When Clinton Fails, She Blames Sexism

9:38 pm EST May 25th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

I can’t stand Maureen Dowd, but sometimes facts are facts. It isn’t that I don’t believe that there hasn’t been sexism in this campaign. There has been. Of course, there has been racism as well. But sexism isn’t why Hillary Clinton is losing.

Her campaign has been poorly planned and executed versus what turns out to be a superior opponent. It isn’t as if the voters turned back the time machine to 1952, gave her a pat on the bum and told her to go cook dinner. Sen. Clinton has been on an even playing field with her opponents, and for a long time was elevated high above them (for a time people said the race was going to boil down to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the Democratic side – and in that scenario you don’t want to be a dwarf), yet she lost.

So now, searching yet again for a reason to explain away this massive fail, Sen. Clinton has decided that it is rampant sexism. Of course, rampant sexism didn’t force Sen. Clinton to lie about her experience in Bosnia, not plan for caucus states, or lose primaries where she once led only to dismiss the black vote when she lost. Sexism didn’t cause any of that.

Yet, as Maureen Dowd pointed out on Meet The Press, this isn’t the first time Sen. Clinton failed and blamed sexism. When she failed at passing health care under President Clinton, she also found sexism hanging out on the grassy knoll.

On a Latin American trip, she told reporters that the criticism of her lead role on health care, politics and policy was not really about performance. As Ann Devroy reported in The Washington Post, Mrs. Clinton sees the criticism more as an attack on her 20-year partnership with her husband because some Americans find it “threatening.”

“The criticism is clearly meant to try to demean and divide men and women,” she said. “You know, ‘Know your place, know where you are supposed to be,’ that is something I wish we could overcome. I mean, judge people on their merits. You don’t like my health-care plan, criticize my health plan. But don’t turn it into some huge attack on the role.”

Mrs. Clinton made the same argument after “her” health-care plan died. “A friend told me I’ve turned into a gender Rorschach test,” she told The Wall Street Journal last year. “If somebody has a female boss for the first time, and they’ve never experienced that — well, maybe they can’t take out their hostility against her so they turn it on me.”

Sen. Clinton, here’s a lesson you need to learn, and many a guy has learned it the hard way as well: It’s not us. It’s you.

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2 Responses to “When Clinton Fails, She Blames Sexism”

  1. Soullite says:
    May 26, 2008 at 8:48 am

    If Senator Clinton hadn’t voted for the war, refused to apologize, and then act like the rest of us were the problem. Maybe if she hadn’t decided to act like she won the 2008 primaries for the last 4 years, she would have won. Sexism exists, but it’s her reflexive hawkishness and her stubborn refusal to admit when she was wrong that did her in.

  2. Vanessa says:
    May 26, 2008 at 9:39 am

    Yes, I agree that Hillary ruined her campaign pretty much all on her own but that’s not to say that she wasn’t a victim of sexism. She was.