The Clinton campaign and its allies is in serious danger of overplaying its feminist hand. The other day Madeleine Albright came out and said something to the effect that there is a “special place in hell” reserved for women who don’t support other women – clearly referring to the female and especially young female supporters, like Emily Ratajkowski, who are clearly supporting Bernie – and Gloria Steinem went on the Bill Mahr show and intimated something like that a lot of young women are voting with Bernie because “that’s where the boys are.”

Oh boy. Gloria Steinem, who is 81 years old, has clearly lost her fastball. To use an unfortunate sports metaphor, but one that people will understand.

The Clinton advocates and apologists clearly don’t understand why people are considering voting against Hillary. And it’s not because she’s a woman. It’s because she’s the candidate of the liberal corporatocracy, and she’s been in bed with the big banks for years. That has nothing to do with feminism or because she’s a woman.

Now to be sure, there are people out there who wouldn’t vote for her because she’s a woman. But those are not the people who are planning to vote for Bernie.

Hillary has maintained that her ties to Wall Street have had no effect on her voting record. But a recent video I came across puts the lie to that. The video is an interview that Bill Moyers conducted in 2004 with Elizabeth Warren, then still a Harvard Law School professor, about how Hillary changed her vote on a piece of bankruptcy legislation that she opposed as First Lady, and then voted for as a Senator from New York.[1]

Bill Curry, a two-time Democratic nominee for Governor of Connecticut and a White House advisor in the administration of Bill Clinton, recently wrote in Salon that It’s almost over for Hillary: This election is a mass insurrection against a rigged system. That’s coming from one of Bill Clinton’s own guys.

There are still many reasons to believe – and I’ve written about these before – that it’s highly unlikely that Bernie will be the Democratic nominee for President.[2] I’ve said before that both Hillary and Bernie deserve our vote, for very different reasons, and I’m standing by that position. Some pundits, like Rich Barlow of WBUR’s Cognoscenti, have criticized Sanders for some of his positions, and those criticisms are not without merit.

But that misses the mark as well. People who are enthused about Sanders aren’t concerned about the details of his policy positions; they’re grateful that someone is standing up very publicly to the rigged system that most of us really do know we operate under. And that this is someone other than that narcissistic blowhard, Donald Trump, who ironically, is tapping into some of that same vein of discontent.

So don’t overplay your hand in the feminist camp, my friends who are with Hillary. That has the potential to produce a giant backlash from the very people you’re going to need. Because if Hillary is the Democratic nominee – as there is still every reason to believe that she will be – she is really, really, really going to need the Bernie Sanders supporters to come out for her.

[1] Elizabeth Warren, now the senior Senator from Massachusetts, is one of those “burn in hell” progressive women who has not yet endorsed Hillary Clinton. To be fair, she has endorsed Bernie either.

[2] If he were to be, however, given the current mood in the country, I’m not so sure that he couldn’t “bring it home.”