Gloria Steinem's op-ed in this morning's NYT has been troubling me today, and I think I know why.

The basic assumption of the piece is that Hillary Clinton is on the precipice of losing the Democratic nomination because she's a woman. Certainly, Clinton's gender has made navigating the campaign a little trickier -- the slightest hint of any kind of emotion has been magnified in ways I think wouldn't be applicable to a male candidate.

At the home page, we've got up a few articles about how Barack Obama's race factors into the campaign. It comes on the heels of several op-eds (which you can find by following the link above) -- Anne Applebaum suggesting his race helps make a clean break with the Clinton-Bush cycle of dynastic succession, and