Salon: Why I'm Still Not For Hillary Clinton

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Then her record enters my consciousness: her votes on Iraq, the Patriot Act and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. ..... But her approach to Iraq leads me to think she would more quickly and inappropriately use military power than other Democrats, and that is impossible to ignore.

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Now, I've never been a centrist Democrat and everything I have seen of Clintonism and the Democratic Leadership Council confirms that women are far down their priority lists. But there must be some small space in the political world in which women are important. It is also not to say that Clinton doesn't care about women -- of course she does, and she has supported and will support many policies that improve women's health, employment and education. Perhaps one hears so little of that commitment on the campaign trail because it is assumed that the woman candidate does not have to talk about those issues. But whatever the reason, there is no evidence that Clinton's feminist history currently influences her thinking about women, or that it is any further advanced than Obama's and Edwards' thinking.

The sad fact is that Clinton has felt compelled to run as a stereotypical male. In her own mind it is only a certain kind of man who is qualified to be president and she will be that man: tough on everything from war, flag burning, kids' access to video games, illegal immigrants and Palestinians. She has missed the opportunity to talk about what it really means for women to be equal in this country. She has shown no interest in using her extensive international experience to push for more women in party leadership, state legislatures and even the Senate. A woman candidate who considered her gender a strength (as opposed to something she needed to overcome) would announce a series of measures specifically designed to ensure that women's needs and rights were at the forefront of her agenda.

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I do not want a feminism that is part of the status quo, and so I do not want the first woman president to be a Clintonian. Every time Hillary Clinton puts on the mantle of the Bill Clinton presidency and reminds us of how important it is to be practical and work with the other side to get things done, I think of every cowardly practical choice that Bill Clinton (or should I say the Clintons together) made. The "don't ask, don't tell" sellout of gays in the military; the abandonment of Lani Guinier; a failed healthcare reform package that would have sacrificed women's reproductive health to the Catholic Church's demands as moral arbiter; a welfare reform bill that actually hurt poor women and their families; and presidential approval of a permanent ban on Medicaid funds for poor women seeking abortions.

The women's movement, along with other progressive movements, did little to challenge the Clinton administration to live up to its campaign promises. And now it seems that the longtime women's movement is falling into the same trap over Hillary Clinton's candidacy. Just read the feckless and stale defense of Clinton's record on the war posted on the National Organization for Women's Web site to get a sense of how willing some in the feminist establishment are to defend any woman, regardless of her track record.

But some women aren't buying it. We'd like to see a woman president, but more than anything we want to be able to say at the end of the first woman's tenure in the highest political office that it really mattered. That the first woman president did things no man would have done, that feminist values were at the core of her decisions -- and that the country was on the road to further transformation.