Let's give Geraldine Ferraro credit: When she went out stomping across the thin ice of identity politics, she did it with as much braggadocio and gracelessness as any man ever could. Who ever said second-wave feminism was a waste of time?

The day Ms. Ferraro transfigured herself from Gloria Steinem to Homer Simpson in one unswell soundbite was of course Feb. 28, when she famously proclaimed in an interview with the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Ca., "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," in reference to Barack Obama's ongoing front-runner status in the Democratic presidential nominating race over Hillary Clinton, for whom Ferraro was serving at the time as a campaign fundraiser.

After the March 7 publication of her interview set off a media feeding frenzy over the racist implications of Ferraro's oafish assertion, the former Congresswoman from New York and 1984 Democratic candidate for Vice President wasted no time dropping the other foot into her mouth by saying, publicly once again, "Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?"

Well, if "that" refers to Ferraro's feminist credibility, it's certainly not what it used to be. In 1984, Ferraro was considered a key standard-bearer for second-wave feminism, having risen through the ranks of a profoundly estrogen-impoverished US Congress to join Walter Mondale on that year's Democratic Party ticket. Twenty-four long years and several American racial crises later, for such an erstwhile feminist figurehead to show such stunning ignorance about the ultimately unilateral nature of systemic oppression in America is truly a case of modern political pathos. Indeed, as more savvy scholars of the subject would likely explain, the idea of a "racism" in which people of color are systemically oppressing white people is as absurd as the idea of a "sexism" in which women are systemically oppressing men. And if we understand Ferraro as having spoken as a surrogate for Hillary Clinton, the implications for Clinton's own understanding of systemic oppression in all its forms should be deeply troubling for both feminists and anti-racist activists.

Ferraro's fateful case of foot-in-mouth disease was telling in more ways than the racially obvious. While Clinton officially disassociated herself from the relevant remarks, and Ferraro promptly fell on her sword for Clinton by resigning, many have interpreted the episode as part and parcel of an overall Clinton campaign strategy aimed at cutting down Obama, if you'll pardon another racially-coded expression, by any means necessary--not exactly congruent with the nurturing and inclusive politics that feminism once promised to bring to American government.

All of which explains why an increasing number of prominent second-wave feminists have refused to support Clinton's White House aspirations, even though her defeat would mean another four or more years of the feminist dream deferred. Key among these, and early on, was the late, great muckraker Molly Ivins, a second-wave standard-bearer who never disappointed the movement or her audience. In a much-cited newspaper column published back in January 2006, Ivins proclaimed, "I'd like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president." While her reasons back then, when a Hillary candidacy was still mere speculation, had more to do with Clinton's spinelessness with respect to the Iraq debacle than her feminist credentials, one must wonder whether Ivins today would be appalled at the Rovian extremes to which the erstwhile Ms. Rodham has now resorted in her pursuit of her Wellesleyan White House dreams.

The gender-based support that Clinton maintains among women, despite her tenuous connection to the feminist ideals of her generation, is arguably the latest case of how identity politics can lead otherwise sensible progressives to make decisions that ultimately go against their deeper interests, blinded by the superficialities of race, gender and/or class identity. A sterling critique of such political dysfunction comes from none other than Naomi Klein, a current standard-bearer for feminism's third wave. In the now-classic No Logo, Ms. Klein offered a daring, if nuanced, critique of how identity politics, as she experienced it as a traditional undergraduate in the early 1990s, proved to be as much a pitfall as a worthy cause for young campus activists to embrace. Klein argued that identity politics inadvertently served as a distraction from the metastasis of globalized corporate power which was then emerging and would soon manifest itself in the form of NAFTA, GATT and the WTO--all while campus leftists fought, often amongst themselves, over issues of identity and representation.

"Over time," according to Klein's analysis in No Logo, "campus identity politics became so consumed by personal politics that they all but eclipsed the rest of the world." And so, as "diversity" slowly became co-opted as a marketing strategy by corporate interests, "identity politics weren't fighting the system, or even subverting it. When it came to the vast new industry of corporate branding, they were feeding it."

"In this new globalized context," Klein wrote just before the Battle in Seattle, "the victories of identity politics have amounted to a rearranging of the furniture while the house burned down."

The current debates over race and gender that have surrounded the first US presidential race to feature serious black and female contenders are lately looking all too much like the early 1990s atmosphere portrayed so deftly in the year 2000 by Naomi Klein, especially with respect to the legacy of second-wave feminism and the question of whether this year's candidate Clinton will faithfully represent that legacy, or ultimately betray it. From this writer's admittedly white male perspective, despite the apparent delusions of many of her woman supporters, all sober signs indicate that the presidency of Hillary Rodham Clinton, rather than amounting to the final fruition of American feminism, will more likely amount to four more years of militarism, fear-mongering, free-market fundamentalism and American exceptionalism--in other words, patriarchy in drag.

The shadow of the 1990s hangs over this year's presidential race, and its subtext of feminism's deferred dreams, in one more crucial respect. Lest we forget, where even the blatant conservatives Reagan and Bush 41 were unable to destroy "welfare as we know it," that beast was finally slain by none other than the allegedly liberal President William Jefferson Clinton. Given that history, for feminist voters both female and male in 2008, one crucial, if audacious, question emerges: How much are we willing to bet that Roe v. Wade won't be overturned on the watch of President Hillary Rodham Clinton? In other words, will she betray the women's liberation movement as badly as she's already betrayed the antiwar movement?