NO SOONER HAD Hillary Clinton proceeded from the Democratic presidential debate to a speech at Wellesley College last week than the wailing began. Barack Obama hit the "Today" show accusing her of playing the gender card, and a chorus line of media pundits denounced her for having hurt the cause of feminism by acting the part of the injured girl.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd contended that Clinton was trying to show "she can break, just like a little girl. ... If she could become a senator by playing the victim after Monica, surely she can become president by playing the victim now." Fox News' Mort Kondracke preached: "I think it is very unattractive for a general election candidate, who wants to be the commander in chief of the free world, to be saying, 'They're ganging up on me!' I mean, this is the NFL. This is not Wellesley versus Smith in field hockey."
Yet these indictments were conjured from the slimmest of evidence. What Clinton actually said at her alma mater before a whooping and roaring crowd of more than 1,000 young women was: "In so many ways, this all-women's college prepared me to compete in the all-boys' club of presidential politics. ... Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it, not now. So let's roll up our sleeves and get to work together. We're ready to shatter that highest glass ceiling."
What about that was so girl-with-her-finger-in-her-mouth frail?
The fact is, Clinton's opponents are mad because they feel robbed. Clinton hadn't acted the victim. The gender card she played was the one every successful recent male presidential candidate has played -- the rescuer card.
Keep in mind: The gender card is always played. It's even played in presidential campaigns in which the candidates are all men, and (given our political culture and our history) it usually involves a morality tale in which men are the rescuers and women the victims in need of rescuing.
Bill Clinton understood the power of that formula when he showcased his boyhood efforts to "stand up" to his abusive stepfather and shield his mother from blows. When facing George H.W. Bush, Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis learned this lesson too late, after he failed to fly into a vigilante-style rage in response to the question: "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?" Dukakis' reply -- "No, I don't, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life" -- whacked his approval ratings from 49% to 42% overnight and helped deny him the election. So did that other failed protection drama that dominated the campaign: the specter of black convict Willie Horton ("every suburban mother's greatest fear," as one GOP ad put it), who raped a woman after being furloughed in Massachusetts while Dukakis was governor. His campaign belatedly tried to counter with an ad about a convict who escaped from a federal program and raped and killed a mother of two.
Post-9/11, the inclination to play the gender rescue card became an imperative. "Every suburban mother's greatest fear" was now not a black man's mug shot but a Muslim terrorist's, and every suburban mother was recast by the pundits as a Security Mom (a mythical creature, as it happened, but that's another story).
Victory on election day 2004 went to the candidate who best understood how to deal from that deck. Both George W. Bush and John Kerry worked hard to position themselves as the King of the Wild Frontier. (Both granted long interviews to hunting and fishing magazines; both bragged about their gun collections; Bush whacked at sagebrush; Kerry stalked wild animals and waved their bloody pelts at journalists.) Kerry's handlers, however, failed to put into play the female part of the rescue equation. They counted on the senator's service in Vietnam to qualify him for the hero role, especially in contrast to Bush's AWOL record.
Bush's advisors knew better, as was evident in their political ads. In "Wolves," set in a forest invaded by a pack of wolves (read: terrorists), a trembling female voice-over claimed that Kerry had voted for cuts in U.S. intelligence "so deep they would have weakened America's defenses -- and weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm." "Wolves" engaged the American terror dream, which the GOP was going to vanquish with a cowboy swagger.
And with a commanding daddy hug. In the final weeks of the race, Bush's backers unveiled "Ashley's Story," a 60-second commercial featuring the president hugging a teenage girl named Ashley Faulkner, whose mother had died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Ashley -- shown lying in a hammock in her backyard, reading a novel with a Victorian lady on the cover -- says: "He's the most powerful man in the world, and all he wants to do is make sure I'm safe."
