After a campaign that was loaded with errors and misfires — from going into a gay bar and looking like a poseur to backtracking on previous moderate positions in favor of leftist extremes, to lecturing suburban white women on their white-skin privilege, Kirsten Gillibrand has called it quits.

It was time.  She never breached more than a couple points in the polls, and by the bitter end, even her staff was leaking to the press that it was time to be a rat and flee the sinking ship.

Good riddance, because never was there are more useless candidate.  She positioned herself as the candidate of women's issues, but she had no real foils to charge at.  Her yellings about abortion, women's workplace equality, and #MeToo only proved she was out of tune with the times.  Worse still, these issues tended to be problems of Democratic, not Republican, origin, which made her a nuisance to both sides.

This doesn't even get into her speaking of problems she knew nothing about, such as the border crisis.  She called for the abolition of ICE quite loudly and then, when people started asking if she was serious, started to backtrack.

But let's take a look at her claim to being the candidate of "women's issues" as the blonde pink suburban housewife she had available to herself as the identity cubbyhole needed to run as a Democrat at all.

Abortion?  She called for more money to Planned Parenthood and denounced low abortion availability in some states.  A smart candidate would probably moderate her abortion stance, given that polls show that Americans are turning against abortion.  Not Gillibrand.  She kept up the old NOW-style Helen Reddyesque form of feminism by touting abortion on demand as if abortion hasn't been legal for nearly fifty years.  Women have long complained that politicians throw out abortion to them as their ticked box for the "women" special interest group, yet it's far from a majority of women who are having abortions.  Gillibrand was one of them.

Women's workplace equality?  The old 1970s-style trope of women making 70 cents on the dollar (which isn't exactly true).  Gillibrand was right there, as if President Obama's administration and his Lilly Ledbetter law had never existed.  This again isn't exactly a women's issue these days.

#MeToo?  She tried to get in on that one, too.  Problem: Most of the egregious cases of sex harassment were perpetrated by the Democratic establishment — the Harvey Weinsteins who donated to Democrats and supported Planned Parenthood, the Bill Clintons who flew, again and again, on Jeffrey Epstein's Lolita Express to the Caribbean island, the leftwing Les Moonveses and Matt Lauers and Charlie Roses in the press, or Al Franken in the Senate, not to mention many the leftist actors in Hollywood.  #MeToo is largely a Democrat problem.  Vice President Mike Pence, who didn't even want the appearance of impropriety to stain him, was roundly denounced by Democrats as a Pecksniff.

Yet here we had Gillibrand, marketing herself as a Year of the Woman candidate (there've been a lot of Years of the Woman, by the way), and it's very, very old hat.  No wonder her campaign failed.  Women's issues as she addressed them were never a big deal in this era of equality that Democrats have largely built. 

If Gillibrand were really serious about women's issues, instead of a lightweight trying to fit herself into some identity politics role as the candidate for women, she'd start talking some serious issues of concern for women, such as transgender participation in women's sports by men, depriving women of any potential for medals, or the serious side effects of abortion on women who've been injured by them, or else the sick degradation of the culture in Planned Parenthood's trafficking of aborted baby parts for quite a bit more than expenses.  #MeToo?  Maybe she can bring up that Democrats are the problem.

But she can't do that.  She wants to oppose Republicans, but all of the problems she can potentially address are Democrat in origin or else nonexistent.  No wonder she kept misfiring and her campaign never got off the ground.  She was running for president in 1976, fighting the last few wars.  She wasn't running a campaign for 2020.

Image credit: Photo illustration by Monica Showalter, with images by Alden Jewell via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, and shareable NBC screen shot.