According to Wikipedia, the phrase “hoist by his own petard,” coined by Shakespeare in Hamlet, means “‘to be harmed by one’s own plan to harm someone else’ or ‘to fall in one’s own trap.’”
Nice candidates for the application of that phrase are feminists who support someone other than Hillary Clinton for president. Take Kate Michelman (no, you take her), former head of NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League). Ms. Michelman is now working to attract women to Sen. John Edwards’ presidential campaign, which, according to this article in the Washington Post, faces an uphill struggle. According to the article, Ms. Clinton’s 15 point lead over Sen. Obama in a recent poll is “entirely attributable” to her 2–1 lead among women.
And how does feminist Michelman respond to the news that a woman candidate has a significant lead among women?
“The excitement of Hillary’s candidacy, the historic nature of it, is capturing the attention of women — there’s no question about that,” said Kate Michelman, an abortion rights advocate who is leading Edwards’s effort to attract women to his campaign. But, Michelman said, “eventually, gender will recede a bit from the foreground. It will recede a bit in its singular, driving importance. And women will be looking at the values, the views, the competence, the electability of a candidate.”
It requires no leap of imagination to conclude that is a similar poll showed blacks favoring Obama by similar margins, Ms. Michelman — or her analog, a black “civil rights” leader supporting some other candidate — would say precisely the same thing, substituting blacks/race for women/gender.
They would want voters to abandon their habitual concern with gender/race, or at least have it “recede a bit,” and concentrate on the non-racial, non-gender individual qualifications of their candidate. In other words, when it suits their temporary interest Ms. Michelman and her analogs want what critics of racial and gender preference want for everyone all the time.
Just to tickle your Muse… the actual meaning of “hoist by his own petard” means “blown up by his own grenade.” A “petard” is a small bomb (the term is still current in, e.g., Swiss French), and “hoist” meant “lifted up” then as it does now. The phrase evokes the semi-comic situation of the grenade thrower who drops the bomb at his own feet, or the sapper whose fuse is too short.
Excellent closing sentence. No one says it better than you, John.