Why Does Hillary Clinton Think We Want Elizabeth Warren to Be Vulnerable?

Hillary Clinton says women are “held to a totally different standard” in politics — and that it’s been that way since she first ran for office.

“You’re expected to be both strong and vulnerable at the same time,” Clinton said in BuzzFeed’s “Another Round” podcast that was published online Sunday. “That’s not easy to do.”

The Democratic frontrunner said it’s “frustrating” for women in “any profession” to be criticized for being themselves.

“It’s just so hard to get people to realize that, you know, we’re all different,” Clinton said. “We may all be women, but we all have our strengths, we all have our weaknesses. We get up every morning and do the best we can. And eventually people either get you or they don’t.”

Clinton said she faced similar sexist questions when she first ran for Senate in 1999 and again during the 2008 presidential campaign — but, interestingly, not during her time as secretary of state.

“Because I wasn’t in politics, people were really nice,” Clinton said. “They said all kinds of nice things about me, which, you know, I appreciated.”

But that changed when she announced her 2016 presidential bid.

“How is a woman supposed to behave? Well, how about the way she is,” Clinton said. “And then people have to figure out her as opposed to her having to figure out everybody else.”

Hillary Clinton: ‘How is a woman supposed to behave? Well, how about the way she is’, Dylan Stableford, Yahoo Politics, yesterday

Yup.  We definitely expect Elizabeth Warren to be both strong and vulnerable.  And since she’s only one of those things, we Democrats are darned lucky that she’s not running for the presidential nomination!

Heck, I’m not sure Warren will even be reelected to the Senate, unless she adopts Barbara Mikulski’s or Debbie Stabenow’s feigning-vulnerability thing. They did it so well that they have both had a cakewalk to reelection.  Mikulski, repeatedly!  And Stabenow, in a swing state!

What concerns me most about Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is that she believes, obviously unshakably, that what really matters in this election is herHer personality.  Her gender.  Her ongoing, decades-long war with the Republican Party, not about policy but instead about her.  It permeates every single thing about her campaign.  Because ultimately, yes, it does show, to use her words, the way she is.

One of the ways she is is a politician who is paying consultants exorbitant fees to advise her that she should be a guest on one after another comedy-skit show or women’s daytime interview show, and talk about herself and act silly.  But who apparently don’t advise her that, maybe, her actual problem is that she never actually engages in a back-and-forth discussion publicly about policy specifics and their impact, and that her vaunted toughness toward Republicans has almost nothing to do with the specifics their economic and fiscal policy proposals but instead in defending herself against their allegations of misconduct.

See?  She can go toe-to-toe with those Republicans!  Just not in explaining that, contrary to their incessant claims, this country’s most successful and creative period was when income taxes were far more progressive, and far higher for higher-income individuals and for corporations, than they have been during periods of slow economic growth.  And that it was during those decades that most of this country’s dramatic upward mobility occurred.

And that while, say, Marco Rubio makes patently ridiculous claims like that Uber couldn’t exist in any other country because only in the United States is it not banned by regulations instituted at the behest of taxicab drivers and taxicab company owners.  And even here in the United States it didn’t exist in Miami when it did exist in New York City because of those of those regulations that taxicab drivers had managed to successfully lobby the city’s government to kill Uber’s plan to that city.

Mm-hmm.  Only the likes of taxicab drivers lobby for favorable legislation and contracts.  Not, say, private prison corporations.  Although, of course, private corporations taking over government functions in exchange for payment to them of huge public funds and payment by them to, say, Marco Rubio’s campaign funds is capitalism!  And democracy!  Unlike taxicab driver and labor union lobbying.

And Uber operates not just in the United States but in cities all over the world.  Even in Scandinavia.  And also in Miami.  But it didn’t start in Miami.  Probably because of the strength of the taxicab driver lobby there.

For months and months after Clinton announced her candidacy, as it started to become clear that it wasn’t quite taking off as they’d expected, her campaign engaged in an intense attempt via political journalists to characterize her as a wonk. Repeatedly, sometimes several within a few days, there were articles describing her as a wonk.  Which, it turns out, now means, simply, a claimed interest in policy.  (Jeb Bush began to borrow the he’s-a-Wonk-campaign campaign strategy, also with some success.  Jeb Bush is not a wonk, but he is a Wonk.  Then again, he can explain why the left wants slow growth; it’s that it means people are more dependent upon government.”  The thing is, though, that he can’t explain why his brother wanted slow growth.  Or at least wanted much slower growth than lefty Obama has wanted.  Or, if he’s wonkish enough to know why, he has so far kept it to himself.)

After reading yet another Hillary-Clinton’s-a-wonk article, circa July, shortly after she made political headlines with an addition to her website in which she assured small-business owners and people who aspire to be one that she fully understood that the biggest problem in starting and then in owning a small business is federal regulation, and that she planned to get right on that as soon as she’s inaugurated, I said to myself:

Yep.  She’s a wonk.  It’s just that she’s a wonk who thinks small businesses are regulated mainly by the federal government, and  thinks that the locale and the nature of the business are irrelevant to the type of regulations required to start and then operat a small business.

It didn’t occur to her, apparently, to not condescend to small-business owners and aspirants, and state that most small-business regulation is not by the federal government but by states and municipalities. Much less did she think that maybe she should point out that, regarding small businesses, federal regulation usually supports them as against mega-businesses that control such things as credit/debit card payment methods and fees, and as against business-sector monopolies.  That’s what the Durbin Amendment and the Sherman Antitrust Act respectively do.

Then again, in order for her to do that she’d have to have the ability to do that, as well as the willingness to do it.  Bernie Sanders has the ability to do that.  And does do it. So does Clinton’s husband, even now; he did it, extemporaneously, on some complex subject—I can’t remember what, but I read about it—when he appeared recently on some interview show.  Granted, they’re both men.  But Elizabeth Warren is a woman, and she can, and does, do it too.

Hillary Clinton speaks only in soundbites because, apparently, she thinks only in soundbites.  And because, maybe after all, and for all her feminism talk, she believes that complex discussion of such things as the Sherman Antitrust Act and the level of its enforcement (or lack of it), and of Keynesian economics, and of the actual history of federal taxation, spending, and regulation—and the actual nature of federal regulation—are subjects only for male politicians to discuss with journalists for the enlightenment of the hoi polloi.

Clinton doesn’t have to show she’s vulnerable.  But, oh, she does.

And she doesn’t realize that it is she who is really the one with the gender bias.  Or at least for whom it will forever be the 1990s.