Barack Obama "is trying to turn years of feminist thinking on its head and argue that the best candidate for women may, in fact, be a man."

Robin Toner effuses on the front page of today's NYT. Never mind that John Edwards played exactly that theme a couple months ago. Obama is the one designated for Timesglow.

It's Sunday, so pour it on:

The pitch for Mr. Obama, in a new video, speeches and talking points aimed at women, presents him as deeply sensitized to the needs and aspirations of women, raised by a single mother, “a man comfortable with strong women in his life,” as his wife, Michelle Obama, puts it, and a man committed to the issues they care about.

In other words, he's pandering in utterly banal terms that apply just as well to most of the other candidates.

The breakthrough nature of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential candidacy has a powerful appeal for many women...

Count me out. I think she's popular with women because they adore her husband — who's deeply sensitized to the needs and aspirations of women blah blah blah — and she's what she is because of him.

But even as [Obama] pursues a first of his own — a black president — Mr. Obama, like the rest of the field, has little choice but to compete for women’s votes; 54 percent of Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa four years ago were women, as were 54 percent of Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire.

Around the country, but especially in the early voting states, many of these women are engaged in a complicated conversation, with a hunger to make history often pushing them in one direction while more conventional considerations, like a candidate’s stand on the war in Iraq, pushing them in another.

Can someone please verify that the support for Hillary represents "a hunger to make history"? I don't believe it... unless the "history" in question is: first President to make an end run around the 22nd Amendment.

Eventually, the Times around to John Edwards:

The gender factor is rarely addressed head-on by Mrs. Clinton’s rivals.

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of former Senator John Edwards, was a notable exception when she told Salon.com last summer that Mrs. Clinton was “just not as vocal a woman’s advocate as I want to see” and relied too much on her sex as a rationale for her candidacy. But in less-noticed, more subtle ways, rival campaigns are advancing the argument that it is acceptable for a woman, even a feminist, to back someone other than the woman.

So Barack Obama is “a man comfortable with strong women in his life,” but Elizabeth Edwards represents her husband's failure to take the gender issue head on? Come on, that was way down in the article. You weren't supposed to perceive an inconsistency or even to read that far. Edwards is not designated for Timesglow.