Obama alienated women with his curt remark to Clinton

Rick Lazio must have known what was coming. As Hillary Clinton's Senate opponent in 2000, he alarmingly strode across the stage during a debate and demanded that she sign a pledge to ban the use of soft money in their campaign. With every step, he lost the votes of women.

Now something similar has happened. I am not referring to the most famous cry since Evita's (Don't Cry for Me, New Hampshire), but Barack Obama's patronizing dismissal of Clinton in the final debate of the New Hampshire campaign. After Clinton had good-naturedly responded to a question about what is sometimes called her "personality deficit" -- "Well, that hurts my feelings" -- she went on to concede that Obama is "very likable." Obama responded with a curt "You're likable enough, Hillary."

Wince. Slap. A version of "nice personality" -- the killer description of a girl from my high school days. In this case, Obama was echoing the truth of the likability charge, dismissing Clinton because she was, as all the polls said, beaten.

It was an ugly moment that showed a side of Obama we had not seen and it might not have been characteristic. But it made for vivid TV, a High-Definition Truth, and probably more than a few women recoiled from it. Obama could have remedied the situation but seemed to be acting for all the world as if his inauguration was just a mere formality.

Was this the moment accounting for the gender gap that put Clinton over the top? Women, 57 percent of the New Hampshire electorate, went for her by a big 12 points. That was not the case in the Iowa caucuses where she lost the female vote by five points. Something happened in New Hampshire, something that moved women. Obama would be a fool not to wonder where he had gone wrong.

As for Clinton's celebrated cry, it was not like its famous predecessors -- Ed Muskie's 1972 cry or Pat Schroder's 1988 breakdown -- a surge of self-pity.

She did not cry for herself. She cried for the country.

"It's not easy," she said of the campaign. "And I couldn't do it if I didn't passionately believe it was the right thing to do. ... You know, this is very personal for me. It's not just political. It's not just public. I see what's happening, and we have to reverse it. Some people think elections are a game, lots of who's up or who's down. It's about our country. It's about our kids' futures. And it's really about all of us together."

Instantly, the more cynical of my brethren wondered if the cry was staged. They wondered if it showed weakness and how, for God's sake, Clinton could stand up to our nation's enemies if she was going to break down in tears from time to time. They missed two points. The first is that women don't consider crying a sign of weakness but, paradoxically, of authenticity. And the second was that this so-called cry, actually a welling up, was not a clear descent into self-pity, but a weep for the country.

There's a natural tendency to make us all one. Barack Obama is neither black nor white and while Hillary Clinton is demonstrably a woman, this is not supposed to matter. But the Obama camp got upset when Clinton adopted the image of Martin Luther King in her rhetoric. It was theirs, the Obama camp felt -- by right, by inheritance, by dint of struggle. You can appreciate their point.

For its own part, the Obama camp forgot that Hillary is a woman -- a wife and a mother. Her life is a woman's life and no man dare dismiss it.

Any prudent pundit ought to know better than to predict what will happen from here on out. But it sure seems for the moment that Hillary Clinton has found her groove and that the wave Barack Obama kept saying he was riding broke on the shoals of his own cold indifference and a mother's warm tears.

© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group