Sisterhood is petulant

I hope he sent Hillary flowers.

John McCain's real triumph Tuesday wasn't snapping up the last of the 1,191 delegates needed to finally convince the dejected far right he's the Republican nominee.

No, it was the many gifts Clinton plopped into his lap, starting with that grating red phone ad she unleashed last week warning that cherubic children will die in their beds if Barack Obama beats her:

"It's 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep. But there's a phone in the White House, and it's ringing. Something's happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call. Whether it's someone who already knows the world's leaders, knows the military - someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world."

Who could that be? The answer, dear Hillary, is obvious: John McCain.

Last time I checked, he's the one who can't hold his arms above his head because they were busted so many times by the North Vietnamese. After a more than five-year stint as a POW, he spent 25 years cultivating his foreign policy credentials in Congress.

When did Hillary ever have to pick up the (nonexistent) red phone when Bill was in office? Never. First ladies don't get national security clearance.

So while McCain was boogying down Tuesday, I hope he didn't forget the little lady who seems hell-bent on delivering him a bigger prize in November by mortally wounding Obama.

Of course, Clinton's still a lock to lose.

Confetti-strewn victory bashes over Ohio and Texas rock, but it's all about delegates - and she comes up short. Clinton didn't major in math or miracles (and we saw how well the latter worked out for Mike Huckabee).

So unless she twists the arms of superdelegates to defy the will of voters or makes a rotten backroom deal to capture Florida's and Michigan's invisible delegates, Clinton is toast.

If she does eke out a victory, it'll reek. The starry-eyed Obama kids will stay home - anyone who recalls Richard Nixon's 1968 win after the Chicago Democratic convention carnage knows that.

The crux of Clinton's case will crumble. Once she's on stage next to McCain, whose hair was shocked white in the Hanoi Hilton, all that nonsense of 35 years of experience will crystallize.

Clinton's a brilliant woman whose crowning glory is botching our best shot to fix health care. She'll make a wily Senate Majority Leader someday. Meantime, enjoy President McCain's picks for the Supreme Court.

It's Obama who ultimately will pay the price of Clinton's "kitchen sink" strategy - and she and her multimillion-dollar consultants couldn't care less.

If Barack loses in 2008, guess who makes another run for it in 2012? It doesn't take a cynic to figure this battle plan out.

Team Clinton is doing McCain's dirty work for him. But somehow I don't think Mr. Straight Talk would shade Obama's face to look darker in a menacing ad. I can't see him doing the Texas two-step on Obama being a Muslim like Clinton telling "60 Minutes," "There is nothing to base that on, as far as I know ..."

Wink, wink. Nod, nod.

Republicans like Bill Nowling are lapping it up.

"The big winner is John McCain," the state GOP spokesman effuses. "We're building a national campaign for the White House while the two Democrats fight amongst themselves over who will be the first to surrender in the war on terror."

As Clinton careens down the course to become the most unlikable presidential candidate in recent memory, she has her girlfriends screaming that you're sexist for noticing. Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem are busy browbeating young (and older) women as "gender traitors" for backing Obama, as if the election is some fusty women's studies class at Bryn Mawr.

They never mention Clinton's feminist accomplishments in the Senate (there aren't any) - but assert the jarringly simplistic idea that women are morally obligated to vote for others with ovaries.

As an ardent feminist, it's hard to see my heroines caricature themselves. Their joyless rants feed into the worst Rush Limbaugh stereotypes and are just depressing.

In fact, Hillary Clinton's whole campaign is depressing. (As one Toledo college student told me last week, "She sucks at life.")

Clinton maintains she's a fighter, while paradoxically playing the victim to the press. She's goaded the national media into throwing punches at Obama between her own blows.

She's set the terms of the race from beginning to end. That's why few people dared suggest the Warrior Princess bow out after 11 straight smackdowns, whereas Obama would have been laughed back to the south side of Chicago.

Clinton's slimy strategy of character assassination worked perfectly for the Tuesday primaries and she promises much more to come.

Hillary doesn't mind winning ugly, because she's decided "it's time to put a woman in the White House." But it isn't about equality or the Democratic Party.

In the end, it's all about her.

‘I Am Woman, See Me Cry’

What a sad night to have ovaries in America.

On Tuesday, tears evidently were enough to catapult Hillary Clinton to victory in New Hampshire.

The electoral Athena, reported to have callously coached her own daughter never to brandish emotion, turned on the waterworks Monday when a voter innocuously asked, “How do you do it?”

(And cringingly added, “Who does your hair?”)

“It’s not easy,” the Warrior Princess intoned gravely. And then her corneas glinted with something we humans know as teardrops.

Pundits did a 180 from their heavy breathing over Barack Obama’s win in Iowa into to breathless bewilderment that Hillary hath emotions, after all.

I imagine the tears were hard for Clinton to muster. It had to be a masochistic moment for her, although given her well-known marital history, she’s used to that.

But nothing else had worked, so why not.

Wait, you say. Isn’t it possible that her whimpering was real?

Of course, dear.

It couldn’t possibly be a MacBethian strategy in concert with Bill Clinton’s assault on the media’s “fairytale” coverage of Obama and her campaign’s wide-eyed insistence that if Hillary kept her loss down to double-digits, it would be a victory.

This couldn’t be the culmination of her “Likeability Tour” through Iowa a few weeks back, the saddest campaign concoction in recent memory evoking images of a hapless spinster selling herself and her 28 cats on Match.com.

Sorry folks, the candidate brought those sexist stereotypes on herself.

They’re on par with Clinton’s rendition of, “I Am Woman, See Me Cry.” Not exactly a gutsy feminist anthem.

For the record, I am an unabashed feminist who thinks the word has gotten a bad rap and should be embraced by all men and women - conservative or liberal - who can agree that the fairer sex is not chattel.

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to first- and second-wave women’s libbers who chained themselves to buildings and sat in jail so I could have the right to vote in this election and a column in which to grouse about it.

My liberal friends tell me I am exactly who should be voting for Hillary. St. Gloria Steinem herself has decreed it is our moral duty to install a woman in the White House.

Amen, sister. But as a student of history and a humanist, I fervently believe in electing the right candidate for the times.

And I think the Clintonian era of psychodrama and scandal has passed. Consider the fact that the entire premise for Hillary ’08 is a throwback to 1950s seedy pulp fiction.

She’s being slickly sold as the candidate of experience, having already done an eight-year stint at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Yes, but it was on the tea and crumpets circuit. Her grandiose health care initiative was one of the biggest domestic failures in modern history and Clinton was never trusted with anything that consequential again.

That is, until Bill couldn’t keep from pawing a bawdy intern and Hillary became - you guessed it - emotional. So distraught, in fact, that the only thing that could console her was running for a Senate seat up in New York.

When married to a serial philanderer, it’s good to find a hobby.

Clinton stood by her man – and on his broad shoulders to launch her own political career.

That makes her presidential campaign remarkably anti-feminist in my book. (Though I suppose she can take comfort that no one can top reliable GOP nut-job Pat Robertson, who called feminism a “socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”)

Naturally, my heresy has just invited hate mail that I would never dare castigate a man, a black man or Bessie the cow like this.

Yeah, check back with the overwhelmingly male legislators I inveigh against week after week.

Look, I’m not delusional enough to contend we’ve busted the glass ceiling and live in magical Equalityland now. I’ve been paid insultingly less than male reporters with less experience. My mug shot often garners more speculation than my prose.

No doubt, Hillary Clinton faces unique challenges as the first top-tier female presidential contender.

But her next move is utterly predictable: to obliterate Obama with a barrage of unseemly and unfounded attacks, probably employing others to do it (like, say, a perennially sorry spouse).

What we need now is a person of honor in the Oval Office, who will pledge an end to that kind of hyper-partisan, cancerous politics.

Hillary’s not our girl, to steal her own campaign line. She’s masterfully lined the old boys’ club behind her, playing the politics of personal destruction like it’s a parlor game.

And all along the way, she still plays the victim.

For that, you can cry me a river, honey.