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There’s a pickup truck in Tomah with a bumper sticker that reads, “Life’s a bitch, so don’t vote for one.” It’s accompanied by a photo of Hillary Clinton with a diagonal line through it.

Didn’t this dude get the message from Fox News and Dittoland? We like Hillary now; it’s the stinkin’ half-breed we despise.

Perhaps the most humorous development of Election 2008 is the sudden conservative embrace of Hillary Clinton. Conservative columnist Mark Steyn put aside normal right-wing qualms about women and minorities playing the victim card and blamed Clinton’s loss on “party and media sexism.”

“How else to explain why their gal got clobbered by a pretty boy with a resume you could print on the back of his driver's license, a Rolodex apparently limited to neosegregationist race-baiters, campus Marxist terrorists and indicted fraudsters, and a rhetorical surefootedness that makes Dan Quayle look like Socrates?”

There’s nothing like falling into second place in the Democratic delegate count to win the hearts of the political right. Remember six months ago when Hillary was too polarizing? When she was the only Democrat who could possibly lose the general election? When her only qualification was being the wife of a former president? When a Republican partisan in South Carolina asked John McCain, “How do we beat the bitch?” (McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, simply chuckled and continued to speak as if the question was in no way offensive.) Now conservatives sound like women’s studies professors (can’t wait for Steyn’s column on how sexism influences the stubborn income gap between men and women). Alas, their sudden foray into victimology is all wrong.

Sexism didn’t torpedo Hillary; issues did. Take, for example, the $3 trillion pre-emptive war in Iraq. The vast majority of Democrats believe the decision to invade Iraq was a really, really, really bad idea. As a Senator, Hillary voted for the war. As a state Senator in Illinois, Obama took a clear stand against it. In states where the war was the top issue (Wisconsin and Oregon, for example), Obama cleaned Hillary’s clock.

There’s also Hillary’s husband, whose record as president, fair or not, is linked to her campaign. As President, Bill Clinton signed a telecommunications deregulation bill that let Clear Channel gobble up 12 percent of the nation’s radio stations and a banking deregulation bill that allowed commercial and investment banks to consolidate, which contributed to the subprime mortgage crisis. He also signed the hated NAFTA free trade deal.

No wonder the activist wing of the party never embraced Hillary. Once Obama and John Edwards had their elimination match in Iowa, it was inevitable that the survivor would be a formidable, even a superior, challenger to Clinton. Besides, did a surly nation that was truly interested in turning the page really want to extend the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton presidential dynasty for four more years?

The conservative sympathy for Hillary Clinton is about as genuine as intelligence that led to the Iraq war, and the bumper sticker is a useful reminder of the taunts that awaited Hillary had she been the nominee (for some reason, I don’t believe the pickup belongs to an Obama supporter). It’s a bumper sticker from another political era when Hillary Clinton was the frontrunner and Barack Obama was every Republican’s favorite Democrat.

Then again, Obama can resurrect all that Hillary hatred by tapping her as his running mate. I can see the bumper sticker now: “Life’s a bitch. So don’t vote for one for vice-president:”

Steve Rundio is the Perspective Page Editor of Tomah Newspapers.