... Obama (a moderate compared to HRC)

Would you care to explain that before I write it off to mere sexism? I think Clinton and Obama were very similar on the issues. If anything, I think Obama was/is just a scarecely perceptible tinge more liberal.

Stop character assasinating Hillary Clinton. She's a strong, principled woman who would have made a great president. This demonizing, character-assasinating sexism is unacceptable. If you are willing to vote for Obama but consider Hillary a "femi-nazi" or a "b*tch" or whatever.. please.. spare us your vote. And crawl back into the dark cave from whence you came.

...women will truly have arrived when the most mediocre among us will be able to do just as well as the most mediocre of men. By this standard, the watershed event for women this year was not Hillary Clinton’s near ascendancy to the top of the Democratic ticket, but Sarah Palin’s nomination as the Republicans’ No. 2.

For Clinton was a lifelong overachiever, a star in a generational vanguard who clearly took to heart the maxim that women “must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good,” and in so doing divorced herself from the world of the merely average. In that, she was not unlike Barack Obama — taxed by his race to be twice as reassuring, twice as un-angry, twice as presidential as any white candidate.

Mediocrity, after all, is the privilege of those who have arrived.

Palin is a woman who has risen to national prominence without, apparently, even remotely being twice as good as her male competitors. On the contrary, her claim to fame lies in her repudiation of Clinton-type exceptionalism.

...She is a woman who is able to not only get by but also be quickly promoted on the kinds of attributes that were once the exclusive province of unremarkable white men: rapport, the right looks or connections, an easy sort of familiarity.

McCain's campaign is too "clean", too honest, and too honorable.

McCain's campaign is too "clean", too honest, and too honorable.