Reply #34: Did you see this conversation on Hillary's sexism claim and damage done from

[K Gardner]

MTP today..

MS. DOWD: I think it's poppycock, really. I mean, Hillary Clinton has allowed women to visualize a woman as president for the first time, in the way Colin Powell allowed people to visualize an African-American. And she dominated the debates, she, she proved that a woman can have as much tenacity and gall as any man on earth. We, we can visualize her facing down Ahmadinejad. But the thing is, Hillary hurts feminism when she uses it as opportunism. And she has a history of covering up her own mistakes behind sexism. She did it with health care right after health care didn't pass. She didn't admit that she was abrasive or mismanaged it or blew off good advice or was too secretive. She said that she was a Rorschach test for gender and that many men thought of a female boss they didn't like when they looked at her. And now she's doing the same thing, and it's very--you know, in a way it's the moral equivalent of Sharptonism. It's this victimhood and angry and turning women against men and saying that the men are trying to take it away from us, in the same way she's turning Florida and Michigan and riling up and comparing them to suffragettes and slaves. And it's very damaging to feminism.

MS. IFILL: Just something, keep in mind what her audience is at this stage. Her audience, assuming she's trying to get out of this campaign with something intact and with some sort of power base intact, her audience is the truly, deeply angry women out there, who I run into, and I know who you hear from, who say, "How could you do this to us? They believe that Hillary Clinton is not the beginning of the road, but the end of the road for women in--and--with a shot at the White House. My thinking is, we didn't know two years, or we never heard of, a couple years ago that Barack Obama would be in this position. We didn't know eight years ago that she was going to be in the Senate. So things change a lot. But the despair and the anger and the fury about this is real. And that's what she's speaking to.

MS. GOODWIN: But, you know, despair and sadness is understandable, but resentments, when you let resentments fester, I think it poisons a part of you. And what you don't want women to take away, instead of seeing her as a champion who actually did some great things for women, see her instead as a victim, it doesn't help the next women coming along. So I just wish those resentments could go on--could go away.