I am a woman. I believe Hillary's campaign is playing the "gender card"

[madfloridian]

and using it to just keep going on and on and on. She and her husband and their surrogates often refer to the fact that she is being mistreated because she is a female.

She is using that sexism thing, and she is using my state as well. She is claiming a popular vote win by using a sanctioned state.

This goes beyond being "just politics."

It is promoting things that are not true at all, and promoting the pretense that they are valid. The media is not helping because they love the tension of the race.

Hillary is not losing because she is a woman. She is losing because she just kept parroting old worn out talking points, because she ran a poor campaign based on tired themes of division and anger.

The party's leaders are being timid because her husband was a two-term Democratic president. They on the whole are letting this thing take its course, and I don't think they have a clue what it is doing to the party. I really don't think they do. I think many of the superdelegates are cowardly, worrying that they will lose constituent votes if they endorse too soon.

I agree with almost every word in this article at Huffington Post today. More should be speaking out like this.

Hillary's Sexist End-Game

This morning, on the Today Show, 1984's Vice Presidential candidate and Hillary Clinton campaign surrogate Geraldine Ferraro pulled the trigger and cynically played the unfortunate but inevitable "gender card" -- she called Barack Obama "sexist." In March 2008 she groused that "if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept." She offended so many of us who are gender- and color-blind in this election cycle that she was rightly called on the carpet for her inane comments and removed from Clinton's "official" campaign functions.Her comments today are no less shocking. When queried if misogyny was to blame for Clinton's defeat after a historically close and contentious campaign, she implored viewers that "it wasn't so much they were referring to gender, it was the way they attacked her. What happened in this race is every time you raised the issue, you're accused of playing the gender card. Latent sexism has been around in this country for a long time, in this campaign it was patent."

Ms. Ferraro needs a good long look in the mirror -- sexism cuts both ways and Hillary's continued presence in this campaign is, in and of itself, a manipulation of the very concept of sexism. People throughout the U.S. and abroad are scratching their collective heads wondering why Hillary is still "going all the way to Denver" when the delegate campaign mathematics ate her for lunch weeks ago.

What her campaign never realized was that our country had reached a point of being proud of having a woman and an African American man running for president at the same time. It was something awesome.

She is the one who turned it into something it never was...."sexism."

Obama is a young, brilliant, charismatic statesman with a moving personal narrative. a picture-perfect family, a stunningly effective campaign team whose strategists ran a brave, hard-fought campaign against spectacular odds and beat the most powerful Democratic political machine of the past two decades.

Obama is gutsy, articulate, elegant, unflappable and full of ideas and energy. Everything that the Clintons secretly believe is their personal bailiwick. He MUST, Clinton insiders say, be stopped at all costs, even if she takes herself and the Democratic Party down with her.

She is using a new system of math that is meant to confuse the uninformed voter.

Someone said they respected my posts about Florida, but they found me spending too much time criticizing Hillary.

Actually right now it is hard to separate the two in my mind. She is using my state as a way to keep going, to keep claiming people are against her because she is a female, claiming that Obama is sexist, and so on.

It is keeping her going.

We had two bright shining candidates when this started. It was our year to be winners. Our decision to support Obama was made on the day she claimed the delegates here. We saw how it would be used, as a vehicle to hurt the party.

Governor Dean made some comments in NH this week-end.

Dean, Dems calling for party unity

The most important jobs of the next President, Dean said, will be to "heal our nation" and "restore the moral authority of the United States in the rest of the world."

Dean recalled some gentle chiding he got from Al Gore at the end of Dean's own unsuccessful Presidential bid in 2004. "This is not about you. This is about your country," Gore reminded him.

And, Dean told the delegates, "This is not about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, either. This is about our country. This is not about George Bush and John McCain; it's about our country. We live in the greatest country on the face of the earth, and it's time we started acting like that again."

The crowd, which party officials said was the largest for a state party convention in more than 30 years, rose to its feet, cheering.

There are no entitlements, there are no special layers, no hierarchy.