In a recent story in the New York Post, Hillary Clinton is quoted saying of Bernie Sanders in an upcoming book on the 2020 election "I know the kind of things that he says about women and to women."* It appears to have been said as a way of declaring sides after the fact in the controversy surrounding insinuations just before the Iowa primary from the Elizabeth Warren campaign about remarks Sanders allegedly had made to Warren in private months before about her prospects for winning against Trump in the general election should she win the Democratic nomination (an outcome of diminishing likelihood given polls at the time that the Warren campaign leaked the story in a move that ultimately failed to work as it was presumably calculated to-- i.e., to drive young democratic primary voting women and their allies from Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren. It almost has to be said out loud to be appreciated.).
To recap, Sanders was supposed to have said to Warren that he didn't think a woman could be elected president. Sanders has denied that he said what the allegation implies and in any case does not agree with the statement. Wisdom subsequently expressed from inside both the Warren and Sanders circles (but not yet from Warren) suggests that if there is any kernel of truth to the allegations, it had to have been expressed in terms of what was certain to be Trump's lack of reservation about using misogyny as a political weapon-- one that Trump had a demonstrated mastery at brandishing as his success at derailing the Hillary Clinton express four years earlier had shown. If there was anything to the story other than desperation from Warren's campaign, the details of the incident were kept vague and archly hinted at forcing the voter to evaluate the veracity based only on their knowledge of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and their respective relationships to the truth.
With her recently reported statement, Hillary Clinton gives us the benefit of her astuteness on the matter, with the implication that she too was a casualty of Bernie Sanders' alleged belittling of the ambitions of women. But Hillary Clinton has a history of trying to keep the waters about her own role in her 2016 defeat at Trump's hands muddied, preferring to deflect blame anywhere but on her campaign's incompetence in conducting what should have been a cakewalk if the opinion of the political class were an indication, and most of all away from the antipathy the electorate has for Hillary Clinton herself from decades of over-exposure to her husband and to her and to the Clinton brand of politics.
On the one hand, you have to wonder what Clinton thinks she's accomplishing by her repeated attempts to impugn Bernie Sanders' character years after he rocked her cruise to neoliberal glory in the democratic primary of 2016. On the other, it's hard to imagine that there could be any thought behind it. Maybe Clinton (whose brand of feminism depends on the premise that what is good for Hillary Clinton is good for women) is the type of operative who sees more value in undermining the public's perception of Sanders-- the candidate who gave her a real old fashioned run for her money; a stalwart who in spite of the prevailing austerity of the neoliberal climate of the past 40 years has consistently championed and succeeded in keeping a focus off of the shallow personality politics of our era and instead on the types of economic and social policies that materially benefit women of all classes and circumstances, not just those at the top-- than in advancing those same causes herself. Maybe her status as also-ran despite her vaunted unprecedented qualifications for the presidency of the patriarchy is merely the result of the lingering misogyny of those who challenged or refused to support her with even a vote. Or maybe she is just a bitter, small-minded loser who would rather moan about her better Sanders-- who challenged her in 2016 as a way of modulating the unremitting sameness of her candidacy in a time that screamed for difference only when Elizabeth Warren didn't-- than to be instructed by where her shortcomings got her-- most notably among them the blindness to her own vulnerability that was her certainty of her candidacy's inevitability.
Hillary Clinton would like you to think that misogyny is the only possible explanation for her failure to be the first woman president let alone the first two-term woman president.† In the real world, it was the ceiling she broke through-- that of leadership of the neoliberal democratic mediocrity-- that lay behind the disappointing scale of the public's indifference to her.
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*Apparently she's not satisfied with my mere lack of enthusiasm for her as a Clinton voter in 2016. She's trying to make me regret it.
† This has got to be a rough eight years for her.
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