Why Do They Hate Hillary?

Cartoonist Jack Ohman asks a relevant and pertinent question: Who do so many people hate Hillary Clinton?

Barack Obama once said that Hillary is likable enough, but Democratic primary voters, especially young women, largely to prefer Bernie Sanders. For many of them voting for the first woman president seems less enticing than feeling the Bern.

Given that Ohman is a cartoonist, he is none too helpful on this score. He says that people hate Hillary because she is a woman. It’s all about the misogyny. If that’s the best you can do, you should stick to cartoons.

Considering how many young women are turned off by Hillary, it’s difficult to tax them all with misogyny.  Surely, these young women would flock to Elizabeth Warren if she were a candidate.

What is it about Hillary?

Could it be all of her lies, coupled with her arrogant presumption that no one will really care?

Could it be the vulgarity of cashing in on her husband’s presidency? People believe that the Republican candidate is vulgar, but Bill Clinton is the only president in memory who used his post-presidency to enrich himself and his wife. If the public believes that you will use the office of the presidency for anything other than to advance the public good, they are not going to like you.

Could it be that Hillary enabled Bill Clinton’s sexual predations? But, this is not news. When these accusations were in the news every day in 1998 people tended to support and defend Hillary. They gave her a senate seat in 2000.

Now, of course, Donald Trump has very explicitly made them an issue. He has openly attacked Bill Clinton for being a rapist and a sexual predator. Perhaps that has caused people to think more clearly than they did in 1998. Perhaps the cultural climate has changed to the point where no one can ever condone rape, even to protect the right to choose. And perhaps the current politically correct way of thinking about these things, namely that women who accuse men of rape are to be believed, has redounded to her deficit.

There is also the fact that today’s younger generation has been largely brainwashed with leftist propaganda, so they are more likely to flock to a socialist like Bernie Sanders than to a liberal Democrat like Hillary Clinton.

And then there is the achievement gap. Had she not been married to Bill Clinton, Hillary would have no chance of becoming president. She would never have been senator from New York or Secretary of State. Hillary has next to no accomplishments to her name. Her candidacy is running on fumes, and perhaps young women have noticed it. Most of them do not want to get ahead by riding their husbands' coattails

Obviously, no one would say the same about Elizabeth Warren.

Allow me another hypothesis. It might not have even entered the consciousness of the young women who find Hillary unappealing. I suggest that young women are rejecting Hillary Clinton as a role model. They know or they sense or they intuit that Hillary does not like men… except as they can be used to advance her political agenda and her will to power. And they know that any woman who gushes over Hillary Clinton might as well be wearing essence of man repellent. The same would not be true of Elizabeth Warren, however tough she is.

Hillary might recently have become a grandmother, but most people, and that includes most young women, do not see her as a motherly type. Not only has she handed in her woman card, but she has never been seen as very much of a mother, either.

For years the American public has been willing to close its eyes and its mind to the bizarre nature of the Clinton marriage. Undoubtedly, people have not wanted to think about their arrangement. As long as Hillary was a wife, they did not want to throw the strange nature of her marriage in her face.

But, if you start asking questions about the Clinton marriage, as young women, in particular, are wont to do, you arrive at some disturbing conclusions.

What kind of a woman allows her husband to conduct a myriad of affairs and even sexual assaults? The answer must be that she would rather he expend his sexual energy with other women.  One has long suspected that Hillary was more concerned about exposure and disclosure than she was about who Bill Clinton was having sex with. She fought to maintain her political viability, not her honor as a woman.

Very few women would make the same moral choice.

More than a few women believe that if a man strays as often as Bill Clinton apparently did he is running away from his wife. No one wants to believe that a wife is at fault or is responsible for her husband’s errant ways, but the truth is, most women believe that the wife is somewhat responsible. In many ways, Hillary Clinton’s true distinction has been that she is the only woman Bill Clinton doesn't want to fuck.

And this does not even account for the possibility, taken by many to be a fact, that Hillary herself led the effort to defame and discredit any woman who had the temerity to come forth to denounce her husband.

Were I to speculate, I would say that for young women, the Clinton marriage looks like a political arrangement. It was not about love and romance, but was a career move, perhaps for both parties. Both were allowed to live their sexuality as they wished, but would collude and conspire to advance their political interests and enhance their political power. Whatever they did for the country, they would become obscenely wealthy.

For my part I do not believe that young women can get around the notion of seeing a woman marrying for political reasons, for pretending to love a man when she only likes what he can do for her politically.

David Brooks makes a similarly cogent point, based on different evidence:

Can you tell me what Hillary Clinton does for fun? We know what Obama does for fun — golf, basketball, etc. We know, unfortunately, what Trump does for fun.

But when people talk about Clinton, they tend to talk of her exclusively in professional terms. For example, on Nov. 16, 2015, Peter D. Hart conducted a focus group on Clinton. Nearly every assessment had to do with on-the-job performance. She was “multitask-oriented” or “organized” or “deceptive.”

Clinton’s career appears, from the outside, to be all consuming. Her husband is her co-politician. Her daughter works at the Clinton Foundation. Her friendships appear to have been formed at networking gatherings reserved for the extremely successful.

People who work closely with her adore her and say she is warm and caring. But it’s hard from the outside to think of any non-career or pre-career aspect to her life. Except for a few grandma references, she presents herself as a résumé and policy brief….

She looks less like a human being and more like an avatar from some corporate brand.

For Hillary it’s all politics all the time. This signals fanaticism, not public service. Whatever Hillary does for fun, we can safely assume that she wants to hide it from public view.

One suspects that many young women will eventually choose Hillary over Donald Trump, but for now Hillary’s prospects do not seem very good, even with the deck stacked in her favor. Bernie Sanders is not going away any time soon. The FBI is still investigating her.

One can even imagine a scenario wherein the FBI issues a report calling for her indictment. Then perhaps she will be forced to drop out of the race, not so much in favor of Bernie Sanders, whose viability in the general election has been largely overestimated, but in favor of the man who is waiting in the wings… Joe Biden.

Will the Democratic Party go with a loser like Hillary or will it try to re-engineer the process in order to bring out a more viable candidate?