Vogue: No, Hillary Clinton, the First Woman to Win a Major-Party Presidential Nomination, [View all]

[mcar]

No, Hillary Clinton, the First Woman to Win a Major-Party Presidential Nomination, Does Not Need to Shut Up About It

https://www.vogue.com/article/hillary-clinton-what-happened-doesnt-have-to-shut-up/amp


...There’s some truth to at least one facet of this new Clinton backlash: For many people, these are indeed dark times and the Democratic party does need to get its act together and focus on resisting and defeating Trump. But for the most part, the criticism of Clinton’s book is just more sexist drivel from the never-ending well of misogyny and sexism that’s been being hurled in her direction during her long career of public service. Hillary Clinton doesn’t have to go out “gently”—or be otherwise schooled on how she should or should not handle her particular, unprecedented situation. She’s the first woman to win a major party’s presidential nomination in American history; she definitely doesn’t have to shut up about it, not now, not ever.

The attempts to silence Clinton are in fact just more proof that the misogyny she writes about in What Happened was not imagined, and is still working against her. There has been an avalanche of hot takes and postmortems about the 2016 election—true story: there are still Fox News segments about Clinton’s emails, not to mention the president still tweets about “Crooked Hillary.” But the one analysis that at least some segment of the public, including members of Clinton’s own party, don’t want to hear is that of the person who could practically feel Trump’s breath on her neck on the debate stage? I know the news cycle moves pretty fast, but even 10 months later, it’s insane to suggest that Clinton’s assessment of what happened is extraneous; technically, it’s everyone else’s that is. And yet, gallingly, critics still manage to deem her somehow unqualified to share the ultimate behind-the-scenes view of how this dumpster fire went down, as if there is some better person to process it all....

Curiously, the impulse to banish Clinton has not applied to male presidential runners-up, as noted in The New Yorker’s hilarious satirical essay “It’s Time for Hillary Clinton to Gracefully Bow Out of Public Life, Taking All Other Women With Her.” Writes Daniel Kibblesmith: “No recent failed presidential candidate has ever had such a prominent public role post-election, with the possible exceptions of Al Gore, who produced and starred in an Oscar-winning documentary; Senator John McCain, who is a constant television presence; and Mitt Romney, who—you gotta admit—seemed like a pretty good dude in that Netflix movie.”

The dismissal of Clinton’s book is sadly not dissimilar from the way Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris have recently been all but shushed in Congress. There’s something about a powerful woman using her voice—and in a way that is not gentle or measured but bold and pointed—that still doesn’t sit well with the general public. (See: Clinton openly threatened with cries of “lock her up” to this day at Trump rallies; being called a “nasty woman.”) In spite of her achievements—and likely because of them—Clinton has always been seen, as then-candidate Barack Obama quipped in 2008, as just “likable enough.” During the 2016 campaign (and long before), she was lambasted for being rehearsed and robotic—a policy wonk, lacking in natural charisma. (By the way—what we wouldn’t give for a policy wonk in the White House today . . .) But now that she’s speaking freely and frankly, the sexist little secret is being laid bare: People didn’t want Clinton to change her manner of speech; they wanted her to stop talking altogether. Consider that while people want Clinton to be quiet, noted white nationalist political mastermind Steve Bannon got the mainstream sit-down treatment on 60 Minutes last night. Or that on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last week, Sanders all but belittled Clinton’s book as “silly,” a statement that felt like the equivalent of a husband calling his wife “hysterical.”