The witch ain't dead, and Chris Matthews is a ding-dong

For many of these pundits, especially those who pander to a mostly white male audience, a nearly pornographic investment in Clinton's demise is nothing new. Matthews made his career as a pundit in that heady era of Clinton-bashing, the 1990s. That Hillary Clinton's political career might not have only survived his wrath but grown more fulsome on it seems to have incited him further, and Matthews has shown hyperactive zeal in his hatred for her. That leads him, often, to imagine Clinton strategy and imaginatively discredit it before it unfolds, or to offer helpful Clinton-beating tips to her opponents. Eight years ago, when Utah financial advisor Howard Ruff began taking donations to bring down Hillary -- who was not yet even a senator -- he appeared on "Hardball," where he explained to Matthews that in a battle against Hillary's nascent political power, "It's a lot easier to kill a 12-inch snake than a 12-foot cobra." Matthews helped him sharpen his weaponry: "You want to destroy the missile in its silo, which makes sense to me." The night after Iowa, Matthews went from asking Elizabeth Edwards, "Do you think your husband has a better chance of winning the nomination if you first knock Hillary out of the race?" to coaching her, "Even if Barack has to win up here [in New Hampshire], it's better to knock Hillary out because if she is knocked out, then you two can fight it out, John Edwards and Barack Obama."

But if the cable talking heads have a longtime commitment to taking down Hillary, their premature party throwing after Iowa was downright infectious. So cooked was Clinton's goose that she became not just the loser of the week but someone of so little consequence that it was all right -- a hoot even! -- for the Washington Post's Dana Milbank to head to New Hampshire and make a droll little video about just how deadly dull her rallies were. Apparently, she answered voters' questions for over an hour! Milbank's video showed audience members yawning, then trickling out.

It's not that the eagerness to dispose of Clinton was motivated purely by the fact that she was a woman. It was also inextricably linked to an excitement about Obama's use of the magic word "change." It was connected to the enthusiasm for Obama, period. It was the fact that the Clinton team behaves as if it is above needing the press, which in turn becomes reciprocally eager to chomp the hand that refuses to feed it. It was because Bill Clinton's old black magic had expired, because Hillary looks like a boring Al Gore-style wonk next to the charismatic dynamism of her most serious opponent.

But underneath it all ran an unmistakable vibe, the loosening of a clenched resentment that it was a chick who had dared be confident about her ability to win, who had exercised infuriating control over the press, who had exerted uncomfortable and unrelenting dominion over her male competitors. When Clinton lost her grip, ever so slightly, over that dominion, there was a release of rip-roaring, rollicking fun at her expense.

She was, after all that inevitability, just a girl. A nerdy girl at that, and an ugly, hysterical one, the tabloids showed us, with freeze-framed images of her caught making unflattering faces. The words thrown around about her fizzed with ill-disguised misogynistic energy: In her presumptive defeat, Clinton suddenly was shrill, panicked, desperate, emotional. On ABC's blog, Jake Tapper wrote of her New Hampshire debate performance that while "bickering" with Obama about health insurance, Clinton "... well ... she got angry." Tapper didn't see her as mad "about an issue, so much, as about the fact that Obama is beating her ... Pundits will say that her tone made male voters recoil. And led some female voters to sneer." This was femininity on the edge -- the winner losing, and losing her marbles.

Then, of course, she cried. Or, more precisely, allowed her voice to crack and her eyes to well up. How much girlier can you get? Here were just some of the congested headlines: "Clinton Fights Back Tears," "Clinton Gets Emotional," "Hillary Gets Leaky."

Such joy was there at Clinton's devolving journey from the front of the pack back to the primordial stew of high-strung, overwrought femininity that even her opponent John Edwards, a man who built his candidacy in part with the support of progressive women, felt free to get in on the fun, reacting to Clinton's show of feeling by telling reporters that a president needs to demonstrate "strength and resolve."

The five days between Iowa and New Hampshire were discombobulating for anyone who had begun to get comfortable with the apparent ease with which American history had weirdly, smoothly made room for a female candidate. A woman had led the Democratic nominees for nearly a year with barely a whisper -- save for the occasional unflattering wrinkled photo -- of serious double-standard resistance from a nation that has yet to break its streak of white Christian guys sitting behind the Oval Office desk. It had all been so deceptively easy. But here were the buttoned-up white boys over at "Meet the Press" going all "Lord of the Flies" on her. Cintra Wilson called the spectacle "a little witch-burny," while Time's Michael Scherer blogged about a call he'd received from a conservative pundit who told him, "The witch is dead, and life is going to change." The pundits, Clinton's opponents, her colleagues -- they were making sport of Hillary's immolation. They were rolling in it. Exulting in it. It reeked of a particular kind of relief, relief from the guys who had thought they were going to have to hold their noses and get pushed around by some dame. They were behaving like men who had received a sudden and unexpected reprieve, and classily reacted by pulling down their pants and peeing on her.

And then ... people began to notice. In my circle, mothers in particular began to notice. My friends and colleagues told me of their despondent moms. Even my own, whose politics list far to the left of Clinton's, bowled me over by expressing her sadness about the treatment Hillary received. I think she was surprised herself as she confessed that she was "sad" about Iowa. "Whether or not it's Hillary," she said, "I just think this shows that any woman who's going to be aggressive enough to make a go of it is going to be too aggressive to be likable."

Next page: Brokaw seemed to relish his opportunity to spank Matthews