Not emotional enough

Ruth Marcus:

More important than helping candidates figure out how to talk about gender, Clinton's candidacy has dispensed with damaging myths about women's capacity to compete in presidential politics. Not tough enough? If anything, Clinton came off as too tough. Too emotional? Clinton teared up in New Hampshire -- and, confounding male pundits, this display of vulnerability helped her win. Too fluffy? Clinton, perhaps to her detriment, out-wonked the competition.

Me, May 7, 2006:

In person, Clinton is one of the warmest politicians I've ever met, but her advisers have stripped what personality she has, hiding it from the public. Some of that may be a product of her team's legendary paranoia, somewhat understandable given the knives out for her. But what remains is a heartless, passionless machine [...]

So no, this "male pundit" was not surprised when a little glimpse into her real personality was well received by voters.

We've learned in recent months that it was Penn who decided to strip that personality from Clinton. When it accidentally poked through in New Hampshire, people loved it. And then she went back to being the same heartless, passionless machine -- yet another mistake in a long line of mistakes.

It was an ironic fear of sexism that simply (and maybe surprisingly) didn't materialize. Rather than let Hillary be Hillary, and risk looking too much like a woman (i.e. "weak" and "emotional"), they stripped her of the very qualities that may have very well clinched her the nomination. In fact, Team Clinton overcompensated in the other direction -- the imperative that likely decided not just her disastrous Iraq War vote, and not just her refusal to apologize for it, but also her inexplicably stupid Iran vote.

At a time when Obama mocks McCain's foreign policy as "I won’t talk to that guy. And I won’t talk to that guy. And I won’t talk to that guy," and refreshingly looks past the Villagers' demands for a Big Penis Stick, militaristic, and aggressive "with us or against us" foreign policy, Clinton is still stuck threatening to nuke Iran and making the same old tired threats

That, right there, was probably the difference this primary election.