It’s going to be more difficult to make a campaign issue of Hillary Clinton’s decision to keep her emails private while she served in the State Department, now that we know that someone, (presumably the Chinese government) has been mining official email accounts for revealing personal information, compromising untold numbers of those official accounts.  

As things are now shaping up, it’s looking like a pretty shrewd decision.

Who knows why she did it, but there have been plenty of invasive document searches in the Clintons’ public history, so one would be surprised if she hadn’t at least considered putting a lock and key on things while serving in such a sensitive position.

I recently had a conversation with a visiting New Yorker that opened my eyes to the perception problems Hillary still has even among sympathetic voters.  

I told her that I was supporting Bernie, but would of course support Hillary if she won the primary.

She replied with concern that Hillary…that’s Hillary Clinton, we’re talking about…might not be tough enough for the fight ahead!!!

Why would she say that??  I can think of no tougher candidate, myself!   She could go toe-to-toe with Chris Christie in a knife fight!

Hillary is like a battle-scarred general at this point.  No one on Capitol Hill has withstood so many attacks as have the Clintons. In this judgmental country where marital fidelity is a tenet of public office, she came back from her husband’s sensational betrayal to effectively re-center the conversation around her own intellect and capabilities.

Why would a liberal woman (not a blazing progressive, but at least a moderate/ liberal) think she might not be “tough enough” for a second presidential campaign?

My guess is that the assumption that men and women are true equals in twenty-first century America is just as false as is the meme of “post-racial America.”

In the entire stockade of Republican presidential hopefuls, there is just one female contender, Carly Fiorina. Given her relatively low polling numbers, she probably won’t even be on stage for the debates.

How is that even possible in a country where more than half the voters are female?

It is just another example of how the power structure in America has become stagnant and dysfunctional as corporate ‘news’ investors have been allowed to hijack our principle information streams and groom our misogynistic consumer habits.

The myth of female inferiority is still alive and well and lurking in the corners of the American psyche.

Which is not to say that if Hillary is the nominee she is less likely to win than if she were a man.

In fact, just as  the similarly historic candidacy of Barack Obama was a catalyst for record voter turnout, the possibility of a female president could have a similar effect; but just as the election of America’s first black president (actually bi-racial president) was by no means a signal that America was now ‘post-racial,’  even Hillary’s election would not end the deep seated biases about women that are embedded in the American psyche.