Subscribe to Breaking NewsGail Sheehy: Why Hillary Lost
Hillary Clinton, conceding the nomination on June 7.
When Hillary Clinton conceded the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama in June, there were a host of post-mortems attempting to explain why the woman whose nomination was ‘inevitable’ lost it to someone virtually unknown outside of his home state only four years ago.
“Any campaign is a mirror of the candidate,” writes Gail Sheehy in her full-length examination of the failure of the Clinton campaign in “Hillaryland at War” in the August 2008 issue of Vanity Fair. “Hillary’s need for a bulwark against all the secrets she’d kept over the years prompted her to surround herself with a tight cabal of loyalists, mostly scandal-scarred survivors of the Clinton White House bunker,” Sheehy says, adding, “Hillary, as always, had surrounded herself with brilliant, egocentric, hypercompetitive men” — Harold Ickes, Mark Penn, and Howard Wolfson.
“It was impossible to find anyone who could lay out the hierarchy of Hillary’s campaign,” Sheehy continues. “Almost everybody had veto power, but no one could initiate. The group was about as effective as the U.N. Security Council. After Super Tuesday and Obama’s remarkable run of February victories, it was clear their arrogantly defended strategies had failed. They became consumed with trading personal invective, hurling expletives, and trashing one another in print.”
Sheehy recites what is by now commonly accepted wisdom about the Clinton campaign’s failures: the failure to understand the netroots and the new Internet-based modes of communication, to admit that Hillary made a mistake in voting for the Iraq war, and to contest the caucuses; the failure to manage campaign finances effectively; the failure to recognize how damaging the Clintons’ racially charged rhetoric in the lead-up to the South Carolina primary would be with the African American electorate; the failure to recognize how appealing Barack Obama’s message of change would be in a change election in which Hillary was running as the establishment candidate.
But the core of Sheehy’s post-mortem is her analysis of the role that gender played in the failure of Hillary’s candidacy. For all the talk about sexism doing Hillary in, it was the insistence of Mark Penn and Bill Clinton “that she not run as a woman” that, in Sheehy’s diagnosis, was at the heart of the campaign’s failed strategy. Contrary to the advice of Howard Wolfson, Harold Ickes, Mandy Grunwald and Patti Solis Doyle, “They ran her as tougher than any man,” Sheehy says.
Sheehy talks about Hillary’s campaign in a videotaped interview on the Vanity Fair website, “Losing Like a Man,” saying that Hillary came into the race “emotionally scarred” and “deeply hurt,” overcompensating by putting on a “hard exterior.” But in Sheehy’s view, Hillary “didn’t have to run as the toughest man in the race” all the way through and obscure her nurturer/rescuer side. The author of “Passages” expressed the hope that in the future, “a woman will be able to run as a woman in full and not run as a fake man.”
Oh for God’s sake Pauline – give it a rest.
Chris, thanks again for yet another constructive contribution to the discussion.
Obviously someone has to reign in your personal crusade againt Clinton. The primary is over dear, time to move on. There must be something in this campaign you can spew your biased, hyper-opionated and divisive rhetoric on instead of continuing to beat a dead horse. I’ve heard of penis-envy, but vagina-envy?
Chris,
“I’ve heard of penis-envy, but vagina-envy?”
How old are you brother? This type of retort is best reserved for the high-school hallway. You can do better.
Sincerely,
Chris, your obvious transgenderphobia will only discredit you in the eyes of progressive LGBT and non-LGBT readers of this blog site.
But I would point out with regard to your ‘vagina’ reference that my post simply quotes Gail Sheehy at length; it is she who says that Hillary “ran as tougher than any man.” As far as I know, Gail Sheehy has a vagina; what then, in your view, would account for her (feminist) critique of Hillary as running as a “fake man”?
Chris, I know what you mean, Pauline has a problem with a woman being so successful, but Hillary still is a threat to the far left and the DNC crowd
and this is the true reason for the new round of Hillary bashing.
Senator Obama, the DNC, Howard Dean, Pauline and a lot of other people know that Senator Obama has not clinched the nomination,
Obviously Senator Obama and the DNC know the best way to insure he doesn’t lose or look bad is to do what he did to Alice Palmer in Chicago when he first ran for office — try to force her off the ballot and keep her name from being placed in nomination.
I think you will find the true reason
there is a new round of Hillary bashing coming is
the last thing they want is Clinton’s name placed in nomination as is her right since she is still a candidate. And she is entitled to a roll call vote and the opportunity for superdelegates to vote for whom they want at the time — at the convention which is the only place it counts.
Pauline does more to help PUMA then any thing PUMA does. Chris, James Wither’s comments towards you I wouldn’t let bother me for a minute, he has openly lied on this forum and has also shown his resentment toward mainstream Gay America.
Oh good grief, Coty Smith. You’re a delusional Hillary fanatic. The woman has ended her campaign and endorsed her opponent, for goodness sake. Get the hell over it, already!
Sheehy’s analysis sounds right to me. I found the all the masculinity stuff coming out of the Hillary campaign to be downright offensive. The very idea that a candidate for national office could have a surrogate telling the media that she had three testicles as to her opponent’s one testicle was not just absurd, it was juvenile. Some of the effete and sissy rhetoric, moreover, crossed a line into being vaguely homophobic. I’m not voting for any candidate — female, male, or in between — who has herself portrayed as an insecure teenage bully.
I don’t always agree with Pauline, but I appreciate her bringing this intriguing article to our attention.
I just think it’s funny how the Obamabots feel they have every right to be haughty and nasty and those who still want to see Hillary treated fairly or oppose him are simply supposed to roll over! Ridiculous! Just like they have a right to believe in him, so do the 18 million plus of us have a right to vote McCain or not vote at the presidential level.
Obama is the PRESUMPTIVE nominee, unless the DNC finds a way to change convention rules.
Hillary will be on the roll call in Denver. I for one want it recorded in history how FL is half a vote each.
No candidate has the number of pledged delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot.
Then it will go to a second ballot where superdelegates finally get to vote and until then they can change their minds.
The Denver Group is doing a fantastic job.
to ensure the 18 million people who voted have a voice at the convention.
http://thedenvergroup.blogspot.com/
Hillary and 18 million voters still have rights at Denver to be heard and vote, unless the DNC
comes up with a way to lock half of the party out of the convention.
Coty, “haughty and nasty” is the perfect description for your comments on this page and those that you’ve made over the course of the primary season.
As for your charge of ‘Hillary bashing,’ no reasonable person who reads my post could possibly characterize it as such. As always, you fail entirely to address the substance in my post. All I do is quote Gail Sheehy — a woman and a feminist — and her feminist analysis of the Clinton campaign. If you were seriously engaged with the political process, you would be interested in understanding why Hillary’s nomination bid failed rather than attacking those who provide a reasoned and insightful explanation of that failure.
Your inability to respond with anything but hysterical invective says far more about you than you may realize.
And I thought it was the Republicans who had the corner on mean-spiritedness. All this post-primary whining from a minority of Clintonites (and it’s a small minority, let’s not be fooled by the tossing around of the “18 million” figure) is a huge disservice, not only to Hillary but every woman who wants to run for this land’s top office in the future. And there will be many.
And someday we will have a woman president. I look forward to that day and I see all the current sniping from sore losers as a counter-productive distraction from what we are actually experiencing in the USA: a wresting away from the tyrants the tight strangle hold they’ve had on us all. Long overdue.