Clinton: Why her supporters are so angry

For many women, it was the last straw, said Faye Fiore in the Los Angeles Times. Hillary Clinton’s most fervent supporters have watched for months as their candidate fought valiantly for the Democratic presidential nomination—despite claims by TV pundits, party leaders, and the Barack Obama camp that the race was over. So when a party rules committee last week thwarted Clinton’s effort to get the Michigan and Florida delegations seated at full strength—all but ending Clinton’s chances—the frustration erupted. Some of the Hillaryites who flocked to the meeting in Washington, D.C.—many clutching “Hear Me Roar” placards—began chanting “McCain ’08!” and “No-bama!” Shoving matches between the Clinton and Obama camps broke out. Harriet Christian, a Clinton volunteer from New York, unleashed a tirade that became an instant YouTube sensation. “The Democrats are throwing this election away, and for what?” she bellowed. “An inadequate black male who would not have been running had it not been a white woman who was running for president?”

As a woman of a certain age, said Eleanor Clift in Newsweek.com, I understand the rage and frustration of Clinton’s supporters. We’ve all had experiences with the glass ceiling, which is why so many women of her generation so fiercely identified with her. But while “blaming gender bias may help some women vent about an outcome they didn’t want,” it ignores the real reasons Clinton fell short of winning the majority of delegates. Clinton’s early support for the war in Iraq opened the door for Obama to enter the race, making him the immediate favorite of the party’s liberal wing. Then she made a huge tactical blunder by not aggressively contesting caucus states, allowing Obama to build an insurmountable delegate lead. Sure, Clinton encountered sexism. But “the sense of grievance that permeates the Clinton campaign is out of proportion to reality.”

Is it? said Marie Cocco in The Washington Post. “The platitude of the moment” is that Clinton’s problem wasn’t the “woman part” but various other factors, such as her volatile husband and her “unlikable demeanor.” Yet the fact remains that the U.S. lags behind India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Germany, and a dozen other countries in electing women as heads of state. Women also remain distinct minorities in Congress and in other public offices. Clinton’s defeat stands as one more piece of evidence that “Americans seem peculiarly averse to female leadership.” Now that she’s been turned away, the question remains: “If not now, when? If not Hillary, who?”

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Sorry, but I don’t buy your premise, said Rosa Brooks in the Los Angeles Times. Seeing Clinton as the candidate of all women is itself sexist, based on the assumption that “women, as a group, share a unified set of political views.” They don’t, nor should women “automatically favor female political candidates.” If anything, Clinton likely was helped by her sex, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. Remember, until Obama began seducing the voters, Hillary was the clear front-runner, with “all the money, power, and Beltway backers”—and “the special oomph’’ that came with the chance to make history. She got millions of votes from women who wanted a woman to be president. As for why Clinton, in the end, didn’t get more votes than Obama, said Gerald Baker in the London Times, it wasn’t because of her gender. It’s because she revealed herself to be a shamelessly self-serving politician “who would do or say anything to get elected,” from her racially polarizing appeals to the “white working class” to her absurd claims that all the votes in Florida and Michigan should count—even though she had earlier agreed they would not count. In short, “there is no Vast Misogynist Conspiracy.”

You’d have to be wearing blinders, though, to not notice that Clinton was up against a double standard, said Lynette Long in the Baltimore Sun. While the media and political establishments reacted vehemently to any hint of racism against Obama, they were complicitly silent when pundits likened her to Glenn Close’s spurned homicidal hysteric in Fatal Attraction. Democratic leaders also kept worrying aloud that blacks would “protest and stay home” if Clinton got the nomination, ignoring the likelihood that white women—three times more numerous than black voters—would do the same if she lost. Now Democrats expect women to swallow their disappointment and line up behind the chosen male, said Froma Harrop in The Providence Journal-Bulletin. But this time it might not happen. “Women are angry,” and the ones who were shouting “McCain ’08!” last week may very well have been “speaking for a multitude.”