by David Brock
Of course, even though Jeb Bush had actually, indisputably, broken the law, there was no rush to judgment, no rending of garments among his supporters, no antagonistic press conference. The headline on the Times story read, AN EAGER CRITIC TOOK TIME RELEASING HIS OWN RECORDS. It was buried on page A14. Never mind—except for Hillary.
So, what have we learned here?
We learned that Hillary Clinton’s e-mail practices didn’t break any rules—but Jeb Bush’s did.
We learned that what at first appeared to be a deeply damaging new scandal was, in reality, just another failed attempt to create one—those of us who smelled a rat from the start were proven right, and those who ran for the lifeboats were proven wrong.
And we learned, as if we need to learn it again, that when it comes to the way the press covers these kinds of stories, the rules are always different for Hillary.
Indeed, even as the initial story was falling apart, it gave Washington reporters an excuse to reflect on how things always seem tumultuous when Hillary’s around.
“The circus is back in town,” wrote the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty, complaining that “the spectacle of the Clinton White House years is unfolding again.”
And, of course, that spectacle, according to the conventional wisdom of the media, was no one’s fault but Hillary’s.
Chapter Twelve
The Haters and the Enablers
It’s impossible to talk about the right’s case against Hillary without talking about sexism. Sexism is in fact integral to the right-wing attacks we’ve just delineated—on her record, her character, and her personal biography. And it’s also integral to the Right’s antiwoman ideology, which a Hillary candidacy is uniquely positioned to expose.
Two decades have passed since the American Spectator dubbed Hillary “the Lady Macbeth of Little Rock” on its cover. The magazine flew off the stands, and in subsequent years attacking powerful women—especially Hillary—proved both a durable business model for conservatives and a way of amping up in the right-wing base’s hatred and fear of the social and cultural changes, and the shift from traditional gender power dynamics, they personify.
From practically the moment Hillary entered the national consciousness, there was never a price to be paid for pushing the envelope when it came to her, and so conservatives pushed it as far as their imaginations would allow. Hillary was the “the Winnie Mandela of American politics,” she was imprisoned hotelier Leona Helmsley, she was criminal mastermind Ma Barker—she was even Eva Braun. Her 2008 campaign, in which she threatened to break the last and highest glass ceiling, brought the right’s attacks on Hillary as a woman to the forefront.
On the campaign trail in New Hampshire, Hillary was met by hecklers yelling “Iron my shirt!” Conservatives sold LIFE’S A BITCH, DON’T VOTE FOR ONE T-shirts. A Facebook group called itself “Hillary Clinton: Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich.” And when a voter asked GOP candidate John McCain at a campaign rally in South Carolina, “How do we beat the bitch?” McCain just laughed it off.
On his radio show, Glenn Beck called Hillary a “stereotypical bitch” (and a year later, when he was confronted about the remark, he only walked it back so far as to admit that “probably a better word is nag.”) That B word was in the air all campaign long—from conservative activist Ted Nugent, who at a 2007 concert called Hillary “a worthless bitch,” to Fox’s Neil Cavuto, who speculated that Hillary was trying to “run away from this tough, kind of bitchy image.”
And time and again, whether it was Rush Limbaugh chuckling about Hillary’s “testicle lockbox,” Tucker Carlson ruminating that there’s “just something about her that feels castrating,” or pundit Cliff May suggesting that Hillary be referred to as a “Vaginal American,” conservatives couldn’t stop conjuring up images of Hillary as a man-eater in their campaign to demonize her.
Others found more subtle ways of calling Hillary Clinton a bitch. Writer Joel Achenbach suggested in the Washington Post that Hillary “needs a radio-controlled shock collar so that aides can zap her when she starts to get screechy.” Conservative author Marc Rudov went on Fox News to proclaim, “When Barack Obama speaks, men hear, ‘Take off for the future.’ And when Hillary Clinton speaks, men hear, ‘Take out the garbage.’” As he spoke, the chyron read, RUDOV: CLINTON’S ‘NAGGING VOICE’ IS REASON SHE LOST MALE VOTE.
When it wasn’t Hillary’s voice, it was her laugh. Bill O’Reilly discussed it with a “body language expert” who characterized it as “evil.” Sean Hannity called it “frightening.” O’Reilly also hosted a guest who warned of “PMS and mood swings” with Hillary in the Oval Office.
This is ugly stuff, and it reveals the unapologetic sexism and even misogyny that, unfortunately, still has a place in the modern conservative movement. These types of attacks obviously would never be leveled at a male candidate.
And, frankly, I doubt they would be tolerated against most female candidates. But the rules are different for Hillary. And in 2008, instead of calling out the right’s personal attacks, the mainstream media joined in.
It wasn’t just Fox making an issue out of Hillary’s laugh, it was the New York Times, which—in a news article mind you—referred to it as “The Cackle” and suggested it may have been “programmed.”
On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Mike Barnicle earned a round of laughter from the panel when he compared Hillary to “everyone’s first wife standing outside a probate court.” Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza, political analysts for the Washington Post, made a “comedic” web video where, wearing silk bathrobes for some reason, they guffawed about Hillary drinking “Mad Bitch” beer.
The Post wasn’t joking, however, when it published an article about Hillary’s cleavage, asserting, “The last time Clinton wore anything that was remotely sexy in a public setting surely must have been more than a decade ago.” Ten days later, MSNBC devoted six separate segments—a total of nearly twenty-four minutes of airtime—to talking about Hillary’s décolletage.
Also on MSNBC, Chris Matthews compared Hillary to Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; NPR’s political director Ken Rudin said she was Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction, comparing Hillary to a violent, psychopathic fictional character.
And when Hillary’s voice broke during a campaign event in New Hampshire, it wasn’t just Bill Kristol claiming, “She pretended to cry.” It was mainstream outlets like Newsweek calling it her “most famous moment of trying to be like an average human being.” Conversely, Dick Morris thought that the tears were real—and disqualifying: “I believe that there could well come a time when there is such a serious threat to the United States that she breaks down like that.”
And it wasn’t just Rush Limbaugh wondering whether “if her name was Hillary Smith, would anybody be talking about her as a presidential candidate?” ABC News anchor Charles Gibson asked Hillary point-blank, “Would you be in this position were it not for your husband?” And it was Chris Matthews (again) claiming, “The reason she’s a U.S. senator, the reason she’s a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around.”
After that remark sparked howls of protest and even an old-fashioned protest by women’s groups, led by Emily’s List, outside NBC Studios, Matthews issued a brave apology—and since then has admirably cleaned up his rhetoric. Matthews said:
Was it fair to imply that Hillary’s whole career depended on being a victim of an unfaithful husband? No. And that’s what it sounded like I was saying and it hurt people I’d like to think normally like what I say, in fact, normally like me…. On those occasions when I have not taken the time to say things right, or have simply said the inappropriate thing, I’ll try to be clearer, smarter, more obviously in support of the right of women—of all people—the full equality and respect of their ambitions. So, I get it.
So are all these well-respected media figures raging misogynists? Of course not. But by playing to familiar, even at times seemingly har
mless, sexist tropes, they enable attacks from the right-wing gutter, which has shifted the window of what is and isn’t acceptable to say about Hillary.
And then, of course, there is the matter of Hillary’s age. Despite the fact that on assuming office Hillary, at sixty-nine, would be younger than conservative icon Ronald Reagan—and is only five and a half years older than Jeb Bush—Republicans clearly think that age is a potent attack against a woman who would be president.
For example: Rush Limbaugh wondered, “Will Americans want to watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?”
For example: The New York Post reported that, appearing at a conference in California, Karl Rove “said if Clinton runs for president, voters must be told what happened when she suffered a fall in December 2012.”
“Thirty days in the hospital?” Rove asked rhetorically. “And when she reappears, she’s wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what’s up with that.”
It was a seemingly clever attack, combining a subtle suggestion that Hillary was too frail to be president with a more or less open accusation that she was lying about her health to gain political advantage.
Hillary, of course, was fine. She had been in the hospital only four days, not thirty. A Clinton spokesperson poked back, “Please assure Dr. Rove she’s 100 percent,” adding, “Karl Rove has deceived the country for years, but there are no words for this level of lying.”
And even Rove seemed to walk his comments back: “Now, is this going to be the issue of the 2016 presidential campaign if she runs? No, it’s going to be a minor thing.”
But Republicans embraced the provocation. Matt Drudge spotted a picture of Hillary on the cover of Parade magazine where, he thought, it looked like she was using a walker—a ridiculous claim, but one he nevertheless trumpeted with his infamous siren graphic. The “walker” was a patio chair.
“I think that health and age is fair game,” said Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus. “It was fair game for Ronald Reagan. It was fair game for John McCain.”
“She’s going to be old!” crowed RedState blogger and Fox analyst Erick Erickson, illustrating exactly what the GOP considers to be fair game. “I don’t know how far back they can pull her face!”
In his 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney frequently touted his eighteen grandchildren on the campaign trail. His comments passed without notice. But when the news broke that Hillary was becoming a grandmother, the reaction was entirely different.
The Hillary-as-grandmother story provided an opening for the media to speculate (once again) about Hillary’s age—the Drudge Report blared “Grandma Hillary”—about whether her grandmotherly duties would provide too great a distraction for Hillary once in office, and about whether Hillary would use the new baby as a “stage prop,” as Kyle Smith charged in the New York Post. “So play nice and don’t projectile vomit. Grandma is not what grown-ups call maternal.”
Steve Malzberg, host of an online TV show sponsored by NewsMax, said, “Pardon the skeptic in me… but what great timing! I mean, purely accidental, purely an act of nature, purely just left up to God. And God answered Hillary Clinton’s prayers, and she is going to have the prop of being a new grandma while she runs for president.”
Politico ran a story speculating that Chelsea’s pregnancy might even cause Hillary to forego a 2016 candidacy, asking, “Why beg donors for money at dozens of events a month when there’s a happy baby to spend time with in New York?”
All of which raised the question, posed by Aliyah Frumin on MSNBC.com, “of how we would treat this news if Clinton were a man.”
Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, told MSNBC: “There’s a disproportionate attention to her being a grandmother. Certainly, many men have run for president as grandfathers. And nobody worries if they can’t do their job.”
The right’s motives in leveling such nasty personal attacks against Hillary are as obvious as they are predictable. Much more confounding is when women join in the sexist attacks.
For instance, columnist Peggy Noonan has also compared Hillary to the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction. Then again, maybe she wasn’t Glenn Close. Hillary, Noonan wrote, “doesn’t have to prove she’s a man. She has to prove she’s a woman.”
Then there is Carly Fiorina, the failed former Hewlett-Packard executive and failed Senate candidate who seems to be running for president so that the GOP can launch gender-based attacks on Hillary while avoiding charges of sexism. Fiorina has accused Hillary of waging “a war on women” by using “identity politics to divide the electorate.” One of her standard lines, “Hillary Clinton must not be president of the United States but not because she is a woman,” is of course a not-so-subtle way of reminding audiences that Hillary is a woman. Fiorina also asserts that only a woman candidate, such as herself, can cut into Hillary’s support among women. “And I will say this, if Hillary Clinton had to face me on the debate stage at the very least she would have a hitch in her swing.”
But New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is the woman who has made attacking Hillary her stock-in-trade for the better part of two decades.
Relying on thinly veiled sexism, Dowd’s decades-long campaign not only reflects the misogyny of the right but also validates it.
By saying things about Hillary she would never say about a male politician, Dowd sanctions a double standard against her. And the fact that the Times gives Dowd such a prestigious platform for her anti-Hillary rants makes it that much harder to insist that there be consequences when right-wingers go overboard in their rancor. In this way, Dowd provides cover for crazies like Ted Nugent. And a great liberal paper like the Times becomes the top enabler of the Hillary haters.
If Dowd doesn’t share the conservative movement’s unhinged loathing for Hillary, she does a good job of faking it. In June 2014, Media Matters sought to quantify Dowd’s obsession, looking back at every column Dowd had written since 1993 in which Hillary received a significant mention. Out of 195 columns we analyzed, only 8 percent cast Hillary in a positive light. Another 20 percent were neutral toward her. And an incredible 72 percent of Dowd’s Hillary columns were negative.
In other words, over two decades, Maureen Dowd wrote 141 columns attacking Hillary Clinton. Media Matters concluded:
In fifty-one different columns (more than a quarter of her total output), Dowd cast Hillary as power-hungry, often in gendered terms. Dowd has called her a “controlling blonde,” a “debate Dominatrix,” a “manly girl.” She has written that “nothing but a wooden stake would stop” Hillary, and that she “moves like a shark.” For Dowd, Hillary’s “relentless ambition” dates all the way back to her 1969 commencement speech at Wellesley College.
In forty-three different columns, Dowd attacked the Clintons’ marriage, which she termed “warped,” “rootless and chaotic,” “transcendentally wacky,” a “repugnant arrangement.” “They seem,” she wrote, “like a virus or alien that needs a host body to survive.” The constant theme is that their marriage is a loveless sham, and that they won’t simply go away like everyone (or at least Maureen Dowd) wishes they would.
In thirty-five different columns, Dowd accused Hillary of betraying the feminist cause and trading on slights from men to get ahead. In 1999, she wrote that Hillary “was unmasked as a counterfeit feminist after she let her man step all over her.” In Dowd’s eyes, Hillary “got to be a senator playing the victim card”: She “won her Senate seat only after becoming sympathetic as a victim” and “because men abused her.” And as a senator? “[She] is now so eerily glazed and good-natured that she could be the senator from Stepford.” Dowd summed up her sexist thesis in a 2008 column:
She won her Senate seat after being embarrassed by a man. She pulled out New Hampshire and saved her presidential campaign after being embarrassed by another man. She was seen as so controlling when she ran for the Senate that she had to be seen
as losing control, as she did during the Monica scandal, before she seemed soft enough to attract many New York voters.
In thirty-four different columns, Dowd claimed that Hillary is insincere and fake: “The public,” she wrote in 2007, “still has no idea of what part of her is stage-managed and focus-grouped, and what part is legit. It’s pretty pathetic, at this stage of her career, that she has to wage a major offensive, by helicopter and Web testimonials, to make herself appear warm-blooded.” In Dowd’s eyes, Hillary is “shape-shifting” and “cynical,” and she’s made sure to use gender as a weapon here, too, comparing her to Sybil, the title character of a 1976 film about a woman with multiple-personality disorder, and on another occasion comparing her to Meryl Streep as a “master thespian.”
In nine different columns, Dowd explained why Hillary isn’t likable. Her “smile,” Dowd wrote, “is not connected to her face,” adding, “you might admire her but you wouldn’t want to hang out with her.” Dowd claimed that Hillary’s “abrasive and secretive management of health care doomed it.” And, she opined, Hillary was now “paying a fortune to try to buy the secrets of likability.”
In one 2015 column, headlined GRANNY GET YOUR GUN, Dowd addressed Hillary’s apparent problem of not being able to “figure out how to campaign as a woman,” chided her for “the foolishness of acting like a masculine woman,” while at the same time exhorting Hillary to show that “bitch is the new black.”
Go figure.
Clark Hoyt, the Times public editor in 2008, took Dowd’s coverage of that campaign to task, writing, “by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, [Dowd] went over the top this election season.” He noted that Dowd was listed in a “Media Hall of Shame created by the National Organization for Women. The Times reported on the list in a front-page article but failed to mention that Dowd was on it, and her rampage continued.
