Hillary's curse

The consensus seems to be that two women, Senators Harris and Warren, did the best at last week's panels of Democratic presidential candidates, but columnist Michelle Goldberg warns against a pessimism about female candidates that could hurt their chances in primary season. Numerous women have told Goldberg that they like Harris or Warren best of all the many candidates, but don't think a woman can be elected President in 2020. Goldberg traces this pessimism to a perception that voters in swing states in 2016 rejected Hillary Clinton because she was a woman. "The more you think that misogyny undermined Clinton, the less inclined you might be to support another female challenger," she writes. If that's the case, it should be imperative to refute the misogyny narrative, yet Goldberg can't bring herself to do this. "Without the handicap of sexism, Clinton probably would have won a race that was essentially decided by a rounding error," she opines.

Loyalty to a woman whose political career is over could sabotage the candidacies of arguably more viable female candidates. To insist that general misogyny rather than specific criticisms and suspicions about a specific woman undermined the Clinton campaign in crucial places is to invoke a potentially paralyzing handicap that may not even exist. Feminists like Goldberg do the women of 2020 no favors by continuing to portray Clinton as a victim rather than a failure.

Since Goldberg regards Harris and Warren as, presumably, the best potential presidents, she encourages voters to overcome the perception that misogyny will cripple any woman candidate. In doing so, she adds a twist to the 2016 narrative, suggesting that Clinton fell short in part because people felt inhibited about supporting her openly. "Voters passionate about Clinton but wary of online harassment hid in private Facebook groups, which made it seem like there was no real enthusiasm about her candidacy," Goldberg writes, "countless women who voted for Clinton ... regret their failure to be public in their zeal." She then says, "It's hard to imagine that Warren or Harris would have this problem in 2020." But why should it be hard if the problem was misogyny. If misogyny drove the online harassment of Clinton supporters in 2016, why shouldn't misogynists in 2020 treat supporters of Harris or Warren the same way? Goldberg doesn't say, apart from observing that "most women don't want Trump to be president," but it's the closes she comes in this column to acknowledging that there was something different about Hillary Clinton that wasn't just a matter of misogynist perception.