Hillary Clinton has no plans to go gentle into that good night, even if she is a two-time failed presidential candidate and continued headache for Democrats.
She wants to be involved.
Moreover, the former secretary of state suggested this week that it’s sexist for anyone, including members of her own party, to recommend she lay low for a while.
“I was really struck by how people said that to me — mostly people in the press, for whatever reason — mostly, ‘Go away, go away,’” Clinton said Thursday during an address at Rutgers University. “I had one of the young people who works for me go back and do a bit of research. They never said that to any man who was not elected. I was kind of struck by that.”
She continued, noting that other failed presidential candidates remained in the public eye even after losing.
“I’m really glad that, you know, Al Gore didn’t stop talking about climate change,” Clinton said of the former vice president. “And I’m really glad John Kerry went to the Senate and became an excellent secretary of state. And I’m really glad John McCain kept speaking out and standing up and saying what he had to say. And for heaven’s sakes, Mitt Romney is running for the Senate [in Utah].”
This is true. Those men didn’t exactly slink off into obscurity.
Then again, they also did a bit more after their respective losses than mope about in public, criticizing the people who didn’t vote for them and airing grievances against both ally and foe. Furthermore, when one of the aforementioned failed presidential candidates came close to pulling a Clinton, that is, taking a pointed swipe at a significant voting bloc, critics in political and media circles definitely recommended he shut his mouth.
Then-Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., did his party no favors in 2006 when he supposedly bungled his prepared remarks and said stupid students end up “stuck in Iraq.”
“You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq,” he said at a rally for California Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides.
The reaction from Democrats was about what you’d expect, especially given that the midterms were just around the corner: They were furious. One Democratic congressman told ABC News, “I guess Kerry wasn’t content blowing 2004, now he wants to blow 2006, too.” Some went so far as to suggest that Kerry was a liability to the party, and that his comments, which smacked of sour grapes, had jeopardized their chances of winning in the fall.
One of those voices was then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, who said, “I think we have to look forward here we don’t need to be re-fighting the 2004 election as much as President Bush would like that to happen. What Senator Kerry said was inappropriate and I believe we can’t let it divert us from looking at the issues that are at stake in our country.”
No one would blame sexism for these reactions. It was just business. Likewise, it’s unlikely that sexism is driving political and media operatives to recommend silence for Clinton, whose recent comments about Trump supporters, white female voters, etc., have been much more damaging for her party than anything Kerry said.
Clinton has a bad habit of seeing far-reaching conspiracies where there is only deserved criticism. The truth is usually far more simple than the theories she prescribes, and the truth here seems pretty simple: The people who are telling her to “go away” are not saying it because she’s a woman, but because, like Kerry, she’s mucking things up for a party that hopes to capture at least one chamber of Congress in the fall.
