Lori Sturdevant: A political moment for which women have waited

Watching the good ol' reliable gender gap pop onto New Hampshire election-analysis screens Tuesday night, I recalled a revealing tale told to me a few months ago.

The story was that one longtime Republican backer of womenwinning (which at the time was called the Minnesota Women's Campaign Fund) phoned another to announce that she was organizing a Republicans for Choice rally at next September's GOP national convention in St. Paul. It was the sort of thing the two of them used to love to do 25 or 30 years ago -- back when there was something called the GOP Feminist Caucus and when Minnesota's Republican leadership had not yet alienated or exiled almost all of its backers of legal abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment.

"Can I count on your support?" Sally Pillsbury asked Marilyn Bryant.

"I'm sorry," replied Bryant, "but I'm supporting Hillary."

So is womenwinning. The still officially multipartisan state organization sends money only to candidates who are female, prochoice and viable, and this year found itself able to endorse a candidate for president for the first time.

Bryant, a womenwinning founder, explained her choice last week: "I've seen women move into the professions -- business, law, medicine -- with great success. But in politics, it's been a terribly slow process. I'd love to have the opportunity to vote for a woman for president, especially a woman who's as articulate, smart and qualified as Hillary Clinton is."

That longing among female voters -- some of them former Republicans like Bryant -- is getting much credit for Clinton's resurgent victory Tuesday.

But in New Hampshire, the big female numbers likely were also the result of Clinton's drawing power among independents and Republicans who've been hoping their whole lives to see a woman in the White House. And if that was true in the Granite State, it also could happen in the Gopher State on Feb. 5.

Iowa showed that Clinton doesn't have a lock on women's votes. She got no overall advantage from women in the Hawkeye State, where Barack Obama came out on top.

To keep women's votes coming the way they did in New Hampshire, Clinton has to make sure they see her the way Bryant does: articulate, smart, qualified, and a woman to boot -- and not the way her opponents cast her in Iowa: too calculating, cautious, controlling and connected to a certain previous administration.

Clinton emerged from New Hampshire as both the establishment and the feminist candidate. That's a complex and somewhat contradictory dual identity that no previous major presidential contender has borne. She's traversing uncharted territory.

A lot of politically ambitious women are watching her for a lesson in how to do it -- or, if she fails, how not to. Count among them three who hitched their wagons to Clinton's on Wednesday at her Minneapolis campaign headquarters (where fumes from that morning's gasoline tanker truck rollover on the nearby freeway added pungency to the political hot air).

In the wake of Clinton's New Hampshire experience, all three played it boldly Wednesday. But it was Gaertner, the only one of the three who's openly exploring a race for governor, who got the female-tilted audience cheering -- and had listeners who don't know her well shooting each other glances of impressed surprise.

"We have an opportunity to break a very important barrier," Gaertner said. "We have an opportunity with this well-qualified, strong, wonderful woman, to have the first woman president our nation has seen. And you know what? It's about time!"

For feminist elders like Bryant, it's long past time. They're asking: If not Hillary Clinton in 2008, who? And when?