I rise to defend women voters. . . against an unfair description of us by none other than the woman who was supposed to be the first female occupant of the Oval Office. Fox reports:
During her appearance in India over the weekend, Clinton claimed she lost the 2016 presidential race in part because white women didn’t stand up to the men in their lives pressuring them to vote for Donald Trump.
“We do not do well with white men and we don’t do well with married, white women,” Clinton said at a conference in Mumbai, India. “And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”
Women, including women who voted for Mrs. Clinton, should be offended at the glaring lack of respect for American women in this statement.
Mrs. Clinton seems to be saying that a large enough percentage of us to sway a presidential election are not capable of making up our own minds and following through and instead rely on men to tell us how to vote.
You may recall that Mrs. Clinton wore the suffragette color–white–when she gave her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, homage to the women who fought for a woman's right to vote.
If Mrs. Clinton's comments in India ( a country that seems not to bring out the best in liberal North American politicians) were correct, it would mean that the suffragettes were actually fighting so their husbands could have two votes.
The Wall Street Journal characterizes Mrs. Clinton's remarks this way:
Mrs. Clinton was supposed to be the first female President who rose as the feminist champion for the aspirations of all American women. Yet it turns out she really believes that any woman who voted against her must have been a mental or emotional prisoner of some man, trapped in a kind of political purdah.end indent
Mrs. Clinton did not stop with offending half the population. In general, she characterized those who voted for her opponent as people who “didn’t like black people getting rights . . . don’t like women, you know, getting jobs . . . don’t wanna, you know, see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are.”
Mrs. Clinton also commented on how economic status played into the 2016 election:
There’s all that red in the middle, where Trump won. But what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. . . .So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.
So much for ordinary Americans. The Wall Street Journal's Jason Willick shows what a seismic shift from Democratic Party history Mrs. Clinton's India speech represented:
But now Mrs. Clinton herself has endorsed the “economic anxiety” thesis, albeit in a backhanded way. She sees her electoral disappointment in economically downscale regions not as a political failure but a source of validation—and, apparently, an indication of those voters’ failings. Similarly, last September she told Vox that the Electoral College is “an anachronism” in part because “I won in counties that produce two-thirds of the economic output in the United States.” Should those voters have more of a say?
Since Andrew Jackson, the Democratic Party has usually been identified as the party of the “common man,” and its adversaries as defenders of wealth and economic privilege. Jackson earned that reputation for his party by reducing property qualifications for the franchise for white men. But the Democrats’ most recent standard-bearer sounds an awful lot like the 19th-century conservatives who thought political representation should be tied to wealth. This is a significant moment in America’s partisan realignment. end indent
My bolding.
In fairness, even Mrs. Clinton's allies found her comments in India cringeworthy.