Clinton and Royal share little beyond poll bids

By Ellen Wulfhorst

NEW YORK (Reuters) - If Hillary Clinton looks to France to learn from Segolene Royal, who lost her campaign to become the European nation's first woman president, the clearest lesson is that a woman cannot count on the support of female voters.

Royal failed to win a majority of the women's vote in France's election last weekend, and U.S. Sen. Clinton, with her eye on the White House in 2008, can't assume she has women's votes without wooing them on substantive grounds, experts say.

"One of the biggest lessons to be learned is that a woman can't take the women's vote for granted. That's a cautionary note," said Barbara Kellerman, an author and a John F. Kennedy School of Government lecturer at Harvard University.

"There's a lot of babble all the time about sisterhood and a certain set of assumptions about women gravitating toward women, which we've just seen now does not particularly hold."

In France, only 48 percent of women voted for the Socialist Royal, according to one poll, while 52 percent supported rightist rival and overall winner Nicolas Sarkozy.

Royal may have paid a price for focusing on gender at the expense of her policies, experts said. She played up her feminist credentials, defending policies she would want as a mother, accusing critics of male chauvinism and focusing on the symbolism of her possibly becoming the first female president, they said.

While Clinton makes appeals to female voters, she plays up her gender less on the campaign trail, experts note.

"Hillary Clinton is running a fundamentally different candidacy than Royal did," said Kathy Dolan, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin and author of "Voting for Women: How the Public Evaluates Women Candidates."