The Huffington Post has an interesting end game analysis for why Clinton lost the primary. One provocative point was that Hillary played

2. The political environment of this race was much different than 2004 or 2000. In those elections, strength was the key attribute the country was looking for. The country desired more of a father figure. Today, the country is looking for more a a healing presence, someone more nurturing and demonstrating an ability to bring the American family together — more of a mothering persona. The country wanted a Mom, and Hillary gave them a Dad. She tried to hard to demonstrate her toughness and strength and voters wanted more caretaking and sensitivity.

Female political leaders often have to demonstrate to their electorate that they can be as hawkish and as tough as their male counterparts–take Margaret Thatcher, who joined Reagan’s hardline approach towards the Soviet Union and who fired the British Navy at Argentina over a couple of little islands in the Atlantic, and Indira Gandhi, who ruled India, the world’s most populous democracy, by authoritarian decree for two years.

An article in a management journal on the relationship between gender and leadership styles has this to say about male and female management approaches:

A review of the empirically based research specifically related to female leadership behaviors generally indicated that women tend to adopt more accommodative strategies than do their male counterparts in influencing group performance and subordinate goal attainment. For example, Vinacke and Gullickson found that in competitive activities women tended to form coalitions in an accommodative manner; men were more exploitive and used coalitions to gain individual advantages. Research conducted by Denmark and Diggory indicated, “It is clear that on the average men are more authoritarian than women with respect to the leader’s exercise of authority and power in the matter of group goals and control of the behavior of individual members.”

A strong case can be made that Clinton’s leadership style is stereotypically masculine; furthermore, she deliberately portrayed herself on the campaign trail in a way that emphasized masculine traits. Obama on the other hand has generally avoided provoking the opposition during the primaries, has emphasized diplomacy in his foreign policy (Although he seems to be slowly growing some hawkish talons as we get closer to November), and his campaign-style emphasized non-confrontational coalition-building on warm ideas like “hope” where much of Clinton’s was fear-based and challenged Obama directly.

So here’s what I’m getting at: could a case be made that a win for Clinton, though a huge symbolic victory for women, would have also been a support for the male-approach to politicking? And could Obama’s victory possibly be a victory for a more stereotypically feminine–nurturing, healing, consensus-building–approach to politics?