By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, August 03, 2016
Among the innumerable flip-flops, course corrections, and
reinventions that have come to define Hillary Clinton’s three decades in public
life, perhaps the most interesting one is her decision in 2016 to go all in as
the woman-candidate.
In 2008, Clinton downplayed her gender. Mark Penn, her
chief strategist in that campaign, had a “FWP” (First Woman President) plan
that emphasized toughness, not nurturing. Voters, he argued, did “not want
someone who would be the first mama, especially in this kind of world.”
Ann Lewis, a 2008 senior adviser, told the New York Times
last year that the decision not to double down on gender was the “biggest missed
opportunity” of Clinton’s presidential bid. “It was not a major theme of the
campaign,” Lewis added.
She’s right about the latter; I’m not sure about the
former. Perhaps one reason Clinton didn’t bang the feminist gong more
forcefully was that she feared it might remind voters she was a household name
because of her husband’s accomplishments, not her own. Clinton successfully
sponsored only three pieces of legislation while in the Senate: the renaming of
a road, the renaming of a post office, and the naming of a house as a historic
landmark. She had other accomplishments, but little that would have
distinguished a senator named Jones or Smith.
Another possible factor: Clinton was running against
Barack Obama, the man who would become the first black president — and in the
game of identity politics, race trumps sex.
This is a hotly controversial point on college campuses,
but the heat cools rapidly the farther away you get from the women’s-studies
departments. Yes, of course, America has a sexist history. But so does every
other society in the world. America hasn’t always been ahead of the pack on
women’s rights, but it has rarely been far behind. New Zealand was the first to
grant women the vote, in 1893. America followed suit with most of Europe right
after World War I, in 1920. Women’s suffrage didn’t hit France until 1944.
Switzerland waited until 1971. The first ballots cast by women in Saudi Arabia?
2015.
You could say that racism in America was horizontal,
while sexism was vertical. Women are born into every class and demographic.
Affluent white women may not have been allowed to vote until 1920, but they
were hardly treated the same way as black women or, for that matter, Native
American women.
Moreover, women’s political, religious, and ideological
orientations are difficult to stereotype. You’d be hard-pressed to find an
African American who dissented from the battle for civil rights. It has always
been easy to find women — lots of women — who dissent from feminist orthodoxy.
For instance, gender is a very poor predictor of attitudes on abortion.
To make the case that women are coequals in the Coalition
of the Oppressed, feminists often rely on hyperbole. In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan argued that housewives were
“in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the
concentration camps.”
Uhhh: no.
I am not one to feed the stunning self-regard of
Millennials, but it is to their credit that they don’t much care about
Clinton’s gender. Bernie Sanders beat Clinton among young women (by a factor of
6 to 1 in the Iowa caucuses).
The coverage of the Democratic convention last week was
instructive. By far, the delegates — and pundits — most excited by the
relentless mantra about the First Woman President were aging white liberal Baby
Boomers.
And that’s fine, I suppose. But it’s worth considering
that Clinton’s decision to emphasize the historic nature of her candidacy is
probably as calculated as her decision to de-emphasize it in 2008. The person
standing between her and the Oval Office this time isn’t the first black
president but a thrice-married, crude billionaire who polls slightly better
than the Zika virus with women. Baiting the ever-baitable Donald Trump to rant
about the “woman’s card” is a shrewd way to pad her lead.
No doubt Clinton, a lifelong feminist, believes her
rhetoric about shattering the final glass ceiling, but one thing is clear from
her decades in the political arena: If she thought it wasn’t to her advantage
to say it, she probably wouldn’t.
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