THE NOTE: Clinton Plays Gender Card

Nov. 2, 2007 — -- A moment of silence, please, for Invincible Hillary. She left us at 11 am ET yesterday, in Wellesley, Mass., a victim of her own hand. She was 10 months old. She is survived by Victim Hillary.

"In so many ways this all women's college prepared me to compete in the all-boys club of presidential politics," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said yesterday at her alma mater, Wellesley College.

This from the frontrunner, the wire-to-wire leader, the choice of the Democratic establishment, the candidate of strength, determination, experience. In the context of her poor debate performance, with all her (male) rivals sensing an opportunity to chip away at her 30-point lead, this is called playing the gender card.

The campaign is raising money on the six-on-one from Tuesday's Democratic debate. But Clinton is also seeking to raise sympathies from (particularly female) voters based on the increasingly aggressive tack taken by her rivals.

"Clinton essentially hid behind her pantsuit in response to a public shellacking," AP's Ron Fournier writes in his "On Deadline" column, noting that Clinton "is no stranger to 'piling on' " herself in playing the aggressor in political combat.

Fournier: "Clinton's advisers, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss internal matters, said there is a clear and long-planned strategy to fend off attacks by accusing her male rivals of gathering against her. The idea is to change the subject while making Clinton a sympathetic figure, especially among female voters who often feel outnumbered and bullied on the job."

Maybe the strategy works (roll out the Rick Lazio footage -- and at least she's not talking about campaign equivocations now). Yesterday marked an "emotional return" by Clinton, and she used her first full day on the trail after Tuesday's debate "to set out on an ambitious drive to attract more women to what she is underscoring as her historic candidacy," Elisabeth Bumiller writes in The New York Times. Said Clinton: "We're ready to shatter that highest glass ceiling."

"The largely dormant issue of Senator Clinton's gender is moving to the fore in the presidential contest," Josh Gerstein writes for the New York Sun. EMILY's List is set to jump into the race on Clinton's behalf, and her latest fundraising appeal is soaked in gender politics. Writes campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, in a fundraising e-mail: "She is one strong woman. She came through it well. But Hillary's going to need your help."

But Clinton's candidacy has always been about far more than being the first woman to launch a viable presidential candidacy. She's wanted us to view her as tougher than the other candidates in the race, the candidate equipped to handle the challenges of the job on Day One. She's been the candidate who's ready to "deck" her critics (and remember who dealt the first blow after Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said he'd meet with leaders of rogue nations?).

Said Obama yesterday, referring to his disagreements with Clinton on Iran: "I fear no man" -- pause -- "or woman." "She authorized war and then recently starting voting on this Iran resolution. The drums of war are beating again. You can't be fooled twice," Obama said, ABC's Sunlen Miller reports.

Obama this morning, on the "Today" show: "I am assuming and I hope that Sen. Clinton wants to be treated like everybody else. And I think that that's why she is running for president. You know, when we had a debate in Iowa a while back, we spent the first 15 minutes of the debate hitting me on various foreign policy issues. And I didn't come out and say 'look, I'm being hit on because I look different from the rest of the folks on the stage.' . . . We're not running for the president of the city council. We're running for the president of the United States of America."

Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus isn't buying it. "Those other guys were beating up on Clinton, if you can call that beating up, because she is the strong front-runner, not because she is a weak woman. And a candidate as strong as Clinton doesn't need to play the woman-as-victim card," Marcus writes. "Using gender this way is a setback. Hillary Clinton is woman enough to take these attacks like a man."

There is such a thing as protesting too much. Lashing out at her critics "contradicts a central part of Clinton's own message: The notion that she is a battle-tested veteran ready for anything the Republicans can throw at her," Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh writes. "If so, she should prove it by engaging with her rivals and defending her positions -- not by having her campaign protest each and every time another Democrat says something critical about her."

In the short-term rush of post-debate spin, does Clinton sacrifice that which makes her most formidable? Maybe Fred Thompson could play a political analyst on TV: "The Clinton campaign goes so far in relying upon her being a strong, strong woman . . . and then on a dime, they can switch to say, 'Oh my goodness, the men are ganging up on her,' " Thompson, R-Tenn., said, per ABC's Christine Byun. "You can't have that both ways in American politics, and they're just beginning to find that out."