His byline article today, in which he also interviews several of my most esteemed colleagues and fondest friends-with whom I don't necesarily agree on this issue--is no exception.

Feminists sharply divided between Clinton, Obama

By DAVID CRARY – 1 hour ago

NEW YORK (AP) — No constituency is more eager to see a woman win the presidency than America's feminists, yet — despite Hillary Rodham Clinton's historic candidacy — the women's movement finds itself wrenchingly divided over the Democratic race as it heads toward the finish.

At breakfast forums, in op-ed columns, across the blogosphere, the debate has been heartfelt and sometimes bitter. Are the activist women supporting front-runner Barack Obama betraying their gender? Are Clinton's feminist backers mired in an outdated, women's-liberation mind-set?

 Read the rest of the article here... and tell me a) what you think and b) so what you think women ought to do, not about this disagreement necessarily but about using our voting power?

LALF: What about your girlfriend?
(I didn’t have to ask her who she meant.)

Me: It’s highly unlikely she’ll prevail at this point, but she ought to stay in the race through the rest of the primaries. Let the process run its course. Then the winner can win with honor and the loser can lose with honor and they can join hands with dignity to go defeat John McCain in November.  I hope on the same ticket, but even if not, they’ll work together.

LALF: But that’s not what people are saying out here. They’re all screaming for Hillary to quit.
Me: They wouldn’t stop a football game in the last quarter just because their team was winning. Why would they want to stop the presidential primary before the last states have voted?

LALF: Everybody says she should get out now. And you know how we used to love Bill…

                                                                   Who are these women? Read on....

Sometimes when you win, you lose.

 
That’s the lesson of the Indiana primary.

What is winning? In the latest polls, Hillary is besting John McCain by more than Barack Obama in a general election hypothetical matchup.

Nevertheless, it's a start at righting a serious wrong. Here's what Rudin said: 

This article from the media watchdog organization Media Matters is such a well documented analysis of the media's current push for Hillary Clinton to exit the race for president that I wanted to share it in full. Regardless of which candidate you support, you can't help but be aghast by how the echo chamber reverberates through and by the political media. The piece lays bare the process by which a narrative gets floated, then picked up widely from the New York Times to the local radio talk show, then beaten like a drum until it fills all the airwaves and leaves no room for a different point of view.  And in this case, the narrative has a distinctly sexist tinge; all the better that a man, Eric Boehlert, wrote it. So no one can say the author is just  being paranoid. Read on...

So now the press tells candidates when to quit?

History continues to unfold on many levels as the protracted Democratic Party primary race marches on, featuring the first woman and the first African-American with a real shot at winning the White House.

Here's another first: the press's unique push to get a competitive White House hopeful to drop out of the race.

Today, we have a much more transparent, much more participatory, much more democratic-with-a-small-d process.
The superdelegates are the closest thing the party has to the backroom now. Clearly, if they continue their trend to supporting Obama, then Clinton is sunk even though she won Pennsylvania.  Quite likely they’ll ultimately go with whoever they perceive as a winner. Yesterday it was Obama. Tomorrow it could be Clinton, for three reasons.
The race goes on

First, Hillary Clinton has shown that she—she—the pronoun is important here—is tough, resilient, focused, and able to stand all the heat the kitchen can produce. Whatever the ultimate outcome of this race, no one can say women aren’t able to hold up through the hard knuckle political contact sport.  She won by that vaunted double digit in Pennsylvania despite being outspent three to one. She hung in there despite being badgered mercilessly to drop out, despite despicable gender-biased media, despite her husband's foot-in-mouth disease. Even the arch-conservative

Cindy McCain was probably clueless that an intern on her pugnacious war hero husband’s campaign staff had rifled through recipes published on the Food Channel’s website and presented several as Cindy’s own on Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign website.

Dubbed “farfallegate” in honor of the recipe combining farfalle pasta with turkey sausage (of course in today’s health conscious world, a low cholesterol recipe gets extra points), mushrooms, and peas that busted Mrs. McCain

Today, we also live in times that will define us as a nation. Watching John Adams spar with his nemesis, the calculating and complex Renaissance man Thomas Jefferson, it struck me that while technology has changed a great deal, critical elements of political leadership have changed little if at all. Nor have the challenges of cobbling together an electoral majority in our cantankerously diverse country become any easier.

This video look at the courage it takes to compete in a presidential election was sent to me by a reader of Heartfeldt Politics, KD. She or he noted the importance of this historic moment, and I thought it worth sharing.

Joan has plunged her creative hands into a key mobilizing issue of the day, building a more family-friendly America in the workplace and public policy. Fresh from getting the New Jersey legislature to pass a paid sick leave measure, she brought me up to  date on the organization she started in 2006 in response to her own experiences as a mom in the workplace.

MomsRising has over 140,000 citizen members already and is aiming for 1,000,000 to participate in their citizen advocacy agenda. Over 85 national and state organizations have aligned with MomsRising to create a coalition that works at the state and national levels to bringing motherhood and family issues to the forefront of the country's awareness so they can advance workplace policies such as