Was Hillary Clinton’s “Hard Road” to the Nomination Her Fault?
Posted: 02 Jun 2016 11:24 AM PDT

“Hillary Clinton was just profiled in New York Magazine by the gifted Rebecca Traister, who wonders if Hillary’s road to the nomination needed to be as hard as it was. In her piece, Hillary Clinton vs. Herself, Traister posits Hillary made her path more difficult owing to her “pathological” need for privacy and purported hatred of the beltway press. While she fairly reports Clinton’s gift for detailed policy and relate-ability with voters, Traister criticizes Hillary’s lack of buttery oratory, calling her “ungainly on the stump,” almost in the way one would criticize oneself in the privacy of one’s own bathroom mirror. This peculiar phenomenon seems reserved for women. We are all too willing and able to give men a pass for their shortcomings, with a dangerous predilection for style over substance. A meat-and-potatoes girl, I could care less for pretty campaign slogans absent the goods to back them up – a concept Hillary Clinton agrees with and rues simultaneously, for obvious reasons.

So should it not be this hard to be the first woman in history to secure the presidential nomination? If you detect sarcasm, you are correct. The answer to who is making it “this hard” is perhaps not who you think.

Traister’s profile discusses the press’ animus toward Hillary that began over 25 years ago but does not mention that press “youngsters” who now cover Hillary, eager for a rare unscripted moment, are also too eager to repeat grotesque tropes from the likes of Andrea Mitchell, Chris Matthews, Chuck Todd or Maureen Dowd rather than discover Clinton anew for themselves – while those press “dinosaurs” continue to diminish her at almost every opportunity.

Hillary Clinton is not in this contest in a vacuum. Throughout, she fought three opponents: her Democratic rival, Republicans who have trashed her for 25 years, and her most potent adversary: the Beltway press, who often acted as stenographers breathlessly repeating the most farfetched “scandal” because Trey Gowdy and Co. said so.

Hillary Clinton’s long held belief that women deserve an equal seat at the table has given mainstream press, among others, fits since she first hit the national stage decades ago. Let’s not pretend beltway operatives were otherwise neutral to Hillary, or that her need for privacy somehow created a relationship wherein they are predisposed to offer up only her negatives. Many of them chose to obfuscate her accomplishments for their own purposes. The lady is click bait and pundits have used her as such for decades, ripping everything from her wardrobe, to her infamous hairstyles and vocal quality. Bernie Sanders yelled throughout his campaign yet we didn’t have the likes of Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum writing articles about his “shouting problem.” Yet this is how we grade and degrade a powerful woman who is large and in charge….”