Hillary Clinton — in the classic liberal style that places avoiding personal responsibility above all else — is now blaming her failed bid for the White House on “white women” who didn’t vote for her because their “fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers” told them “not to vote for ‘the girl.’”
In an interview with NPR’s Rachel Martin last week, Clinton said that her loss to Donald Trump was the result of sexism. Plugging her new book, What Happened, Clinton related a conversation she says she had with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in which she said Sandberg “really helped to put into perspective a lot of research that supports common experiences.” The sum and substance of those common experiences is that “the more professionally successful a man is, the more likable he is; the more professionally successful a woman is, the less likable she is.” Clinton went on to say, “When women are serving on behalf of someone else, as I was when I was Secretary of State, for example, they are seen favorably. But when they step into the arena and say, wait a minute I think I could do the job, I would like to have that opportunity, their favorabilities goes down.” Clinton also said, “Sheryl ended this really sobering conversation by saying that women will have no empathy for you, because they will be under tremendous pressure — and I’m talking principally about white women — they will be under tremendous pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers not to vote for ‘the girl.’”
Of course, left out of that “blame-it-on-those-he-man-woman-haters” part of the interview is the salient fact that Sandberg — whom Clinton cites as a source of a woman’s lack of popularity being inversely proportional to her success — is currently on the boards of Facebook, The Walt Disney Company, Center for Global Development, and SurveyMonkey. Since her seat on those boards is a reflection of both her success in business and her acceptability as a person, her argument — cited by Clinton — falls apart.
This tack is not new to Clinton. In an April interview as part of the Women in the World annual summit, she told Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times that “certainly misogyny played a role” in her defeat by Trump. Earlier in that same interview, she said that at least one reason Putin interfered in the election is because “he’s not exactly fond of strong women.” She neglected to point out that strong people — male or female — don’t shift the blame for their own failures to others.
So, according to Clinton, at least part of “what happened” is that a sexist Russian president and a sexist presidential opponent took advantage of a sexist mindset in America to pressure “white women” not to vote for “the girl.”
That is classic Clinton revisionism. Because it is Hillary pretending that she doesn’t know that millions upon millions of American voters — black, white, and otherwise and both male and female — could not pretend they did not know that she had shown herself to be unworthy of the office for which she was running. Her defeat was not about sexism. It was about more than 2,000 classified e-mails on her private, unsecured, unauthorized server and her willingness to risk national security to operate that server. It was about repeatedly lying about that server. It was about a reaction to the corruption in the DNC that helped Clinton steal the nomination. It was about her; not her sex.
So, while Clinton plugs her book and cries into her very non-presidential beer about being denied the opportunity to serve because of her sex, she shows that American voters made the best choice they had in November 2016. Because just what America did not need in the White House was someone who cannot help but blame everyone else for her failures.
Photo: AP Images
