In general, if you had only Penn’s memos to go by, you’d assume that Clinton was obviously superior to Obama in every way, and that all the campaign really needed to do to win was to display her virtues and his faults while avoiding any obvious pitfalls. Even if that were true, I would think that a good advisor would try to game out possible avenues of attack and prepare for them. But in the case of Clinton it was not true. (Here I don’t mean to say that she was worse than Obama, or had more vulnerabilities; only that she had some.) And that makes Penn’s memos hard to understand. You never serve your bosses well when your advice to them flatters rather than challenging them. And you really don’t serve them well when you collude with them in underestimating their opponents.
It’s now clear that her campaign was fatally flawed, that Clinton herself failed as an executive in the most basic rudimentary ways. So then, why the lionizing? Why Clinton as the champion of all that’s right with feminism? Why Clinton–specifically–as a vessel for the hopes and ambitions of so many women? The answer lies, not with Clinton herself, but with her tormentors.
Obviously, I’m not a Clintonite, but a certain tribe of white men have always evinced a visceral hatred of her which I can’t fathom. There’s a sexism there, but something more than that, something about the men themselves and their own failings. For someone who’s never been a flaming lefty, Clinton draws an incredible amount of venom. I may not completely understand why, but I suspect somewhere out in our fair country there are millions of white women who know exactly what that sort of hatred is all about.
From that perspective, Clinton is not a symbol of the possible, but of what these women have endured. If you see Clinton as a metaphor, not as an actual candidate, not as breathing, loving, fucking, eating, flawed human, but as the personification of all your strife, it almost doesn’t matter whether she’s a good candidate or not. Think about this notion that the sexism endured by the Clinton campaign is cause for a new woman’s movement. The frame is almost jihadic. The concern isn’t, How do we make sure that next time we pick a better female candidate, it’s How do we use the pain we’ve endured to our ends.
