No one expects Hillary Rodham Clinton to don a camouflage hunting suit next year, right? And no one thinks Barack Obama will be saluting anyone from the podium at the Democratic Convention in Denver?

This election, thankfully, will be about women and race — not male insecurity.

Then again, maybe not. Over the weekend, someone (who will not be named or linked to — since that’s all she wants) decided to, more or less, call John Edwards the dreaded “f-word”:

I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.

What is interesting is neither the outrageousness of the remark (that is just her lowest-common-denominator modus operandi) nor that she chose to resurrect a rather dubious pop culture figure (Isaiah Washington of Grey’s Anatomy who faced fallout — and rehab — for his anti-gay remarks to a fellow cast member).

It is the very out-of-place nature of the homophobia that stands out. Do the swift-boaters really believe that they can play this I’m-more-of-a-man-than-you card once again?

Is that the lens through which they will force us to see Rudolf Giuliani and John McCain? The true 9/11 hero and the prisoner-of-war — only “real men” can lead us out of the morass in Iraq, not liberal lawyers and community activists.

Considering their last “real man” put us in the morass, can they possibly get away with the blatant hypocrisy? No one would have thought, of course, that they could have made a draft dodger look more capable of being commander-and-chief than a genuine war hero who chose to serve.

If the Democrats are going to do things differently this time around, it should be by facing down the fears, not avoiding or kowtowing to them. If certain people want to make this election about manhood, then expand the definition of what it means to be a man. We might start with honesty, patience and sensitivity. How would the proponents of the Bush Doctrine appear in that light?

Remember, it’s all about the narrative, and in these early stages, there’s still time to steer the plot.

Then again, maybe it’s all about the lyrics. Let’s just hope they’re not these from Merle Haggard’s “Hillary”:

Eight years in the White House
With the know-how we need
When you walk with a leader
You learn how to lead
And who kept her head high
When it could have been down
Who ran the show
When the scandal hit town
This country needs to be honest
Changes need to be large
Something like a big switch of gender
Let’s put a woman in charge
Put a woman in charge of the Army
Put a woman in charge of the wheel
The country owes it to Hillary
And Hillary owes it to Bill

He’s been playing it on tour. Really. Whether you’re taken by the nursery-school rhymes or the condescending you’re-almost-Bill tone, I don’t believe this is what Hillary needs.