From IMDiversity: Race, Gender & Hillary Clinton

Starting this weekend, a couple of features on our sister-site, the Professional Women's Village at IMDiversity.com, attempt to look back at the week's hub-bub surrounding the race-gender split arising in the Democratic Presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

First, a series of Clinton-Obama analyses of from the Associated Press provide different takes on the tit-for-tat between the campaigns, and looking at how race and gender, racism and mysogyny, play into the coverage. It also looks at the impact of women voters, as well as the importance to the campaigns of parsing out that vote by generation, class, race and philosophy.

In another feature, Hispanic American Village Editor Carol Amoruso reflects on the (false?) dichotomy threatening to divide voters' loyalties in the party, in Race and Gender at Odds Again as Steinem Wades into the Clinton-Obama Fray.

On the African American Village, frequent contributor Kam Williams looks back at the N.H. results and seeks to put the focus elsewhere: on the Diebold Corporation. "For, while the punditocracy has been busy dubbing Hillary Clinton the Comeback Kid and attributing her surprise victory to women rallying to her support in the wake of her eyes welling up on camera, no one’s looking for a more plausible explanation than that overly-publicized Muskie moment.," Williams writes. Suspicious of dubious vote tallying, Williams concludes "we’re again in dire need of U.N. observers during the 2008 primary season, just to give an the democratic process a chance to unfold untainted by fraud."

Additional features will unfold, as our editors and visitors try to interpret the events in what is becoming an unhappily tense time in an otherwise historic election. One reader said that she liked Obama and Clinton "almost equally," and would support either in a general election, but "as a woman, I have to go with Clinton now."

Another wrote that she "resented having to choose" between candidates who each represented a historic political milestone she'd been "waiting for my whole life."

And, should it matter?

With a particular (but not exclusive) interest in the views of our women visitors, we ask in the Women's Village blog poll for the week: Would you lay issues aside and vote for Hillary Clinton for president for the historic precedent of having a woman in the White House?

What do you think?