So I hope everyone saw the interesting article on the front of the NY Times today, regarding Hillary's much-criticized performance in Philadelphia last week.

The topic of this article, "Different Rules When a Rival Is a Woman?" was whether Hillary Clinton, as the only female, had received equal treatment in the debate.
The weird thing is, that I actually can't make up my mind.

The guys played rough with her, for sure. But that is what we want...she doesn't desire or expect the other candidates to tiptoe around her because she's a lady:
"The standard should be exactly the same," said John Edwards, "I think she's entitled to be treated like every other candidate is treated, and that's exactly what I'll do."
But was she treated `the same'? I really think it would be hard for anyone to deny that she was essentially being ganged up on for two hours by the moderator as well as the other candidates. And she should be interrogated unmercifully, she is a front-running candidate. They all should. Hillary would sound like a sniffling martyr if she lamented that the men attacked her with sexist motives. I do not pretend to know how they personally feel about women, but I do concur with what Geraldine Ferraro said:
"John Edwards, specifically, as well as the press, would never attack Barack Obama for two hours the way they attacked her. It's OK for this country to be sexist, it's certainly OK not to be racist."  

I do think that if Obama had been attacked in such a way, that African Americans would be crying fowl. I really do.

Sites such as this one accuse her of not answering some questions in a straightforward way. But really...(if you will permit an extended baseball metaphor) the loaded questions were being hurled at her hard and fast. She tried to field them, but naturally some threads were going to get lost over the course of two hours.

The Nov. 12 issue of TIME Magazine features a blurb on what they say was an, "All-out assault on Hillary Clinton.[...]While almost every participant took a shot at Clinton, the semi-coordinated attacks of John Edwards and Barack Obama did the most damage." See? I cannot say if she was being attacked because she is a woman, or simply because she is a front-runner...but it is does seem true that she took more much heat that Edwards or Obama, for whatever reason. Yet I maintain that under the circumstances, she did a good job.