‘What if Hillary Clinton Were a Man?’
She wouldn’t be a presidential nominee, that’s for sure.
Was that the sound of a glass ceiling breaking? Or was it Bill Clinton diving over the Oval Office desk in pursuit of an intern? It’s hard to tell.
Hillary Clinton claims it’s the former, saying her selection as the first female presidential nominee of a major political party put the “biggest crack” yet in the proverbial glass ceiling — the term feminists love to use for the limits on what women can do. But is being nominated because you’re a woman — and, more specifically, because you’re a woman who effectively played the role of devoted wife defending her high-powered husband’s seduction of women — really something to tout?
Let’s be honest. Hillary’s policies haven’t driven her career. Her gender, combined with her last name, have. If you want to track Hillary Clinton’s rise, start with her marriage certificate.
This makes the irony of Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen’s missive this week even more potent. “What if Hillary Clinton were a man?” he asked. “What if she were a 68-year-old man rather than a 68-year-old woman? Would we think differently of her? Her raised voice would be lower. She would be better at physically commanding the stage. Her indomitability might be seen as manly. If she were taller and bigger, might she have been able to get away with saying nothing about her email server — as Donald Trump has with his tax returns? As they say, I’m just askin’.”
Well, to answer, if Hillary were a man, she never would have gotten to the Senate, let alone to the presidential nomination. Even the Democrat Party wouldn’t nominate a man as inept and unlikeable as Hillary. In fact, Cohen himself writes, “I understand the criticisms and don’t reject them out of hand. She has been slippery. She has fibbed. She has used a private email server, which was wrong and careless. She has been the marital partner of a man who has taken other partners. She did not leave him, as many women wanted her to do. To them, she became the personification of the female doormat.” Yet, he laments that “the dislike of Clinton is so palpable that it has become akin to a prejudice.”
Did you catch that? Hillary is a lying, crooked, adulterer-enabler, but those who don’t support her — say, those who value honesty, honor and faithfulness, for instance — are prejudiced and sexist. Makes perfect sense.
Tennis legend and Clinton supporter Billie Jean King complained, “What bothers me the most is that there’s not very much excitement about Hillary being the first woman.” As if women must check their brains at the voting booth and vote with their ovaries instead.
Then again, if everyone who disagrees with Barack Obama is a racist, everyone who disagrees with Clinton must be a misogynist. This includes the many women who aren’t jumping on the Hillary bandwagon. As the Wall Street Journal reports, “While 52% of female voters from both parties support Mrs. Clinton, the proportion falls to 36% among white women ages 50-64 and 34% among white women ages 35-49, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll this month.”
In other words, all women are not the ignorant dupes Democrats take them for.
Certainly, the fact that we live in a nation where a woman can win a presidential nomination is something to celebrate. But the fact that we live in a nation where this woman won the nomination is deplorable.
As National Review’s Ericka Anderson writes, “There is a small part of me that celebrates but more than that, I’m sad. I’m sad that the woman who represents our gender in this pretty cool moment of history is of such low moral character, and has clawed her way here in the most politically calculated climb in history. … Hillary Clinton has defended a man time and again who has been accused of sexual assault, rape and of course, infamously taking advantage of a young intern during his time in the White House. … If nothing else, just remember that women are celebrating today a defender of a serial sexual assaulter, a woman who told any number of other women they don’t deserve to be believed or heard.”
If there really is a “war on women,” picking one of its chief enablers as a presidential nominee is hardly worth celebrating.