JAMES TARANTO : HYPOCRISY AND HYPERGAMY…BEHIND THE HUMA/HILLARY DOUBLE STANDARD
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Who the heck does Huma think she is? That’s the question “a top [New York] state Democrat” is asking about Anthony Weiner’s wife, according to a report by Fred Dicker of the New York Post. “The Clintons are pissed off that Weiner’s campaign is saying that Huma is just like Hillary,” Dicker’s Dem declares. “How dare they compare Huma with Hillary? Hillary was the first lady. Hillary was a senator. She was secretary of state.”
Being called low-class by the Clintons has got to hurt. But we don’t see how Dicker’s source’s comparison works to Huma’s disadvantage. Yes, Mrs. Clinton was a U.S. senator and secretary of state–but that was after Bill hid behind her skirts during both the 1992 campaign and the 1998-99 Monica Lewinsky scandal. Before 2001, she had never held a job in politics or government–in contrast with Huma, who was already a top State Department aide when, in 2011, Weiner was first exposed as having exposed himself.
And Hillary’s defenses of her husband were far more outlandish than Huma’s. “I’m not sitting here some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” Arkansas’s then-first lady told “60 Minutes” in 1992. Her denial was literally accurate, since to sit standing is a contradiction in terms. But even as she literally sat, she figuratively stood by Bill, making her denial reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s “I’m not a crook.”
One of them abased herself to help her husband’s political career. The other was an aide to the secretary of state.
Her 1998 defense called to mind Nixon’s attack dog, Spiro Agnew. In an interview with NBC’s “Today,” she waved away Bill’s Oval Office hanky panky by denouncing his political detractors: “The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”
We suppose it would be an even greater strain on credulity for Huma to posit a vast right-wing anti-Weiner conspiracy. In famously liberal New York, right-wingers would be lucky to assemble a half-vast conspiracy. Even so, it seems clear that Huma has conducted herself with considerably more grace and dignity than Hillary did. We say that not as a Huma admirer, merely as an observer sufficiently fair-minded to credit her with living up to a low standard.
Yet Dicker’s anonymous source isn’t alone. Prominent members of the media elite have joined in dumping on the Weiners while expressing their admiration for the Clintons. Here’s the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn (no relation, as far as we know, to Weiner rival Christine Quinn):
Though [Huma’s] friends say she is strong and resolute and defiant, sadly she makes all women look like weak and helpless victims. She was not standing there in a position of strength. It was such a setback for women everywhere.
Did Hillary deal “women everywhere” a “setback” back in the 1990s? Quinn doesn’t say in this post, but in another one last month she was considerably less judgmental:
Hillary Clinton is well known for her faith. She went to Sunday school and attended church all of her life, taught Sunday school, was a member of the altar guild and youth groups. When she came to Washington in 1993, she joined a Bible study group. She says she was sent daily scriptures from her group. She was dubbed Saint Hillary at one point for her religious leanings and even made a speech referencing Rabbi Michael Lerner’s “The Politics of Meaning.” When she became a senator, she joined the Senate Prayer Breakfast. She has always been supportive of federal funding for faith-based initiatives. When asked in an interview after the Monica Lewinsky scandal how she had gotten through it, Clinton referred to her “very serious” grounding in faith and talked about her “extended faith family” who helped her out, as well as “people whom I knew who were literally praying for me in prayer circles, who were prayer warriors for me.”
By contrast, Quinn is dismissive of Huma’s faith: “So why has Abedin done this? Some have suggested that her Muslim background and growing up in Saudi Arabia have skewed her views of how women should be treated. But she’s been away from that for too long.”
Here’s how Daily Beast editor Tina Brown concludes a denunciation of Weiner:
The trouble with Carlos [Danger, Weiner’s nom de net] and his ilk is they’re not just a danger to themselves, but a danger to everyone else. One look at the humiliated face of the elegant Huma Abedin, spear-carrier for Hillary Clinton’s women’s-empowerment message, will tell you that.
While it’s possible Brown means to be sarcastic about “Hillary Clinton’s women’s-empowerment message,” we doubt it. The cover story of Brown’s inaugural issue of then-magazine Newsweek was a puff piece about “how she’s shattering glass ceilings everywhere.”
What accounts for the contrast between the disparagement of Huma and the reverence for Hillary? It won’t do to say that Mrs. Clinton is more accomplished now than Mrs. Weiner, for Huma’s now-critics treated Hillary no less kindly back then. No, the only possible explanation is the one the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple puts forth:
The distinction may have more to do with political gifts than marital particulars. Despite his high media profile, Weiner is a former House member who was the the lead sponsor of only one bill that actually became law. Clinton was a successful two-term president of the United States, and he went on to be the head of a global philanthropic enterprise.
So Hillary is admired and Huma maligned because Hillary married better. Isn’t feminism wonderful?
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