When I was in law school, a couple of centuries ago, there was a rebirth of feminism, a movement grounded in unarguable fundamental human principles and driven in equal measure by smarts and determination. At the time, less than ten percent of the student body were women, a ludicrous state of affairs brought home to me in stark fashion on a regular basis in a course entitled “Women and the Law.”

It wasn’t the legal part which interested me, and you can interpret that any way you want to. I don’t think I opened my mouth once in all of those classes, which was wise considering that I didn’t know shit about either the law or women, and it was pretty much impossible to listen to the personal stories of my classmates, all of whom were female, without sharing their outrage and their tears.

I read anthologies, including the terrific “Sisterhood Is Powerful.” I harangued my male friends, ruining more than a few social occasions by trying to snap people’s heads off. I looked forward to the day when women would have the same shot at political power then routinely afforded to mostly rich, white, men. Partly this was ideological: it was difficult to imagine women fucking things up as badly as men.

That was before I ever heard of Condoleezza Rice.

It turns out that unless the culture is prepared to evolve in a more feminine direction, the price of political success for women will continue to be the adoption of some of the worst characteristics commonly assigned to men, including an eagerness to brawl and a willingness to inflict enormous damage. There have been a few notable exceptions, such as Pat Schroeder of Colorado, and Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey in Northern California, but too often we’ve had to settle for Diane Feinstein, who will vote for war and weaponry until it engulfs the planet entirely.

I have sympathy for Hillary Clinton. I don’t like her and hope to God I don’t have to vote for her, but I’m feeling sad right now because she’s turned herself into Hubert Humphrey and sold herself down the river for a chance at the presidency.

Because she is the first woman to have a realistic shot at the presidency, she evidently decided that on matters of international dispute she’d better waive her dick around just like Bush and his boys or be thought “too weak.”

Please don’t tell me, Hillary, that after all those years of experience you like to talk about, at the highest circles of power, you really believed George Bush when he lied the nation into war. Don’t tell me you voted to authorize America to launch a first-strike attack against a nation which was neither harming nor threatening us because George Bush promised to only do it if he had to. Don’t tell me that.

There was a brilliant editorial in Buzzflash.com today, which asked:

“How many of the Clinton “cannot be criticized” readers (or ex-readers) who have written us would vote in favor of allowing the military to use cluster bombs in civilian areas? Very few, but Hillary Clinton did; Barack Obama voted against it.

“How many of our readers would support a welfare bill that would cut women and their needy children off of government support money if they didn’t find work in an economy that is increasingly bereft of decent paying jobs? Few of our readers would, but Hillary did.

“How many of our readers would have voted for the Iraq War authorization, when we all knew it was the enabling legislation Bush needed to go to War with Iraq? We would have voted against it; but Hillary Clinton voted for it, and then claims that she was, essentially, “duped.” Okay, we weren’t duped; you weren’t duped. But the person who touts her “experience” claims she was.

“There’s a point when support of a political candidate because the candidate is a symbol – in this case of a woman triumphing to become president – compromises so much to reach that goal that the victory would be hollow. Is it advancing feminist principles of peace, care for women and children, and decent jobs for women when the candidate one supports has severely compromised herself on all these issues? We’ll let you answer that.”

I want to believe that Hillary Clinton is better than that. But I don’t believe we’ll ever know. She’s not going to win the presidency. Maybe the Democratic Party’s semi-hack leadership can still engineer her nomination if she can squeak by in Ohio and Texas a week from Tuesday, but she can’t beat McCain, and that’s really, just unutterably sad.

She can’t beat McCain for three reasons, two of them fairly obvious: she is so corrupted by her own record that she has no issues to use against him, and she is so rabidly hated by a large number of really twisted ‘conservatives’ that she will be ‘swift-boated’ into infinity. The web is already awash in scurrilous garbage about her; it will only get worse. There is another reason, though, and it’s the strongest: she’s not real, and people can tell.

I’ve watched her now in a couple of ‘debates’ and while I don’t hold against her the little prevarications and evasions – that’s normal for pols – I think it’s clear that her entire persona is in a kind of living hell. She is brittle. Her speech is strident. Her smile appears to be forced and false, and it is there even when there is no earthly reason for it. Her eyes dart, as though an inner program is trying to sort out the audience from the camera. She has lost all gentleness. Even when she speaks well of Obama, as she did at the end of the appearance in Austin last week, it’s pure calculation and without sincerity.

I know it reads as though I have no sympathy for Hillary Clinton, but I don’t think that’s so. She’s been carrying a heavy load for a long time. Any woman aspiring to high public office has to deal with not only public attitudes toward women but also with mostly male, often macho schmucks who already run the place. In politics, it’s supposed to be dangerous to be too genuine, and the danger is multiplied if your gender is in the minority.

So I get it that she figured, whatever her real beliefs, she’d better not look weak on things like war and munitions. I get it because pols think that way, the rationalization that you can’t do all the wondrous things you want to do for the people unless you screw the people a few times along the way for the sake of your campaign contributors.

The look of panic in Hillary’s eyes may be the recognition that she has completely trapped herself. She has nothing to use against Barack Obama and so has taken to misrepresenting his health care proposal and launching pathetic claims that he’s “plagiarized” a couple of lines formerly used by his own campaign co-chairman, when the plain fact is that while Obama’s two books were actually written by him, Clinton’s were ghostwritten, and, anyway, authenticity may not be her best issue.

I do not want a President who is afraid. Presidents who are afraid do really terrible things. Maybe you think all presidents do terrible things, but I’d argue that it’s not so and if it is there are degrees of terrible. John McCain, for instance, is so overtly insane that Hillary looks like Joan Baez. But anyhow I don’t want to spend the campaign debating whose candidate is a bigger whore.

I don’t know what it’s going to take for the egalitarian society I once thought was just over the horizon to finally arrive, but we’re not close to it. And the success of Hillary Clinton in the political arena is not a feminist victory. Most women in America are still treated as inferior to men. You don’t think so? Why, because Meg Whitman got to be C.E.O. at eBay? Because Boxer’s in the Senate?

Women in the United States get paid about 60 cents for every dollar men get paid, which is almost exactly what it was forty years ago. The feminist movement, when it is mentioned at all, is trivialized with references to “bra-burning.” The Equal Rights Amendment was never passed.

I’m from the sixties. I’m aware of the existence and ‘celebrity’ of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, and it makes me want to rend my own flesh at this final, utter debasement of the human spirit and its possibilities, at what we’ve become. Except for this:

Maybe it’s not over. See, there’s this guy from Illinois. I know, I know, don’t yell at me. He could be a fake. He could catch a few bullets in a hotel kitchen. Anything. It might be that a lot of people are desperate not only for a change in administrations but for a change in the world. Okay, in that case Barack Obama’s just handy for the millions who were looking for someone. As he says, we are the people we’ve been waiting for.

A lot of truth in that.