When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and daughter Chelsea announced they were collaborating to write The Book of Gutsy Women, I wrote that the work might prove valuable, if only someone else were to write it instead.
It was never going to be good. Hillary Clinton, the woman who tried to silence Monica Lewinsky and other alleged victims’ claims of her husband’s misconduct, is not the person to tell readers who a “gutsy” woman looks like.
Nevertheless, she persisted.
More than a month after the book came out, the mother-daughter duo is now on the publicity circuit, and if you know anything at all about Hillary, her latest comments won’t surprise you.
In an interview, BBC Radio 5’s Emma Barnett asked if Hillary had considered including Margaret Thatcher, the first female prime minister of the United Kingdom, in the book. Doesn’t she have the credentials to be called gutsy?
Hillary and Chelsea Clinton haven’t included Margaret Thatcher in their book of “gutsy” women@HillaryClinton tells @EmmaBarnett that Thatcher didn’t try to “make a positive difference” for other women
?Full interview: https://t.co/VqEUpMJ4jd#EmmaBarnettGetsAnswers pic.twitter.com/GDyYigC2pG
— BBC Radio 5 Live (@bbc5live) November 12, 2019
“Well she does, but she doesn’t fit the other part of the definition, in our opinion, which really is knocking down barriers for others and trying to make a positive difference,” the former secretary responded. “I think the record is mixed with her.”
Wow.
Thatcher, known as the “Iron Lady” for her powerful leadership against the Soviet Union and the ferocious opposition of British trade unions, has as much of a “mixed record” as any other politician. The only difference in her case is that it’s popular to criticize her. She still makes some Britons so irrationally angry that some fans of the TV show The Crown even took their ire at Thatcher out on the actress playing her.
What exactly made Thatcher such a hideous figure? To Clinton, one of Thatcher’s faults was that she was too … presentable.
“I thought it was clever of her to really try to mold herself to be more acceptable in terms of everything from hairstyle and speaking style to clothing style,” she said.
So, I guess we’re back to saying that commenting on women’s appearances is not sexist after all.
The positive differences that Thatcher made, Clinton argues, are not “that apparent.” If you don’t live in the United Kingdom, I guess it would be easy to forget that Thatcher’s steady guidance helped end the Cold War or that Britain’s economy was rescued from ruin on her watch.
Still running low on substantive critique to mask her blatantly partisan distaste for the Iron Lady, Clinton smeared Thatcher with another bad-faith argument: “And also, her view of politics, and her dismissal of the idea even of community — ‘there is no such thing’ — really struck me as being out of step with where we need to go, what kind of country, what kind of future we want for our good friends here in the U.K.,” she said.
Thatcher’s actual words were “there is no such thing as society,” and she meant quite nearly the opposite of what Clinton is putting into her mouth. What Thatcher specifically meant in her 1996 lecture was that society is no more than the sum of the individuals and families that comprise it. Her meaning was that there is no separate, larger entity that can bear burdens they cannot. Thus, she argued that there must be limits to what governments promise and that people must act as individuals to help their neighbors and communities, knowing that there is no magical government fairy that can step in to do whatever they cannot.
Thatcher put it this way:
This is basic small-government philosophy. It is actually quite similar to JFK’s famous turn of phrase about asking what you can do for your country, not the other way around.
But Clinton didn’t engage the argument, choosing instead to attack Thatcher’s character. For Clinton, a failed presidential candidate who called her opponent’s supporters a “basket of deplorables” and baselessly criticizes other women, that’s pretty on-brand.
