Let Hillary Clinton roar

http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/13/opinions/let-hillary-clinton-roar-bordo/index.html

By Susan Bordo
Updated 3:54 PM ET, Wed September 13, 2017

Something very strange is going on in post-mortems about the 2016 election. On the one hand, the hard evidence is piling up that a combination of factors largely outside of Hillary Clinton's control were responsible for her loss to Donald Trump. On the other hand, many apparently don't want Hillary Clinton to talk about any of that.

Every day, we hear fresh reports of the extent and insidious nature of Russian interference in the promotion of fake news stories and nasty accusations about Hillary Clinton's character -- a smear campaign that was bound to have had an effect on voters' perceptions (why else would the Russians invest so much energy and money?). But when Clinton mentions the Russians, she's accused of shuffling responsibility away from herself.
Studies by respected think tanks such as Harvard's Shorenstein Center have documented a negative bias against Clinton in ordinary news reporting. This was not "fake news" but a daily, repetitive media buzz of (often GOP-inspired) "scandals" and "suspect" activity, which always had Clinton hiding something, from her basement server to her pneumonia. And this obscured coverage of her policy speeches and core messages.

But she dare not talk about that, lest she be seen as boo-hooing about unfair treatment by the press.

Pollster Nate Silver has published data highly suggestive of the disastrous effect of James Comey's eleventh-hour revival of the media's email obsession -- an announcement made just as Donald Trump's post-"Access Hollywood" polling numbers plummeted and Clinton's momentum revived. But when Clinton mentions Comey, it is taken as just one more complaint in a litany of "blaming others" for her own mistakes.

Instead we're told -- and what we're told Clinton herself refuses to acknowledge -- that the real problem was Clinton herself. It's usually a one-dimensional narrative. She didn't reach the "working people." She had no "economic message." She was too "establishment" in a year when people wanted change. She didn't go to the right states during the last week of the election.

And, of course, the old go-to: she just wasn't likeable enough. (Let us pause to recall here, that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote over Donald Trump by 2,864,974 votes.)
And now, because she's published a book in which she has the audacity to present her own multi-dimensional account of the election, she's being advised, by colleagues as well as pundits, that she should stop "re-litigating" the past, and that it's time to "move on."

Interesting that no one criticized the authors for "looking backward" when "Shattered," a book that puts the blame squarely on Clinton and her campaign, was published. Or when Bernie Sanders, who now suggests "it's a little bit silly" to talk about the election, published his own diagnosis a week after the election. Yet on Sunday, Susan Chira, in The New York Times, called Hillary Clinton "the woman who won't go away," and as I write this, the day after publication of Clinton's new book "What Happened," the annoyed, often vicious customer reviews are piling up on Amazon.

Why are people so angry with Clinton for having the chutzpah to tell her story? Gender certainly plays a role -- but words like "misogyny" and "sexism" require much more precise analysis than I can provide here (I get into it in my book), and without that precision are dull weapons that shut down people's brains.

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