The two women to have announced their official campaigns to run for president, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Carly Fiorina, have so far won little support from some of the most influential voices of the 2016 campaign: the women of the national op-ed pages.
Even while the historical implications of the first female U.S. president hang in the air, the writers, including the ones who have a clear political ideology, have shown nearly negligible support for either candidate.
Last week, Washington Post liberal columnist Ruth Marcus hit both Fiorina and Clinton in separate columns. She said that Fiorina, a former Hewlett-Packard CEO, is benefitting from sexism. “I’m writing about Fiorina because, frankly, as a woman, her candidacy offends me,” Marcus wrote in one piece. “It’s not sexist to criticize Fiorina for being unqualified. What would be sexist is to hold her to a lower standard than a man with similarly paltry credentials.”
On Clinton, Marcus dinged the former secretary of state for declining to answer any substantial questions from the news media. “If you don’t want to deal with reporters, don’t run for president,” she wrote.
In April, Kathleen Parker, conservative writer for the Post, wrote on Clinton that “ovaries matter no more to me than another’s testicles, if we must stoop to such symbolism.” On NBC’s “Meet the Press” in May, however, she offered some praise for Fiorina, calling her a “viable candidate.”
Fiorina has been Clinton’s harshest critic among the field of GOP 2016 hopefuls. She cites her business career as her main selling point, though she was fired from the top job at Hewlett-Packard in 2005.
Liberal New York Times columnist Gail Collins said Fiorina is “an excellent example of why we don’t want the country to be run like a business.” But her assessment of Clinton, who is currently embroiled in a series of scandals involving her tenure as secretary of state, was hardly better. “There won’t be a new Hillary,” Collins wrote in March, before Clinton officially launched her campaign. “What voters can hope for is the best possible version of her flawed self.”
Maureen Dowd, also of the Times, has not written about Fiorina but has been a steady critic of Clinton since before she even officially launched her campaign. In an April column, Dowd called Clinton “a low-key lady who doesn’t stand for anything except low-keyness.”
Wall Street Journal Republican columnist Peggy Noonan is also a regular critic of Clinton and her status as a feminist symbol among Democrats. In March, Noonan wrote that “the idea of the first female president in a party increasingly preoccupied with identity and gender politics is a powerful ideological glue.”
But Noonan has only mentioned Fiorina once, as a passing reference in a column about Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz. “Republicans will have Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio and probably John Kasich duking it out,” she wrote in March. “Add Carly Fiorina, and some others.”
