenly acted but much e-mailed Sopranos finale takeoff. And even as Obama got the enviable Oprah seal of approval, Hillary’s team borrowed a trick from the daytime master of nuzzling the hoi polloi, producing a short video in which two contributors get flown onto the campaign trail and straight into the Clintons’ open arms. Regardless of how tightly choreographed all that fun-with-Hillary-and-Bill might appear, when ABC recently surveyed viewers about which Democrat they’d like to have with them on a cross-country drive, Edwards and Obama were left to hitchhike. Hillary, the reformed ice queen, took a full 51 percent.

12. Baracky road The most compelling argument Barack Obama has been able to offer voters has been that America is ready to “turn the page” on the entrenched Washington establishment, symbolized by the ritual passing of the White House keys between the Bush and Clinton families. Change may be appealing, but only if voters feel comfortable with what they’re changing to. When Obama said this summer that he’d be willing to meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela his first year in office, Hillary let him have it, calling a meet-the-despots tour “irresponsible and, frankly, naive.” The pundits overwhelmingly agreed. “Obama showed he was maybe not ready to hit Major League pitching,” says Republican consultant Ralph Reed. “Hillary Clinton understood you don’t make those kinds of commitments in advance.” Another problem with Obama’s message: Few among us wouldn’t consider Hillary a radical change from Bush II. As she puts it, “Some people think you have to choose between change and experience. Well, with me, you don’t have to choose.”

People say nasty things about Hillary because she has earned it. It’s sad, really, when you consider the implications, but it’s true.

Up here in Alaska, we elected a woman for governor. Interestingly, none of the epithets used for Hillary are used for Sarah Palin.

Perhaps it has something to do with Palin’s character and attitude, just as Hillary’s character and attitude have something to do with how people view her.

"As I write this, the New York primary is far in the future, so I have lots of time to see how the candidates and their campaigns play out. In the end, I wouldn’t choose Hillary just because she’s a woman. The issues facing our country—Iraq, health care, education, poverty, civil liberties—are too crucial for me to treat the election as primarily an opportunity for national gender reeducation."

With all due respect, this bitter witch can bite me. I'd vote for Condi in a New York minute. Hillary might be a queen b*tch (or not), but first and foremost she is a lying Marxist (is there any other kind?) As to the "national gender re-education", let me be clear: unless she's got hordes of gun-toting amazon vigilantes ready to beat down my door, she can't touch me. The day has yet to dawn when feminazi's can ruin single men at random, and the first one who tries that with me had better have a great lawyer (because I'm willing to bet that my employer pays me one heck of a lot better than hers does--nothing sexist there, I simply work for a great company).

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