As a scandal-plagued Hillary Clinton continues to flail, feminists have seen there’s a woman out there who’s cleaning her clock as a candidate, fulfilling their dreams of a powerful woman, except that she isn’t one of their own. She’s pro-life, pro-markets and very pro-power. And she’s causing a crisis among female Democrats, who long to embrace her, but can’t. “Carly Fiorina is the candidate I wanted Hillary Clinton to be,” said one wistful feminist. Another asked, “Can you love a campaign, but hate a candidate’s policies?” And a third noted, “As a lot of feminists cheered her on during that [debate] performance, we were loathing her actual policies. There’s an excitement and a horror that those two … co-exist.” But they do co-exist, and it’s not getting better. Which is giving the sisterhood fits.
Feminists tend to be cute when they’re mad, and they’ve never been madder than they are at the moment, when they’re seeing their long-held dream of a Hillary regency blow up in front of their eyes. Their problems seem to stem from three major facts: They hitched their wagon to the wrong star; they assumed female accord on all things, most of all on abortion; and they ignored what occurred in the 2010 midterms, which should have taught them lessons they chose to ignore.
As to Hillary, it’s clear now she isn’t a star, but a moon who shone briefly in the glow of Bill Clinton. He who gave her the exposure and chances she would not have had otherwise, at the same time that his escapades made her a martyr, a sure road into some women’s hearts. Minus all this, she seems clueless and charmless, with a sense of entitlement the size of Nebraska and a truly Nixonian penchant for lawlessness. Like Nixon, she has to work hard just to seem human, and she relies on focus groups to find “the real Hillary.” Alas, the “real Hillary” is all too apparent, and has been revealing herself for some time.
They thought, because they wanted to do so, that all women think the way they do, ignoring the fact that men don’t think like each other, or fight about what’s better for men (and indeed for all people) literally all of the time. And they chose as their litmus test the most fraught of all issues, on which many are not on their side. A small slice of the public thinks abortion should be outlawed completely; a much larger slice is extremely conflicted; and another small slice thinks that a baby has rights when it comes home from the hospital, as Barbara Boxer once said.
Thus, they want to force the 53 percent of the country which is female into the 23 percent or so that holds this position, which is an impossibility. When problems occur, they go into a rage or denial. Which leads us to point number three:
They might be less shocked if they’d taken proper note of the Tea Party midterms of 2010, when the balance of power in female politicians began to tilt the Republicans’ way. The parties each have three female governors, but only two — Republicans Nikki Haley and Susanna Martinez — are plausible picks for a national ticket. Democrats have fourteen female senators to six for the Republicans, but four of these were elected in 2010 and 2014, while many of the Democrats stem from the 1992 “Year of the Woman” and look and act like it. The young and the restless are not the liberals. The force and the future are no longer with them.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
