The gender card

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."

At $14 million, "Ashley's Story" was the single most expensive political ad of the race. Broadcast more than 30,000 times, the spot ran 7,000 times in Ohio alone, a bombardment intensified by an Internet, phone and direct-mail campaign that distributed 2.3 million brochures showcasing The Hug. Pundits scored it "the most effective ad" of the race, and post-election surveys found it to be one of the two most remembered ads (the other being its evil twin, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth commercial attacking Kerry).

In the 2008 election, the gender card has so far proved harder to play than usual. No one's talking about "security moms" anymore. Democratic candidates Obama and John Edwards have not run gender scare campaigns. And the GOP candidates, while playing the security card for all its worth, have yet to find a way to assign a little Ashley to their 21st century John Wayne -- though, no doubt, that will come.

So far, the only person who has a lock on rescuing women is the one female candidate. Her approach departs from the old male version. In the old model, helpless women were saved from perilous danger by men; in the new, women are granted authority and agency to rescue themselves. Understanding the distinction is essential to an evaluation of current American politics.

The clash between these two rescue scenarios was on vivid display in late 2001, when President Bush signed the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act (before a window-dressing crowd of invited feminists) and declared that "the central goal of the terrorists is the brutal oppression of women." His concern for women's rights came to a halt, however, as soon as the Taliban was driven from power.

"Right now we have other priorities," a senior administration official said when asked (only 2 1/2 weeks into the invasion of Afghanistan) what role women's rights would have in a future government. "We have to be careful not to look like we are imposing our values on them." Tellingly, even as the president was trumpeting female oppression as a casus belli, his administration was deep-sixing an initiative that would have provided financing for women-run nongovernmental organizations in Afghanistan. After all, if women laid claim to self-determination instead of violation and dependency, the rescue drama fell to pieces.