There’s no crying in politics? Why not?

Hillary Clinton cannot win for losing. It is becoming increasingly clear that the New York senator is being held to a different standard than every other candidate in the race.

Consider yesterday’s mini-firestorm:

Everything is on the table inside Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign if she loses the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, her advisers say — including her style of campaigning, which shifted dramatically on Monday when Mrs. Clinton bared her thoughts about the race’s impact on her personally, and her eyes welled with tears.

“I couldn’t do it if I just didn’t passionately believe it was the right thing to do,” she said here in reply to a question from an undecided voter, a woman roughly Mrs. Clinton’s age.

Her eyes visibly wet, in perhaps the most public display of emotion of her year-old campaign, Mrs. Clinton added: “I have so many opportunities from this country, I just don’t want to see us fall backwards. This is very personal for me — it’s not just political, it’s not just public.”

Mrs. Clinton did not cry, but her quavering voice and the flash of feeling underscored the pressure, fatigue, anger and disappointment that, advisers say, Mrs. Clinton has experienced since her loss on Thursday in the Iowa caucuses and that she continues to shoulder at this most critical moment.

The Times is playing this pretty straight — but that hasn’t stopped those tears from becoming an issue. And that’s the problem. The array of opinions — to get a sense of what everyone is saying, go to the Times’ The Caucus blog — offers a pretty stark reminder of the biases Clinton faces these days. She has been criticized both for being emotional (read this as code for “weak woman”) and for not being sincere in her emotions (which plays into the stereotype of her as cold and calculating — another in a long line of misogynistic stereotypes used to damage strong women) — sort of a “damed if you do, damned if you don’t” critique.

I’m no fan of the New York senator. She is too much of a centrist for my taste and far too much like her husband: a Democratic triangulator.

But the controversy over her tears seems contrived and a distraction.

Of more significance, I think, maybe the responses from her chief Democratic rivals.

From Barack Obama:

As Mr. Obama stopped briefly for a cup of hot tea in New London, N.H., he was asked about the video image of Mrs. Clinton.

“I didn’t see what happened. I don’t know the context of it,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “I know that this process is a grind, so that’s not something I would care to comment on.”

From John Edwards:

John Edwards was asked for his reaction to Mrs. Clinton’s emotional display at a news conference on Monday.

“I don’t really have anything to say about that,” he said, but then continued, “I think what we need in a commander in chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are tough business, but being president of the United States is also very tough business. And the president of the United States is faced with very, very difficult challenges every single day and difficult judgments every single day. What I know is that I’m prepared for that.”

Edwards comes off looking pretty sexist, as Katha Pollitt points out in her blog at TheNation.com:

Today he deployed against Hillary the oldest, dumbest canard about women: they’re too emotional to hold power.

She adds

Ooh, right,we need a big strong manly finger on that nuclear button! Even if that finger has spent most it its life writing personal injury briefs in North Carolina, which, when you come to think of it, is not an obvious preparation for commander-in-chiefhood.

“When people say they don’t want anyone’s finger on the button who cries, I say I don’t want anyone’s finger there who doesn’t cry,” Pat Schroeder told me when we spoke by phone this afternoon. “Tears show someone is a human being.” Schroeder ought to know. In 1987 she was viciously attacked for shedding a few tears while announcing her withdrawal from the presidential race. “Ronald Reagan used to tear up all the time,” she said. ” when John Sununu left the New Hampshire governorship to run Reagan’s campaign he was crying so hard he couldn’t finish his speech. Bush recently teared up. Dozens of male politicians cry. But when a man cries, he’s applauded for having feelings. when a woman cries, she attacked as being weak.”

Edwards backtracked some this morning, saying he wasn’t criticizing Clinton. I’ll let others judge.

In any case, Edwards did come off better than Rudy Giuliani, who opted to use this silliness to once again remind us that he is running for president of 9/11.

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