Rebecca Traister: "Just think, little Sally Ann, some day you too can live out your life's ambition and be painted an emasculating succubus..."

Okay, first John Edwards is an "orc."

Now Hillary Clinton is a "succubus."

Do you play Dungeons & Dragons?

A wonderful article - but my impression of Hillary is the exact opposite of yours! Your description fits, if Hillary is the strong leader you make her out to be. But I don't think she is. The awfulness of her campaign, the skyhigh salaries of her advisors, the loosemouthedness of her husband, all those things are a sign that she didn't control the alpha males who surrounded her.

It's a fact with men - and I've noticed it in myself, despite my "feminist" upbringing - that when we have a female chief, we unconsciously jostle for power, we continually suggest other strategies, we test whether she will swat us down. If she doesn't, you get chaos. And Hillary didn't swat down Bill, and Mark, and whoever, and her campaign went from incoherence to incoherence, and from goalpost to goalpost.

In short, the real sexism she suffered from was that of those close to her.

And that's why the sentence you like best is the one I like least - in fact, the only sentence in her speech I found off-key. "We weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it."

But that doesn't make sense. If that ceiling existed, how could she, during the whole of her campaign, state that she was the best candidate to beat McCain? Either her gender scares off voters or it doesn't. And since she broke vote total records, my guess is that it doesn't. Her reference to the glass ceiling is a way of saying the electorate's sexism is to blame. But it's not: she ran (or let others run) a rotten campaign in comparison to Obama's.

At the beginning of the primary season I did not think that Sen. Clinton had much of a chance. She had not been against the war at the beginning. She was not much of a public speaker. She was dull. The media was totally against her. Racism was rampant not to mention sexism and this was from the people who supported Obama. What happened? She fought like I haven't seen anyone fight since RFK. She became articulate. She was delivering rousing speeches. No matter how you look at it, she got more votes than any other candidate who ever ran for President. All this from a woman. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe we have ever heard rousing speeches from a woman. Maybe bitchy speeches from the likes of Faye Dunaway doing Joan Crawford but is this a first? Has Sen. Clinton set a new glass ceiling for rousing speeches with substance that you can remember and take with you and think about them and hope and not forget? Can Senators Obama and McCain even get anywhere this new cieling?

Very good article. It hit most of the points dead on. The only one I see missing is the DNC and the Democratic leadership selecting Obama to be their candidate rather than letting the people (Us unwashed, idiots) pick our candidate.

The combined weight of MSNBC, CNN, CBS and the likes if Chris Dodd and Teddy Kennedy were too much to overcome.

Luckily I don't have to have either DODD or Kennedy as my representatives and I've chosen to forever not watch MSNBC. This cable channel has become a joke during this primary season. Olbermann, I thought was the worst until Chris Mathews open his yawning yap and proved that he could top him. I'll throw in Dan Abrams too as a complete waste of broadcast bandwidth. Never did I see anything approaching fairness on any of these shows and I'm not willing to ever listen to any of these three pieces of (fill in the blank here) ever again.

PS I'm not a sarcastic female.

Didn't Hillary start out with the massive advantage in Super delegates, plus party connections and fundraisers? Clinton got very favorable media coverage starting in 2007 until she lost 11 contests in a row in February and the media figured out she would have to win the remaining contests by very big margins in order to get enough delegates.

You do realize that there's no way to make a definitive claim about the popular vote, right?

You do realize that Obama won more pledged delegates no matter how they are counted, and no matter how FL and MI would have been settled, right?

You also realize that the DNC R&B committee was packed with HRC supporters, right?

So how exactly did the DNC hand this to Obama?

On an unrelated note. . .

Hutman, the newest rules set for DnD was released on friday. Have Fun!

I'm not one to be impressed by her, not even a little bit. I don't consider her to be a great woman nor a groundbreaking figure. She has been riding the coat tails of Bill. You can talk about how strong and independent she was but she frequently said, "In my husband's administration..." To me, no matter how you look at it, if she was married to another lawyer other than Bill, she herself would most likely be a practicing lawyer herself. When another woman, who is self-made gets there, then I'll be impressed.

When are the Clintonites going to wake up to the fact - the fact - that Hillary's fate was sealed on February 19, the day of the Wisconsin primary? After that point, her campaign was doomed. After that, she did not win anywhere that she was not expected to win, contrary to what the author states. And still it was not enough, because she was not going to overcome his delegate lead. The talking heads did not respect her campaign after Wisconsin because it was doomed, not because Hillary is a woman. In fact, everyone indulged her in her fantasy campaign because she was a woman, and a Clinton. No man, not Edwards, Dodd, Biden or Richardson, would have gotten away with such a wasteful, divisive effort. I appreciated Hillary's speech today, but we've got to stop canonizing her. She took the Democratic party through hell because she lacked the courage and maturity to face the cold, hard reality of her situation. Because she prefered life in a bubble insulated from reality, the country is we;;-served that she will not be our next President - and that has nothing to do with her gender.