Is Hillary Clinton the victim of a Vast Misogynist Conspiracy? Have her efforts to breach the ultimate glass ceiling in the world's labour market been destroyed - as in the end we're told all women's efforts inevitably are destroyed - by a lethal combination of sneering chauvinism and locker-room clubbiness?

To the cynics this US presidential election was always going to be a race to the bottom between racism and sexism. As the Democratic party continues to writhe through the final agonies of Senator Clinton's collapsing ambitions, her people think they know the real winner. They are muttering angrily that she is the most high-profile victim yet of sexual discrimination in the workplace. A favourite theme among them now is that Mrs Clinton is a kind of sacrificial figure: the woman who so obviously should have won the presidency but was denied by woman-hatred, the one whose efforts were not enough to conquer the legions of male bigots but whose sacrifice has made it possible for future women to scale the mountaintop. Henceforth, as it were, all generations shall call her blessed.

Before ascribing this sentiment to a particularly powerful case of sore loser syndrome, we ought to acknowledge that it surely has a little merit. There are things that are said all the time about Mrs Clinton's manner, her speaking style, assumptions that are made about her motivations, even the vocabulary in which she is described, that are, shall we say, certainly gender-specific. The cultural allusions played out with tired regularity to describe her campaigning style conjure the worst female images that lurk in the darkest corners of the male brain. She's Lady Macbeth and The White Queen and Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction rolled into one.

And yet, are we truly expected to believe this is why Democratic voters have rejected her? I've no doubt that there are still some men who physically recoil at the thought of a woman in a powerful job but do people really think that there were not other - good - reasons for denying Senator Clinton her prize?

In the end the beauty of the “We only lost because people are sexist/racist/homophobic/stupid” argument is that it can't really be rebutted. The only way to deal with it is to explain patiently and with great understanding that there were valid reasons why millions of intelligent, thoughtful and tolerant Americans decided to run a million miles from the idea that this woman - this woman - should become the most powerful person on the planet.

The principal reason voters give for not liking Senator Clinton is that they don't trust her, that they sense that someone who would do or say anything to get elected is not someone who should be entrusted with the presidency. If anything has been demonstrated in the two long years in which she has been actively campaigning for the presidency, it is how right they are.

As she ratchets up her final efforts to wrest the nomination from Barack Obama's grasp, she has finally cut herself free from the frayed moorings that connected her campaign with honesty and reality. This week, as Senator Obama moved closer to securing a majority of delegates needed for the Democratic nomination, she was insisting with more urgency than ever that the votes cast in Michigan and Florida must be counted.

These states, you'll recall, broke the Democratic Party's rules and went ahead with their primaries earlier than they were supposed to. As a result the Democratic Party - not the Republicans, or the Supreme Court or the Bush Administration - decided to disqualify those states from the process. In Michigan, Senator Obama was not even on the ballot papers, yet now Senator Clinton not only insists those votes must count towards the final vote totals, but says it would be a terrible denial of Americans' civil rights if they did not.

She compared her effort to overturn the decision not only to Al Gore's controversial defeat in Florida in a disputed recount in 2000, but to the victims of tyranny throughout history - from enslaved blacks in pre-Civil War America to the cheated voters in the election in March in Zimbabwe.

This is, truly, disturbing. It matters not whether it is a man or a woman saying it. It is not only hyperbolic and cynical. It is inflammatory nonsense. But it is at least of a piece with her increasingly desperate struggle.

Mrs Clinton has received much credit for the fighting posture she has adopted of late. She has found her voice, it is said, as she fights to win votes in the remaining primary states among predominantly low-income, white voters. Yet what is this voice? It is a voice that explicitly appeals to white working-class solidarity and implicitly suggests that people outside that demographic cannot be president. It plays on the worst populist instincts of Americans, issuing threats to obliterate Iran and attacking the Chinese for poisoning Americans with toxic toys.

To see how completely Senator Clinton has changed in the course of her campaign, we have only to consider how the Democratic race was viewed two years ago as it got under way. Back then, when Mr Obama's campaign was merely a twinkle in his own eye, the question on Democrats' lips was: who could possibly beat Hillary? The assumption was that Senator Clinton would be the candidate of the elite, liberal, progressive types and African-Americans who in the end, as it turned out, flocked to Mr Obama.

Her problem, it was assumed back then, was that she would not be able to appeal to the white working class with its more conservative instincts and values. And so the discussion about potential rivals revolved around candidates who might appeal to those voters - Mark Warner, the former Governor of Virginia, John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina. Instead, Senator Obama became her main rival and outflanked her on the Left and outranked her among the progressives. So with barely a change of step, she pivoted and turned herself into the candidate of the hardworking ordinary Americans.

Now, there is much talk that if Mrs Clinton cannot be president she must be Mr Obama's vice-presidential nominee. But in her most recent speeches and actions she has surely demonstrated how dangerously unfit she would be. It would not be sexism or chauvinism but the clear-headed decision of a wise statesman, if Senator Obama brought this particular woman's presidential hopes to an unmourned end.

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