"With each passing day, it seems a little less likely that the next president of the United States will wear a skirt..."

Did Mrs. Clinton ever wear a skirt? Not once, during the entire campaign. But that's not the point of the linked article (by Jodi Kantor). It's more talk about the whole "woman President" business that has always left me cold. Hillary Clinton is not a woman, she's a particular woman. (She's that woman, Mrs. Clinton.) I have always resisted the efforts to get women jazzed up about the idea of a woman President. But for those who did get absorbed into that idiotic emotional manipulation, there is now the need to work toward closure.

“Women felt this was their time, and this has been stolen from them,” said Marilu Sochor, 48, a real estate agent in Columbus, Ohio, and a Clinton supporter. “Sexism has played a really big role in the race.”

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,” the presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said in an interview. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign is faltering, she added, because of “strategic, tactical things that have nothing to do with her being a woman.”

I'm with Goodwin on this one. Clinton used the woman thing to manipulate us whenever she could, and her campaign simply failed, as most campaigns fail.

As a former first lady whose political career evolved from her husband’s, Mrs. 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.

"Somebody." Indeed.

Mrs. Clinton’s supporters point to a nagging series of slights: the fixation on her clothes, even her cleavage; chronic criticism that her voice is shrill; calls for her to exit the race; and most of all, the male commentators in the news media who, they argue, were consistently tougher on her than on Mr. Obama.

It's not that they were tough on her, but that they were easy on him.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, many women say with regret, did not inspire a deep or nuanced conversation between men and women, only familiar gender-war battles consisting of male gibes and her supporters’ angry responses. Mr. Obama, who sought to minimize the role of race in his candidacy, led something of a national dialogue about it, but Mrs. Clinton, who made womanhood an explicit part of her run, seemed unwilling or unable to talk candidly about gender.

Interesting, but Obama did not set out to lead that dialogue. He was dragged into it. Face it, Obama has the more agile, able mind. He presented himself as transcending race — something he could see many Americans want to do — and when he had to deal with it — he spoke in broad, inclusive terms. Clinton promoted herself from the start as deserving special support because of her sex, and then when things didn't go her way, she and her surrogates were quick to attribute her problems to sex and to whine and blame about sexism.

IN THE COMMENTS: dbp says:

"With each passing day, it seems a little less likely that the next president of the United States will wear a skirt..."

My hopes in this regard were dashed once Rudy dropped out.