"Did Hillary "Play The Gender Card"?"

Greg Sargent (TPM Election Central):

Did she or didn't she?

The debate is raging away on this question today. Ezra Klein says no. Atrios agrees, and adds that Hillary was right to describe the political world and its domination by Russert and company as a "boy's club." Garance Franke-Ruta agrees, suggesting more female moderators at debates such as the one last Wednesday.

The New York Times and Washington Post political blogs are both all over this, too.

Today Obama strongly suggested, without quite saying outright, that Hillary was claiming that her rivals were attacking her because she's a woman. "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,'" Obama said.

But Hillary herself says she isn't playing the "gender card," saying today in New Hampshire: "I don't think they're piling on because I'm a woman. I think they're piling on because I'm winning."

So what really happened here, anyway?

After the debate, Hillary's campaign sent out an email describing her as "one tough woman" and deriding the nature of the "piling on" that had ensued. And the next day, AFSCME president Gerald McEntee endorsed Hillary with remarks that almost certainly had plenty of input from the Hillary campaign: "Six guys against Hillary. I’d call that a fair fight. This is one strong woman."

So just after the debate the campaign didn't argue that she was being attacked because she's a woman. But the campaign clearly did try to strongly emphasize the gender picture here.

The campaign also produced this video, called "the politics of pile-on," which featured all her opponents attacking her. This vid didn't reference the fact that her opponents were all men, or reference her gender, however. It just so happens that her opponents are all men, so this one doesn't tell us anything, accept that the campaign wanted to emphasize that her opponents were attacking her.

Hillary pollster Mark Penn subsequently said in a conference call that the image of six men beating up on Hillary would play well with female voters. And anonymous Clinton advisers told the Associated Press that "there is a clear and long-planned strategy to fend off attacks by accusing her male rivals of gathering against her." Though one should approach anonymous stuff with caution, this doesn't seem especially difficult to believe.

Yesterday Hillary said during a speech that her all-girls-school alma mater "prepared me compete in the all boys’ club of presidential politics." Here again, she just didn't say that the reason she was being attacked was that she's a woman. But she did, clearly, want to draw attention to the gender component here in a way that would appeal to women. And, of course, Hillary is right on this: Politics here is something of a boy's club. So Hillary said something that is true and something likely to accomplish her obvious political goal of winning over more women.

Bottom line: As best as we can determine, Hillary never explicitly made the accusation that the men were piling up on her because she's a woman. But you'd have to be very credulous indeed not to believe that the campaign is explicitly trying to emphasize, for various political reasons, the fact that she's a woman getting hammered by a bunch of men. I don't know if that constitutes "playing the gender card" or not -- the exact meaning of the term is unclear, at least to me -- but that's obviously what's going on.

And by the way, that's what campaigns do: They strategize and try to win elections, something that by nature is political. Camp Hillary isn't "hiding behind her gender." But the spirit of at least some of what Obama is saying is partly right: Camp Hillary has in fact aggressively emphasized the gender dimension to all this, because there's a fair amount of truth to it, yes, but also because they are convinced it will help her politically.