Not long after the election, the front page of the Washington Post featured a wonderful piece about how Bill and Hillary Clinton lost touch with their home base and with it the White House; along with that came a number of other good stories about how and why. So far so good, as the paper’s A section featured its A team of political reporters and writers. But then came the B and C sections with the B and C teams, which were all p.c. and quivering feelings and throwing around sand. There was sob after sob and piece after piece about the deep wracking grief that coursed through all right-thinking people, as the dream of anointing the First . . . Woman . . . President slowly but certainly sank.
And so it went on in print and on websites and the stories were always the same. They were of the old, kept barely alive by the great hope of seeing a woman in the nation’s highest office, and of the young, taken by parents to be part of the historic moment, allowed to engage in the quasi-religious experience of filling the check-box on the ballot or pulling the lever themselves. In the evening, little girls gathered, and perhaps went to bed, thinking they were winning. And then came the dawn. “Now What Do I Tell My Daughters?” ran a story in Fortune, describing months spent building up to the historic great moment. Children were told to expect to see history. “I was supposed to wake her up around midnight with happy tears and champagne.” It was like waking up Christmas morning to find that someone had stolen the furniture. Santa had taken away toys, not brought them, stockings had been stuffed with coal. “What this taps into is the most primal parenting fear. I can’t protect you from everything,” one parent in the Washington Post‘s Style section had mourned.
Some phrased it in terms of a death in the family: Something unexpected and bad had occurred for no reason, or for reasons no one could explain. Actually, there were many ways that one could explain it, but they were hard to see through the tears. One was that a lot of people who didn’t like Donald J. Trump had voted for him, because they had some pretty big problems that nobody else had thought to consider. Another was that Hillary Clinton had lost the election because she was a very bad candidate who had run a complacent, misguided campaign.
What people should have been telling their daughters, if they wanted them to grow up to understand anything, is that Hillary Clinton didn’t lose the election because life is unfair. She lost it because she had more baggage than the carousel at a major airport, a paranoid streak that rivaled the one last seen in Richard M. Nixon, and a sense of entitlement, encouraged by her fans and her supportive if often unfaithful husband—a set of liabilities that vastly exceeded her skills. She was bright, she worked hard, and she worked for the right things as she saw them, but she was also dishonest and greedy, traits she might have controlled had she stayed in the Senate. But when she moved to the Obama cabinet the temptations became overwhelming, and to her eternal discredit she slipped.
Because she was secretary of state and did government business on an insecure email server, she opened herself to criminal charges, and when this was discovered, she lied. The public was in no mood to give her the benefit of the doubt because back when they were first getting to know her, she had lied also, about the use of insider trading to make a profit of $100,000 in cattle futures as the first lady of Arkansas, which she had tried to explain away as something she had learned to do by reading the Wall Street Journal at night. This tied her untruthfulness into her greediness, another recurring theme in her story that undercut the image of the conscientious do-gooder she was trying so hard to project.
While in the White House, the Clintons were accused of “renting out the Lincoln Bedroom” for campaign donations, and when they left the White House in 2001 they took along with them a lot of furnishings they had not brought with them and, though both soon were making millions of dollars, set up a gift registry to relieve them of the burden of paying to furnish the two new estates—just off Embassy Row in D.C. and in New York’s Westchester County—that they were buying or bought.
In the window between the time she left the State Department in 2013 and formally announced her candidacy almost two years later, she racked up a staggering $22 million in lectures, charging the people she spoke to around $250,000, and which she did up until the very last minute, though well-wishers around her were urging restraint. The move to State also opened up new problems concerning the Clinton Foundation and donations to it, as the benefits of buying the goodwill of the husband of a United States senator paled in comparison to having the ear of the spouse of someone making decisions affecting every part of the world. Bill Clinton’s speech fees exploded exponentially with his wife in the cabinet, sometimes reaching $750,000 and assuring that the aura of greed would permanently envelop the pair of them, making it hard to run a positive campaign based on character or exploit similar weaknesses in the character and career of the man who she was running against.
The Clintons’ character failings, together and separately, would cancel out those of Trump and make the two sides seem equal—Bill’s female accusers vs. Trump’s female accusers, Trump’s greed vs. Hillary’s, and the lies of all three about practically everything would deprive her attacks upon Trump much of their force. After she lost, Hillary would blame FBI head James Comey for cutting short her momentum with his letter to Congress before the election about the possibility of new information that had surfaced reviving the email investigation. But without her behavior, there would have been no case at all and no emails to surface. And if her aide, friend, and protégée hadn’t married a man whose favorite pastime was sending pictures of his genitals over the Internet to very young women, investigators wouldn’t have seized his laptop, a complication one cannot imagine these mothers who write for the Post and for Fortune having tried to explain to their girls.
Clinton’s loss means that the First Woman President, when we do get one, will be a much better deal for the world. Hillary’s rise was both derivative and celebrity driven. And one way or another, her career always happened because she was Bill Clinton’s wife. It was as Bill Clinton’s wife that she burst on the world as a “new kind of First Lady,” as Bill Clinton’s wife that she lost both houses of Congress for her husband and party in 1994, as Bill Clinton’s wife that she emerged as the woman wronged in the epic impeachment-and-Monica scandal, and it was as Bill Clinton’s wife that she ran for the Senate with all of the force of the White House behind her and won election in a state she never had lived in, as compensation for all she’d been through.
In the Senate, she turned into herself; it was a good fit for her gifts and she ought to have stayed there, but as Bill Clinton’s wife she was hooked on their common idea that they both should be president; and it was his presence and influence as his party’s most recent president that made her at once the frontrunner. It was as herself that she lost to Barack Obama, and the story repeated itself eight years later, her political instincts and skills not being up to the demands of a grueling two-year national campaign.
This is not the path of your normal career politician, and when we do get a first woman president, she will most likely decide to do it the old way, deciding to run, defining her program, finding her allies, climbing the stairs one by one. She will also not run as the First Woman President, but more as John Kennedy ran in 1960, not as the First Catholic President out to crack ceilings, but as a senator who asked for no more than a fair break from the voters and didn’t want what he thought an irrelevant issue to stand in his way. The good news is that eight years after Kennedy won, after a campaign that had its share of stories of tunnels to Rome, two other Catholics ran for president—his own brother Bobby and ex-seminarian Eugene McCarthy—to no comment whatever about their religion. Since then, Catholics and others have been running for president, and no one has batted an eye.
The other good news is that right behind Hillary (and in most cases, not remotely inspired by her) is a large group of women in both major parties who have risen in the profession without president-husbands and the truckloads of baggage: governors Nikki Haley and Susana Martinez, recently defeated senator Kelly Ayotte, who may be planning a comeback, Senator-elect Tammy Duckworth, who lost both of her legs in Iraq. Proponents of the girl-power, girls-can-do-anything school should look very hard at the cadre of veterans: Duckworth, Tulsi Gabbard, Joni Ernst, and especially Martha McSally, a retired Air Force colonel, first woman to head a USAF fighter squadron, first American woman to fly in combat. If you want someone promoting girl power, there’s no better example than that.
How do those women and girls now lamenting not understand what a bubble it is that they live in, what a minority they are and have been in this country, which for a great many months has viewed this election not with awe and excitement and wonder, but with apprehension and fear and disgust? That focus groups could turn up not one participant who could say one good thing about either contender? That both candidates’ unfavorable ratings were in the sixties? That polls showed both contenders were disliked and distrusted? That most of the people who voted for Clinton or Trump did so only with grave reservations, and spent much time wondering just which of these evils was the lesser one? Hillary Clinton did not lose because of misogyny or backlash or hatred of women, but because 67 percent of the country, women included, thought her dishonest, and with good reason.
For all of the tears in the blogs and the B and C sections, her feminist creed and her personal reputation were a gigantic turnoff for millions of voters, who were not devastated at all on Wednesday morning, had nothing to explain to their non-shell-shocked children, but were simply relieved the election was over, and calmly went on with their day.
Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Washington Examiner.
