Via Heidi Hecht and National Politics
By now, it’s no secret that many Clinton supporters didn’t exactly take it very well when Donald Trump won the election. Watching them was like watching children have a mass temper tantrum. However, Hillary Clinton has been pretty quiet during the period immediately following her loss, although one may wonder how much her neighbors heard of her reaction to her unexpected loss. Now she has gone public with an explanation for her loss that boils down to one word: Misogyny.
“Let Me Be Clear”: Hillary Clinton Didn’t Lose Due To Misogyny
Hillary Clinton told New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in response to a question posed during an interview, “But it is fair to say as you just did that certainly, misogyny played a role. That just has to be admitted. And why and what the underlying reasons why is what I’m trying to parse out myself.”
That response implies that Kristof was looking for an admission that she though sexism might have played a role. If he was, he got it. However, both he and Hillary Clinton ignore the fact that sexism might have had a very small role in her loss, if any.
The Real Truth
The real truth is that while American society may be ready for a woman president, Hillary isn’t her. In reactions to Hillary Clinton’s statements, opinion writer like David French have suggested that women like the current U.S. ambassador to the U.N. might have a fair chance of winning a presidential election if she were to run: “At this point, it’s safe to say that Nimrata Randhawa has a far, far better chance to be the first female president of the United States than Hillary Clinton.”
To be fair, it’s likely that Hillary Clinton did turn off some woman voters who found that they could not hold their noses and vote for her. However, they didn’t vote against her . Not because they weren’t ready for a woman to sit in the Oval Office, but because they didn’t want the first woman president of the United States to be named Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Hillary’s Many Mistakes
Clinton was the one who referred to Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and may have won the Democratic nomination because the Democrat Party leadership conspired to cheat Bernie Sanders. She may have tried to sell political favors to wealthy foreigners in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. (Take a look at the Clinton Foundation’s finances if you don’t believe that much. It’s notable that large donations dried up after the election.) Voters won’t have forgotten scandals like her attempt to turn an unknown video producer into a scapegoat in the wake of an extremist attack on a U.S. embassy in Benghazi. They may also have kept the fact that she charges $200,000 per speech in the back of their minds while casting their votes. These are not the earmarks of a so-called “progressive” who is in touch with ordinary people.
Instead of admitting that her own mistakes may have cost her the election, Clinton tries to turn that around and blame it on misogyny. She’s playing identity politics without realizing that most rational women are capable of seeing right through it. Mature women who have been around the block a few times are perfectly capable of recognizing that they do not want someone like her in a position of authority. These are women who might have a successful career and are comfortable in a job that pays well. Some of them may be single and highly independent women who don’t want to be told that they are incapable of succeeding without help from the progressive movement. They would probably be okay with seeing a woman whom they can relate to in the White House.
When Clinton claims that women and minorities can’t succeed without help from the government, she makes herself unrelatable by telling them that she thinks they’re incompetent. Progressives like Clinton may be inadvertently be making things more difficult for women and minorities by implying that they are somehow less qualified for senior positions and that means they need to be propped up by the government. That’s an inevitable turnoff for senior decision-makers in business. Some women and minorities fall for it because it’s couched in language that implies that sexism and racism are to blame.
Others see through it because they recognize that most people won’t make it to the C-Suite Club even when they have a master’s degree in business and male chauvinism is actively discouraged in their employers’ corporate culture. These women recognize that they can apply for new opportunities like everybody else. They also recognize that they may be rejected and that’s only a signal that they should step back and analyze what they could be doing better or what approach they could take that’s different from what they’ve tried before. However, Hillary Clinton does not seem to have the ability to recognize the flaws that caused the American people to reject her.
The women who voted against her are the ones who might not mind seeing a woman in the Oval Office. They just recognize that Hillary Clinton has too many character flaws to really make a good president. Those flaws include an inability to take a look in the mirror and recognize that she made mistakes that ultimately cost her the presidency. Basically, she had the opportunity to be president and blew it. Now she’s trying to blame everybody and everything but herself, including misogyny that probably doesn’t exist.
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