For female voters, chilly Clinton is a turn-off
naky
www.diecastingpartsupplier.com
2016-08-03 15:22:24
When I was at university and Bill Clinton was running for a second term, there was a huge craze for “Hillary for president” buttonsadges. These were chic, perhaps because HillaryMr Clinton’s wife was not running for president. As a purely abstract idea, young women liked her, but as a reality, two decades later, they like her a whole lot less. The historic ascent of a woman to the Democratic ticket for president seems to have come and gonelast week without stirring much genuine enthusiasm among women, especially younger women. For some reason they cannot seem to muster any passion for Hillary Clinton; her support, for the most part, is begrudging, dutiful, pro forma . A vast number of women cannot seem unable to love her the way they loved Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders or, for that matter, Bill Mr Clinton.
In spite of being a proverbial old white man, Mr Sanders’ eloquent articulation of an ensconced victim mentality — the system is rigged, the world is against us — is in some sense more appealingand recognizable to this generation’s particular blend brand of identity politics. In spite of Despite being a woman in one of the more an arduous professions for women, Mrs Clinton, on the other hand, does not speak the language of victimisation and a riggerd system the way Mr Sanders does; she does not, in her rhetoric, take all the responsibility off of individuals and put it on the rigged system. This makes her less enthralling to younger voters, less in tune with the voice of their more inspiring professors, their favourite books and their most beloved websites.
Her message, explicit or otherwise, is about hard work, perseverance and playing the system, which lacks the obvious romance of Sanders’ blazing rage. The fact that Mrs Clinton has struggled and overcome tangible social obstacles is not in itselfbarely recognisable to this generation, which has not in fact struggled as much and is instead enamoured of the idea ofthat the world is out to get them, a world that is one big unsafe space. Much of Mrs Clinton’s charisma problem, though, with women of all ages, dates back to her husband’s presidency and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, to the suspicion that flowered then that she is cold and ambitious. There were all sorts of rumours about a “pact” she made with her husband that she would tolerate his infidelities if she could get to the White House, and an image of her emerged as a sort of inhuman Lady Macbeth, a virago. She seemed to embody pure ambition. For some reason, all her long years as a senator, as secretary of state, melt away to leave that basic perception.
The problem is not that she stayed with Mr Clinton, it is that she did not seem wrecked, destroyed. She did not show enough weakness. Mrs Clinton in general does not bother with vulnerability. She does not put her suffering forward as a political offering, and she never has.
The unsettling truth is that while we as a culture like the idea of strong women, we do not much like actual strong women. Over and again, Mrs Clinton has been accused of being fake, of beingphoney, of being untrustworthy, even though the highly contrived and constructed nature of political personas is now openly dissected on the television news. The idea that politicians are not exactly expressing their true selves is hardly a revelation but because she is a woman, Mrs Clinton’s phoniness is somehow more galling than everyone else’s. Our expectation that she be openly flawed and vulnerable is undeniably higher than it would be for a male candidate. We want her to be herself and we do not want that self to be overly tough.
Mrs Clinton’s sheer will to power, her undeniable, unromantic hard work, and her obsessive focus is off-putting to women as well as men. In high school, Clintonshe was voted in her school year book most likely to be a nun calleHer high school nickname was “Sister Frigidaire” and that aura of repellent chilliness has clung to her all these years. So extreme was her reputation for cold ambition that she once wrote: “Some people were eager to see me in the flesh and decide for themselves whether or not I was a normal human being.”
What we seem not to have grasped, of course, is that “normal human beings” do not run for president. We should be appreciating her outsized drive, her cool pursuit of what she wants, her obsession with pragmatic politics right about now. It seems sad to have to remind reluctant or skittish female voters that we do not have to linger over a glass of wine with her and deconstruct our relationships, we have to beat Donald Trump.