OPINION:
Hillary Clinton declined to say last week whether she agrees with Madeleine Albright’s theology, that “a special place in hell” is reserved for women who won’t vote for a woman, but she insists that she doesn’t want women to vote for her just because she’s of the female persuasion. This was an unusual exercise in both diplomacy and theology, one former secretary of state assisting another. Life can get complicated in Washington.
Harry S. Truman was accused of “giving ’em hell” on the campaign stump, and Mrs. Albright, figuring that she had to do something, merely reprised a familiar Democratic tactic. Stump crowds expect a little entertainment. Hillary is not doing well with Democratic women, and Republican women certainly won’t help, so Mrs. Albright called the sisterhood to arms.
Hillary had a chance in Milwaukee to distance herself from the harsh Albright view but demurred. Asked by Judy Woodruff, the PBS moderator, whether she agreed with Mrs. Albright’s curse, Hillary seemed to regard the incident as something like the ancient argument, still not settled, over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. “Well, look,” she said, “I think she’s been saying that for as long as I’ve known her, which is about 25 years.” She preferred to put hell aside to say sharp things about Mario Rubio and to resume her standard stump spiel. Consigning people to the bad place seems to be an old fixation with Mrs. Albright, who knew as early as 1991 that Hillary should one day run for president, and thought even then that that anyone who would not join the Clinton crusade was tempting an unpleasant eternal fate.
Hillary generously urges everyone to make up her own mind. “I have said many times I am not asking people to support me because I’m a woman,” she says. “I am asking people to support me because I think I am the most qualified, experienced, and ready person to be the president and the commander-in-chief.” That’s a risky statement, too. Those familiar with her record, her experience and her performance over the years, in either private or public life, question her honesty, don’t believe much she says and observes that while she has had several important jobs she hasn’t accomplished much. Other than that, she’s a pip.
In New Hampshire, she lost nearly every demographic group to a cranky socialist from Vermont, and by large margins. She won the votes of white women older than she, but middle-aged and younger women, married or not, risked a scorching later by casting their votes for Bernie Sanders.
She’s counting on minority voters in South Carolina to save her bacon. She’s playing identity politics of the rankest sort, but having failed at gender politics she moves on to racial pandering. It’s a hellish thing to do, but a lady has to do what a lady must, and stay out of the way of that evil devil who lives in the details.
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