Once you get beyond the surface of the 2016 battle of the sexes, with its chest-thumping versus maternal hugging, there’s a more intriguing gender dynamic.
On some foreign policy issues, the roles are reversed for the candidates and their parties. It’s Hillary the Hawk against Donald the Quasi-Dove.
.. He has a tender ego, pouty tweets, needy temperament and obsession with hand sanitizer, whereas she is so tough and combat-hardened, she’s known by her staff as “the Warrior.”
.. “Unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct,” he said in his maiden foreign policy speech in Washington last week, adding, “A superpower understands that caution and restraint are really truly signs of strength.”
These Kumbaya lines had the neocons leaping into Hillary’s muscular embrace.
.. In his new book, “Alter Egos,” Times White House correspondent Mark Landler makes the case that the former Goldwater Girl, the daughter of a Navy petty officer and a staunch Republican, has long had hawkish tendencies, reflected in her support for military action in Iraq and Libya and a no-fly zone in Syria.
“It’s bred in the bone,” Landler told me.
.. Instead, she’s meeting Trump, who is “a sheep in wolf’s clothing,” as Axelrod put it