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New York: With each passing day, it seems a little less likely that the next president of the United States will wear a skirt - or a cheerful, no-nonsense pantsuit.
Senator Hillary Clinton is now in what many agree are the waning days of her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. To use her own phrase, she has been running "to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling" in American life, or even a nomination that once seemed to be hers to claim.
Along with the usual assessments about strategy, message and money, Clinton's political position brings with it a reckoning about what her run represents for women: a historic if incomplete triumph or a depressing reminder of why few pursue high political office in the first place.
The answers have immediate political implications. If many of Clinton's legions of female supporters believe she was undone even in part by gender discrimination, how eagerly will they embrace Barack Obama, the man who beat her?
"Women felt this was their time, and this has been stolen from them," said Marilu Sochor, 48, a real estate agent in Ohio and a Clinton supporter.
Imperfect test case
Not everyone agrees.
"When people look at the arc of the campaign, it will be seen that being a woman, in the end, was not a detriment and if anything it was a help to her," presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said in an interview. Clinton's campaign is faltering, she added, because of "strategic, tactical things that have nothing to do with her being a woman."
As a former first lady whose political career evolved from her husband's, Clinton was always an imperfect test case for female achievement. "Somebody's wife," as Elaine Kamarck, a professor of government at Harvard and a Clinton supporter, described her.
"She's raised this whole woman candidate thing to a whole different level than when I ran," said Geraldine Ferraro, a Clinton supporter and the first woman to be the vice-presidential nominee of a major party, contrasting her own brief stint as a running mate in 1984 with Clinton's 17-month-and-counting slog.
The conversation Clinton spurred among women, however, seemed newer and more surprising. Her candidacy split Democratic women, not to mention prominent feminists. The cleft was largely along generational lines, with older women who had waged their own battles showing more solidarity and younger ones arguing that voting for a male candidate over a female one was itself a sign of progress and confidence.
"The most important contribution she has made is to show that women candidates are just like men candidates," said Joan Scott, a historian at the Institute for Advanced Study. "You have to judge them not on the basis of their gender but their character."
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| This article on the national political campaigns in the United States is from The New York Times. It was specially selected and prepared by the editors of The New York Times News Service. |
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