Hillary Postmortem
This bears restating:
Hillary Clinton has actually done a great service to women, if she doesn’t ruin it all by whining that her defeat was due to sexism. She has in fact shattered the glass ceiling by being completely, plausibly presidential, and even believable as Commander in Chief. She has also shattered the glass ceiling by being rejected (and narrowly at that) for her character, not her gender.
(Most crude woman jokes made about her are simply a version of the hazing any politician must undergo, and are best laughed off. It’s true that racial jokes are much more taboo than gender jokes, and that this can be interpreted to mean that demeaning women is still regarded as good fun rather than deadly bias. But it can also to be interpreted to mean that “the battle of the sexes” is so universal and so psychically charged that jokes about it — cutting both ways — are inevitable and pretty harmless. That is: the hostility they reveal — cutting both ways — is the inextricable dark side of the power mutually dependent intimates have over each other, which won’t go away no matter how equal the sexes become. And joking is one of the more harmless ways to vent it.)
The supreme irony is that one of the objections to Hillary’s character is that she has ridden to power on the coattails of her bounder husband rather than entirely on her own (indisputable) merits. (Granted that this is judging an early baby boomer — a transitional generation impacted rather late by feminism, take it from me — by a harsh, later standard. But well before second-wave feminism there was Eva Peron, and then there was Golda Meir.) Bill, who was predicted to be her greatest asset, has turned out to be an asshat, a lia-Bill-ity. He complicates the assessment of the woman, since, like a political Siamese twin, she cannot be cut away from him and seen for herself against a clear background.
But Hillary has, in fact, smashed the glass ceiling in politics. That will turn out to have been her historic role — as the Mosesse who has seen the Promised Land of the White House but couldn’t get there herself. However, it will never again seem strange and new and different to have a woman competing matter-of-factly for the highest office in the land.
The real pity of the Democratic primary process is that the dreams of the equal rights movement came up against the dreams of the civil rights movement. Neither deserved to lose. Ultimately I think it was her vote for the war in Iraq and the "Billary Clinton" rhetoric that cost her the nomination.
I’m sure many rejected her because she’s a woman and embraced her for the same reason. Personally I could care less of her sex it’s her that was revolting as a character.
I think women could have had a better voice than HRC. There are certainly no shortage of smart, capable women in public service.
Amba, I agree whole heartedly. I think that Clinton did a good job destroying, or almost destroying, this glass ceiling.
However, she hasn’t destroyed it yet. For that to happen, a woman needs to either win, or become VP.