Infinite MonkeysHillary is gone yet sadly not forgotten. The former first lady and her husband will afflict American politics for years to come -- but perhaps never again from the Oval Office. That's a good thing. The chattering classes will debate what brought on Madam Clinton's demise for years to come, too. Was her defeat evidence of America's incorrigible sexism? Seems doubtful. Fact is, Americans don't mind electing women. We do it all the time. We've got women serving at every level of government and in every branch. We'll elect a woman president someday. God willing, her name won't be Clinton, though.
Read Christopher Hitchens' autopsy of the Clinton campaign. He doesn't buy the hooey about sexism:
People who favor Sen. Clinton are allowed to stress her gender and sex at all times and to make a gigantic point of it for its own sake. They are even allowed to proclaim that she should be the president of the United States in time of war only because she would be the first vagina-possessing person to hold the job. But — and here's the catch — people who do not favor her are not even allowed to allude to the fact that she is female and has feminine characteristics. ...How pathetic can you get?
My friend Lisa doesn't quite buy the sexism line either, although her reasons differ somewhat:
Blaming other women for refusing to vote for the chick, blaming younger women for being insufficiently grateful to their elders, blaming the patriarchy for what was, by many accounts, a stupidly-run campaign, blaming organizations for being insufficiently polite to a candidate, blaming the other candidate for being more compelling to voters ... ech.
Lisa is too kind. I reiterate: Few Americans would have reservations about voting for a woman. But many Americans had reservations about this woman. As Hitchens concludes: "Her whole self-pitying campaign... has retarded and infantilized the political process and has used the increasingly empty term sexism to mask the defeat of one of the nastiest and most bigoted candidacies in modern history."
Note how Hitchens doesn't qualify "bigoted candidacies" with "Democratic." Perhaps he's too kind.