DOROTHY RABINOWITZ: A GLIMPSE OF HILLARY AS PRESIDENT
http://online.wsj.com/articles/dorothy-rabinowitz-a-glimpse-of-hillary-as-president-1403563803
It is hard to imagine Margaret Thatcher complaining, as Mrs. Clinton did, that ‘it was all about my hair.’
The past few weeks of Hillary Clinton’s book tour have given Americans more than a modest whiff of what a future Clinton presidency would bring. Nothing has brought home with more immediacy the role we can expect gender to play in that administration—or more to the point, the focus on anti-women bias about which we would evidently be fated to hear a great deal.
That would come as a change, after what will by then have been eight years of a different ruling focus in the White House—that being, of course, the president’s race. Years in which Obama administration staff members, congressional allies and advocates in the political culture regularly nurtured the view—when they weren’t making outright accusations—that vociferous opposition to this president, and his policies, was largely fueled by white racism. Jay Rockefeller (D., W.Va.) just last month declared that opposition to ObamaCare came from people who don’t like the president “because maybe he’s the wrong color.”
Attorney General Eric Holder in turn delivered himself of bitter complaints to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network in April about the lack of respect accorded him by a House committee. “What attorney general has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment? What president has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment?” Barack Obama had barely taken office, which he could not have won without the vote of white America, when his attorney general charged that the American people were “a nation of cowards” in their dealings with race. Mr. Holder would go on to attack states attempting to curtail voter fraud, to refuse prosecution of members of the New Black Panther Party who had menaced white voters at a Philadelphia polling place, and to become, in all, the most racially polarizing attorney general in the nation’s history.
A Hillary Clinton administration would bring change, yes, but much about the change would feel familiar. We were given a small foretaste last week in a statement by Lanny Davis, former special counsel to Bill Clinton and indefatigable Hillary supporter. Mr. Davis had taken offense at the press description of Mrs. Clinton’s performance on a National Public Radio program—one that had not gone smoothly for her. He was offended at certain language that had been used to describe Mrs. Clinton’s reactions when the NPR interviewer questioned the consistency of her support for gay marriage. Reporters had described her as “testy,” “contentious” and “annoyed.” Mr. Davis opined that “had it been a man, the words ‘testy’ and ‘annoyed’ would not have been used.”
Mr. Davis’s reflexive discovery of insult to Mrs. Clinton—to women—in those words comes as no surprise. The idea that certain words are demeaning to women, because they’re deemed unlikely to be used about men, is by now deep-rooted political faith. Many people were doubtless unaware, until Mr. Davis brought the odd news, that testy is a word not used for men—that hitherto standard descriptive words and phrases might now be subjected to close examination and be rendered illegitimate on the grounds of their potential offensiveness to women.
None of this would come as a shock to anyone with experience of the speech codes and all similar products of the ideological fervor on the nation’s campuses today—institutions of learning where any text, any class reference, can be considered harassment or gender bias, should any student raise a claim of discomfort. That ideological fervor wasn’t going to be confined to universities and colleges, and it hasn’t been. Determining the words that may or may not be used to describe a woman candidate for the presidency is only its bare reflection—the beginning. We will be seeing that fervor full-blown should Mrs. Clinton win election to the White House.
In her conversation with Diane Sawyer on ABC, Mrs. Clinton herself recalled the unwelcome attention to her appearance during her travels as secretary of state. People mentioned her hair, the scrunchie she wore to keep it in place. Try as one may, it’s impossible to imagine Margaret Thatcher complaining to an interviewer, as Mrs. Clinton did, that “it was all about my hair.”
There are other signs that the tone of a Hillary Clinton presidency would bear strong resemblance to that of Mr. Obama’s. Under questioning during her recent media interviews, the former secretary of state deflected all challenging questions—when any were put—with her characteristic unyielding aplomb. Whether queried on al Qaeda’s triumphant march to power despite the administration’s long-continued assurances that al Qaeda was a spent force—or about disaster in Bashar Assad’s Syria, or her own role in the Benghazi catastrophe in Libya—she exuded a serene assurance. And with it, the faintest hint of amazement that such queries should actually be put to her—a cheery puzzlement that anyone should think she had anything to do with what might have gone wrong.
“Let’s talk about what was accomplished,” she briskly instructed Diane Sawyer, who had asked about Syria and al Qaeda and Benghazi.
Mrs. Clinton could not at that moment have sounded more like the current resident of the White House. Or more like a future one who would be, much like her predecessor, a leader of boundless self-confidence. One also inclined, when presented with the evidence of catastrophic policies of her own making, to wonder what any of that had to do with her.
Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
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