KEY POINTS:
Here it comes. One week from now Hillary Clinton will be toast and much of America will spout gluten-intolerance.
Already the post-mortems are mortifying. She had one too many cajones. It was her voice, her cackle, her scarves, her cleavage-o-meter - or as Mike Barnicle of MSNBC put
it so eloquently, Clinton "look[ed] like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court".
Just when she's rounding the final gruelling lap, there it is in full pulchritude - the gender card. Hillary Clinton told the Washington Post the media's sexism has been "deeply offensive to millions of women", and criticised the "incredible vitriol" she received from "misogynists", clearly ranking the world's bads in a pecking order that puts her waa-ay at the back of the bus.
She said, "Every poll I've seen shows more people would be reluctant to vote for a woman [than] to vote for an African American, which rarely gets reported on either.
"The manifestation of some of the sexism that has gone on in this campaign is somehow more respectable or at least more accepted."
She's right. Inspiring presidential primary moments include a Republican group, "Citizens United Not Timid", T-shirts with slogans like, "Bros before Hos", and my favourite, the Hillary nutcracker with stainless steel pants-suited thighs that, you know - breaks nuts.
I loved it all. The only thing that stopped me from ordering the Hillary nutcracker was that I would have needed a twin Helen Clark one so they could play together in my little dollhouse-sized political-chick dominatrix torture chamber.
Which begs the question, how realistic would a tiny plastic John Key look in stainless steel serrated thighs?
Okay, it's not pretty. But there are two sides to this sword. Former vice-presidential candidate and Clinton supporter Geraldine Ferraro complained, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman [of any colour] he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is."
She couldn't realistically expect women to shout amen from a former candidate who also said, "In 1984, if my name was Gerald instead of Geraldine, I would never have been picked as the vice-presidential candidate."
The reality is that one man's brakes are another woman's foot to the floor. If John Edwards had been the last man standing, women could more graciously foam at the mouth at what has gone down, but you had two candidates who had matching misdemeanours of race and sex.
The playing field hardly got ugly in comparison to what awaits when John McCain steps up to bat, especially if Karl Rove moves back to play for his old side.
Today the real twisted sign of progress is that even political sexism has its uses. When someone shouted, "Iron my shirt!" at a New Hampshire rally, a couple of hundred thousand more fair-minded men and women ticked her name on their ballots.
She may be losing by a nose, but she's doing it with style - fighting, kicking, maybe even onward to Denver. Start to pull the gender card now and you insult the millions of men and women who voted for a candidate, not a testosterone meter.
Clinton has earned her history-making reverence, but not because she was the first real viable woman to run for the presidency.
The real history-making part is that she did not lose because she is a woman. She will lose because not enough people wanted this particular woman. If you want to put your finger on the moment when Clinton first began to lose, it was probably in some diner in Iowa when a bunch of corn-fed, white, conservative farmers, men and women, decided they'd rather vote for a skinny young black guy who came out of nowhere - representing something entirely new - than another Clinton White House they'd already lived with for almost a decade. She could never have changed that.
She's been brilliant - if not nauseating to some - at morphing into Nascar Hillary-Get-Your-Gun when she needed to woo back those same working-class voters, but she ignored something. She couldn't reinvent her name, her best asset and worst deficit. No one really wanted to turn back the clock and get a two-fer replay of Billary again.
The great irony of this race is that the first formidable woman to run for the presidency represented the old guard. Brand Hillary was so busy selling us experience, there's something she forgot; in today's demoralised America, "change you can believe in" isn't a slogan, it's a prayer.
