hillary stands down

A very good speech: generous, graceful, and when addressing the question of women and the White House, quite moving.

Michelle Cottle, whose reports on the internal machinations of the Clinton campaign were one of the journalistic highlights of the cycle, posted an anguished goodbye to Hillary last week. It includes this passage:

It is easy to poke fun at the cultishness of Hillaryland gals, with their locked-lipped, obsessive devotion to the group's namesake. But the women themselves are an exceedingly likeable, unnervingly impressive lot, all of whom hold Hillary--and specifically her humanity--in the highest regard. For all her flaws, it says something about the much-maligned Senator Clinton that she has inspired such enduring loyalty and affection.

It's worth contemplating this, on the day that Hillary Clinton officially concedes. You wouldn't have thought, given the vitriol and contumely that has rained down from all sides on Mrs Clinton over the last six months - sections of the left proving themselves as hysterical as those on the right in this regard - that she might be capable of inspiring anything but fear, or that she was anything but a hostile stranger to 'humanity'.

It wasn't just those with a political stake in this race who consistently sought to caricature Clinton as somehow inhuman, or who gave every impression of wanting her to disappear. In a recent post, Mark Halperin noted that Clinton may underestimate the 'disdain' felt towards her in most newsrooms, even as she knew it was high; when she occasionally suggested that the media had an in-built bias against her, she wasn't exaggerating.

I must say, I've never really understood it. Yes, Clinton can be over-calculating, ungenerous, and unscrupulous in her pursuit of political victory. But those faults are the faults of her breed: all politicians suffer them. If she seems to suffer them worse than most, that might be the flipside of the fact that she's also better at her job than most.

And how unscrupulous was she? A staple of the commentary on this race has been the 'they're taking the gloves off' story. After a Clinton defeat, some Democratic consultant or unnamed source 'close to the Clinton campaign' would intimate that things were about to get really, really vicious. The Clintons were going to take down their opponent by any means necessary; you ain't seen nothing yet. But each time we expected the worst we got...well, nothing very much. Just the same old attacks (one or two of them admittedly crossing the line of acceptable intra-party competition) but little that was truly low. Anyone who thinks that Clinton showed no restraint in her attacks on Obama will just have to shut their eyes and ears once the Republicans get into their stride, lest they faint with shock.

Whatever else we've seen over the last year, we've also seen a politician of exceptional intellect, great campaigning skills - in the last couple of months on the trail, even as the sun went down, she really came into her own - and the kind of fierce, unquenchable will to win that sorts out the women from the boys at this level.

Clinton was a terrific candidate, who would have won in virtually any other year facing virtually any other opponent. Her campaign made mistakes, of course. But, as I tried to suggest here, the real reason she lost was that she faced a precision-guided missile: a candidate whose strengths so precisely matched her vulnerabilities that it was all she could do to keep it close.

It's hard to conclude that the widespread, visceral dislike of Clinton, particularly amongst those who consider themselves good liberals, is down to anything but discomfort with powerful women. Time to get over that, no?  But having grown up with one running the country, perhaps that's easy for me to say.

Comments

[Candadai Tirumalai]

One of the remarkable features of this Democratic race is that Hillary Clinton, despite her victory in New Hampshire after the defeat in Iowa, lagged behind Barack Obama in the early and middle caucuses and primaries, but almost caught up with him on the strength of her victories in some big states, including Pennsylvania and Ohio.

[Marbury]

Hello Candadai. I'd say the remarkable fact is that she DIDN'T catch up by winning Pennsylvania and Ohio and Texas, or even erase his lead by much at all. That was down to the way delegates are allocated. What her campaign never accounted for was that by running up big margins and therefore big delegate hauls in a string of smaller caucus states after Feb 5th, Obama would be able to build an insurmountable lead. Even as she won the biggies, she couldn't win them by margins big enough to wipe that lead out. It was too late.

[rellis]

Not too sure about your last paragraph. I do think she got a bum rap in the election coverage, much as you describe. But there were plenty of reasons for that. I doubt most people who disliked her cared that she was a woman.

The biggest reason for a lot of the "widespread, visceral dislike of Clinton" is that Obama is simply a lot of voters' favorite, including people in the media, and they don't like seeing competition against him. Emotions get high during a tight contest, and it gets worse the longer it goes. A lot of this will dissipate almost immediately.

The contrast between Obama and Clinton didn't help her, either. Obama is rightly seen as someone who's willing and able to speak truth to power -- to treat us all like we're adults instead of numbers. Clinton's original stereotype was that she was "poll-driven", and I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary. If she were the only serious candidate it would have been overlooked, but when held up next to Obama, it made her come across as a relative phony.

This essay by the late Molly Ivins, written long before the primary started, sums up why a lot of people were eager to find an alternative to Clinton. It resonated with me quite a bit.

Not. Backing. Hillary.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/01/20/ivins.hillary/index.html

[45387]

Hi Marbury,

I can't agree with the view that HRC's problem is because she is a powerful woman. Or that the media disdain her because of it. Dislike is a complex subjective experience and isn't based just on gender or power or even the two combined. It makes a handy shorthand explanation, I admit, for discussing why a particular individual is disdaine for reasons not easily expressed in sound bites.

At the outset, the record clearly shows that this election was Hillary's to lose. She was the front-runner for a long time even though she was a powerful woman. She behaved in ways that gave ammunition to her detractors. She lost because of it. Fair and square.

I submit that simplest explanation for her failure is that unfortunately for Clinton, she ran against someone who is equally smart who is also extraordinarily thoughtful and visionary. And most importantly someone who more consistently behaved in ways that didn't disappoint. Character tipped the balance.

[fleety3000]

As noted by an aide a while ago, the top 3 reasons Hillary lost:
Mark Penn
Mark Penn
Mark Penn
It was him who is to blame for the 3 biggest blunders:Not apologising for the iraq issue.Positioning Hillary as the inevitable and incumbent in a climate that cried out for change.And having no plan as to what to do if the contest went a day past feb 5th.
But then again it does injustice to Obama who is a once in a life time candidate whose strengths were like a heat seeking missile to her biggest vulnerabilities

[Candadai Tirumalai]

After her victories in the big states (Texas, curiously, had caucuses as well, in which Obama seems to have done better than in the primary), Hillary Clinton hoped that uncommitted superdelegates would rush to her, arguing that she would be a more formidable candidate against John McCain, but the rush did not materialze.