Mark down Sept. 16, 2015, in the three hours between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. (in California), as the time the world changed. The next day, the news was that Carly Fiorina had dominated 10 other Republicans, tamed Donald Trump, and emerged as a viable presidential contender.
That same day, Hillary Clinton would also be making some news of her own by dropping 20 points in a month in her fan base of liberal women. She was caught in a “negativity loop” of three different problems: The news that she was playing to small rooms with empty seats in them; the news that Joe Biden was getting closer to running against her; and that Jerry Brown, (now 77), might be running too.
For the first day in 23 years, Clinton was not the dominant female in national politics. Since 1992, when she burst on the scene as a “new kind of first lady,” she had been the name and the face of political women, an inspiration to some, a toothache to others, and, as the only-plausible-first-woman-president of her day, the heart and the face of the feminist cause.
She still is a toothache to some, but feminists have to wake up to the facts that “the first woman president” may be a Republican; that Fiorina might win in a matchup against her; or that Clinton might even be beaten before this. She might lose, this time not to a charismatic and much younger bi-racial messiah, but to one of a number of wrinkled white men even older than she is, who first started running some 40 years earlier.
Perhaps none of these things will occur, but none is unlikely. The only thing known is that feminists are in for a very rough passage, from which they may not emerge whole.
“Don’t you someday want to see a woman president of the United States?” Clinton called out to Emily’s List, the abortion rights lobby, last March. The crowd roared, as expected, but no one asked her how she would feel about a woman president not named “Hillary Clinton,” or asked her audience how it would feel about a woman president who wasn’t extremely pro-choice. “There is a special spot in hell for women who don’t help other women,” Clinton told a women’s group months ago, even though she had campaigned for Democrat Bruce Braley against Joni Ernst, a (very young) grandmother and war veteran, in the Senate race last year in Iowa. Presumably, she had also opposed the bumper crop of Republican women — Kelly Ayotte, Nikki Haley, and Susana Martinez among them — elected in the past several years.
Clinton — and feminists — have always asked women of all kinds to support them in lockstep on the basis of gender, while assuming the right to oppose and eviscerate female politicians whose views aren’t their own. In 2014, a Gallup poll found that “Americans say the best or most positive thing about a … Hillary Clinton presidency would be her serving as the first female president” – 18 percent, topping “experienced” at 9 percent and “qualified” at 3 percent.
Needless to say, Fiorina views things differently. If Clinton were to run against Fiorina (or any woman), her campaign would at least have to change greatly and could even collapse. Fiorina, on the other hand, would run exactly the same campaign against Clinton, Biden or Brown.
As Clinton fades and Fiorina gains prominence, the contradictions of feminism will rise to the surface and demand answers. The era of Hillary seems to be ending. We are now in the post-Carly world.
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.”
