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Why, Hillary, Why?

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Clarissa

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Did she really say this? And if so, for what purpose? 

“Women will have no empathy for you because they will be under tremendous pressure — and I’m talking principally about white women — they will be under tremendous pressure from fathers, and husbands, and boyfriends and male employers, not to vote for ‘the girl,’” Clinton continued”

The statement is clearly dumb, offensive and counterproductive. Aside from everything else, when a 70-year-old grandma refers to herself as “the girl”, it sounds beyond pathetic. Clinton is not an idiot. Is she trying to sabotage her own party to punish it for not getting her elected? 

27 responses to “Why, Hillary, Why?”

  1. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    It’s not hard. It’s not about the past, it’s about the future. She’s trying to guilt the women who didn’t vote for her in 2016 to vote for her in 2020.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      It’s not a funny joke. It’s a cruel one.

      This isn’t going to happen, right? She won’t run again, right? RIGHT?

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “She won’t run again, right? RIGHT?”

        Of course she is, people don’t give up lifelong dreams after two failures….

        If the Democrats can muscle her out before 2020 then she has plausible deniability, but my assumption is that she’s running and that this book is part of it.

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      2. David Gendron Avatar
        David Gendron

        She’s younger than Trump, so why not?

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  2. Z Avatar
    Z

    I am a white woman and I rarely get pressure from men to vote in a particular way. My father does make rather aggressive comments about people who do not vote for the mainstream Democrat and would have been rather unpleasant had I not voted for HRC. If I hadn’t, I’d have kept it from him.

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  3. Shakti Avatar
    Shakti

    I’m curious as to why anyone expects anything productive or useful out of her “why I lost” memoir. Or why people seem to think she’s going to run again for President.

    FFS, nobody expected “useful” or “productive” political statements from Al Gore in 2002 or him to run again in 2004. Then again, Al Gore did gain about 50 lb and grow a mountain man beard.

    All of the memoir reviews are “My feelings about Hillary and the election, the comment section.” She could’ve put out a book of ipsum lorem and the reviews would have the exact same content.

    The freakouts are weird because it’s like they’re overstating her actual importance. Why in the world would a sitting president and his press secretary bother acknowledging his opponent’s “I lost” memoir?

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  4. djiril Avatar
    djiril

    She technically said it, but she was quoting someone else.

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  5. Pen Avatar
    Pen

    There was a lot of pressure for women to vote for Clinton because she’s a woman (especially college students — at least, the places I saw this the most were mostly frequented by college students). There was also a lot of assumption that women would vote for Clinton because of that. I don’t remember any pressure to not vote for her for that reason, though.

    But all this is unrelated to Clinton losing the election. Clinton won the popular vote. She lost because of the electoral college. Which is why there were all those protests in support of abolishing the electoral college shortly after Trump was declared president.

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. Z Avatar
      Z

      Yes, but it appears that the issue is, why she didn’t win bigger, so she could have won the electoral college. It appears to me that a man might well have also lost. Would another woman have been able to get into her position without creating the kind of animosity there was against her? I just don’t know, don’t know enough about all these counterfactuals, it just really seems to me that all the discussion is exhausting and not helpful. What to do about Trump’s activities really is more important.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “why she didn’t win bigger, so she could have won the electoral college”

        Mistakes in her campaign. She virtually didn’t campaign at all in some important states and spent too much time in states were her victory was assured.

        She ran way to the left rather than in the center (or from the right as her husband successfully did in 1992).

        There’s more but those are both more important than mysterious Russian bogies or Donald Trump not being nice enough to her…..

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        1. Z Avatar
          Z

          I agree on the question of where she spent her time. But she didn’t seem to me to run from the left–it seemed like a super-centrist campaign. And there isn’t just the campaign, there’s the record, and it isn’t left. Further to the right, you think that would have gotten more votes, and not lost more votes? I’d have said, be a clearer alternative.

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        2. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          There was too much vapid identity sloganeering in her campaign and zilch on what people really care about. She was preaching to the converted and not trying to convert anybody. She was so dedicated to winning the tiny minority of the small yet loud fringe that she disregarded everybody else.

          Neither she nor Bernie were offering anything even to people like me , let alone to Middle America. All that the Democrats are offering to me is not being Republicans. The Democrats can’t excite even somebody like me. They speak the language nobody but faithful adepts understand and aren’t even trying to make themselves understood. You got to be desperately willing to lose to come up with the term “single payer.” As a slogan, it has zero power. Go outside, stop people, and ask them if they want single payer. Isn’t it obvious that most will hear “single payer” as a vague threat? Like in “you’ll be this single payer, and pay through the nose, like always, without getting anything in return”? Hey, if you really want to lose, why not just call it “a tax raiser”? Just to make sure that no voter finds their way to you by mistake.

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    2. cliff arroyo Avatar
      cliff arroyo

      “Which is why there were all those protests in support of abolishing the electoral college shortly after Trump was declared president.”

      The electoral college cannot be ‘abolished’ by protests, but only by a change to the constitution which takes the type of long sustained effort that protests cannot achieve. Unless those people are working to pass a constitutional amendment then their protests are 100 % irrelevant.

      Alternately, since the apportionment of electoral votes is not determined by the constitution but by individual states they could seek to effectively nullify the electoral college by working for more proportional electoral votes in key states like Florida and Ohio instead of winner-take-all.

      Unless there are signs of people following one of these strategies their protests are entirely irrelevant.

      Liked by 1 person

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      1. Dreidel Avatar
        Dreidel

        @cliff arroya
        If you waste time scanning the drivel on websites like Salon.com and Slate.com like some of us do, you may have noticed that those websites are all excited about a supposed way to abolish the electoral college without a constitutional amendment.

        The scheme is called the “National Popular Vote” interstate compact. It’s a deal wherein states commit to send their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote — but only once states representing over half of all electoral votes adopt similar laws. Once that threshold is reached, the electoral college is effectively abolished, without a constitutional amendment.

        So far, nine state legislatures and the District of Columbia (of course) have passed this into law — BUT all those states did so when both houses of their state legislatures were run by Democrats. All but Hawaii had Democratic governors, and the Hawaii legislature overrode the Republican governor’s veto. Not a single Republican-controlled state has seriously considered the idea — AND since this idea is a compact of state laws with no force at the federal, level, any state legislature could reverse the law if it felt sufficient pressure from its constituents in any given election.

        In other words: It isn’t going to happen. The idea of abolishing the electoral vote without a constitutional amendment is a silly progressive fantasy — as useless as putting on a black Antifa mask and smashing in a Starbucks window.

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        1. cliff arroyo Avatar
          cliff arroyo

          ” The idea of abolishing the electoral vote without a constitutional amendment is a silly progressive fantasy ”

          The irony is that in theory, with online resources it should be easier than ever to organize constitutional amendments… but other factors mean that people’s political attention gets detoured into silly and meaningless actions (hashtags, facebook) that have no effect in the real world.

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  6. Z Avatar
    Z

    It seems to me that a lot of women old enough to have experienced even more sexism than me wanted her to win because they wanted to see a woman win this office in their lifetime and are now very upset. I think maybe I understand this but then again I don’t, as I don’t feel it in my gut the way they seem to do.

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  7. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    “She ran way to the left rather than in the center”

    Looks like you were observing the election in an alternate universe.

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      “Looks like you were observing the election in an alternate universe.”

      • When you look at it from the vantage point of a regular voter, it’s true, though. All identity and nothing on the economy or anything else whatsoever is how most people perceive the fringe Left. And that’s exactly what she did.

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      1. el Avatar
        el

        The exclusive focus on identity does wonders to support the view of the Left as privileged and cut off from the people. See the Right-wing propagandist portrayal of Leftist academics in ivory tower.

        After all, if you don’t focus on economy, it means you are rich enough not to care.

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      2. Stringer Bell Avatar
        Stringer Bell

        Sorry, one can’t have it both ways. Calling Bernie a one-trick pony who only talks about inequality and the economy (making him sexist and racist, obviously), and then when your identity politics shits the bed in a spectacular fashion, claim that was the left’s idea all along.

        The campus looney ‘fringe’ left that you’re referring to are mainstream liberals who have nothing to offer to people except safe spaces and vague notions of empowerment. This is not the left. These are rich, spoiled brats who would love Raytheon if only its CEO were a woman.

        Again, your terminology is confusing. Liberals and the Left are different and you often conflate one with the other.

        Hillary wing of the party = Liberal
        Bernie wing of the party = Left

        It’s not 100% accurate, but still, quite a serviceable definition.

        Liked by 1 person

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          I understand all this. But this is not a point that has been successfully transmitted to the masses. Unfortunately.

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          1. Stringer Bell Avatar
            Stringer Bell

            Oh, I agree. The masses (and Cliff Arroyo) don’t understand all this, unfortunately.

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            1. Z Avatar
              Z

              Actually, Stringer, I wish you would write an op-ed on this and start sending it places. It would be really helpful. You can market it as a response to the reviews of HRC’s book, or something.

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  8. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    The cycle continues.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-18/obama-goes-from-white-house-to-wall-street-in-less-than-one-year

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      The rich are getting richer.

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  9. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    I remember you posted about a police shooting in St. Louis last week. How is this not a premeditated murder?

    https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/908728894253096960

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Unfortunately, I’m very ignorant about the case. I haven’t been following it at all. There is a chance I’ll get to talk to the people who are organizing the protests and then I’ll be better qualified to say something.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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