Hillary sets a new low.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side - Hillary Rodham Clinton - Column

In a recent op-ed for The New York Times , Susan Faludi rejoiced over Hillary Clinton's destruction of the myth of female prissiness and innate moral superiority, hailing Clinton's "no-holds-barred pugnacity" and her media reputation as "nasty" and "ruthless." Future female Presidential candidates will owe a lot to the race of 2008, Faludi wrote, "when Hillary Clinton broke through the glass floor and got down with the boys."

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I share Faludi's glee--up to a point. Surely no one will ever dare argue again that women lack the temperament for political combat. But by running a racially tinged campaign, lying about her foreign policy experience, and repeatedly seeming to favor McCain over her Democratic opponent, Clinton didn't just break through the "glass floor," she set a new low for floors in general, and would, if she could have got within arm's reach, have rubbed the broken glass into Obama's face.

A mere decade ago, Francis Fukuyama fretted in Foreign Affairs that the world was too dangerous for the West to be entrusted to graying female leaders, whose aversion to violence was, as he established with numerous examples from chimpanzee society, "rooted in biology." The counterexample of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the first head of state to start a war for the sole purpose of pumping up her approval ratings, led him to concede that "biology is not destiny." But it was still a good reason to vote for a prehistoric-style club-wielding male.

Not to worry though, Francis. Far from being the stereotypical feminist-pacifist of your imagination, the woman to get closest to the Oval Office has promised to "obliterate" the toddlers of Tehran--along, of course, with the bomb-builders and Hezbollah supporters. Earlier on, Clinton forswore even talking to presumptive bad guys, although women are supposed to be the talk addicts of the species. Watch out--was her distinctly unladylike message to Hugo Chávez, Kim Jong-Il, and the rest of them--or I'll rip you a new one.

There's a reason why it's been so easy for men to overlook women's capacity for aggression. As every student of Women's Studies 101 knows, what's called aggression in men is usually trivialized as "bitchiness" in women: Men get angry; women suffer from bouts of inexplicable, hormonally driven hostility. So give Clinton credit for defying the belittling stereotype: She's been visibly angry for months, if not decades, and it can't all have been PMS.

But did we...