At the last meeting of the National Conspiracy of Misogynist Pundits Conspiring to Pillory Hillary, I drew the short straw and thus the duty to explain how it was done. The meeting, of course, was held in the usual smoke-filled room with racy calendars on the wall. We used to drink boilermakers, but since the candidate took those up in Pennsylvania, we’ve switched to white wine.
Back on Jan. 4, right after the Iowa caucuses where Clinton finished third behind Sen. Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards, she still held a huge lead in the the delegate count, thanks to early endorsements from “automatic delegates.” (That’s her campaign’s term for what everyone else calls “superdelegates.”)
She led then with 169 delegates to Obama’s 66 and Edwards’ 47.
Since for months we’ve been saying that delegates are what counts, instead of the metric of the moment, we should have recognized right then that she had it wrapped up.
But we failed to see the obvious when she led in money and name recognition and was polling well ahead of other candidates: that she deserved to win no matter how things turned out down the road.
Doubtless we were blinded by our sexism in continuing to see a contest for the nomination. Some say that those of us who failed to support Clinton are bigoted chauvinists. Others say that the Evil Mainstream Media love long, close contests because those horse-race aspects increase ratings and sell newspapers, but whatever the reason, we all failed to point out how important Clinton’s experience was.
But I do remember that in 1992 she was campaigning hard in favor of a 46-year-old candidate from Arkansas who had never held a federal office. He was running against a man who personified experience: two terms in Congress, ambassador to the United Nations and then China, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, vice president for eight years, president for nearly four.
If Washington experience wasn’t important in 1992, how did it become important in 2008? And if it’s so important in 2008, why wasn’t she supporting John McCain, who’s been in Washington since dirt was invented? (Actually, four years as a U.S. Representative, followed by Senate terms starting in 1987.)
It must be sheer misogynism that makes anyone question such things. I’m sure that if she had been a male candidate, the snipers really would have been firing upon her when her plane landed in Tuzla in 1996. But guys being guys, they failed to oblige her.
And if the guy candidates had said their tall tale just slipped out three times because they were tired from a grueling campaign, we would continue to believe whatever they said because they were being victimized by the paleolithic knuckle-draggers who dominate political discourse.
Only the persistent power of the patriarchy could have forced Martha and me — both rural white non-college-graduates over 50 — to defy our demographic duty and trudge through 2 feet of snow on a subzero February night to attend our precinct caucuses and support someone other than Sen. Clinton. And if she had been a male candidate, of course we would have felt flattered, rather than insulted, when we learned from her campaign that Colorado was not a significant state and that our votes shouldn’t matter because they were cast in a caucus.
So there you have it, the inside story of how Sen. Clinton’s campaign was derailed by a bunch of jerks whose overt sexism made them pay attention to what she said and how she ran.
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) is a freelance writer, history buff, publisher of Colorado Central Magazine in Salida and frequent contributor to The Post.
