Hillary Clinton: Victim of Her Own Success

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/29/opinion/hillary-clinton-victim-of-her-own-success.html

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Durham, N.H. — One of the most powerful ironies in a political season full of perversities is a paradox that now defines Hillary Clinton’s campaign: The first female presidential candidate to overcome the obstacles that sank every single woman before her now confronts criticism for overcoming those very same difficulties.

Let’s start with money. Women have long been pushed aside for not having enough to run a presidential campaign. In 1987, Representative Patricia Schroeder of Colorado concluded her brief presidential campaign by admitting, “The bottom line is, the money’s not there.” Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine tried to take the high road in 1964 by eschewing campaign donations, a decision that crippled her ability to compete effectively in the Republican primaries. She lost handily. Senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, despite a sterling résumé, bowed out of a 2000 Republican presidential race shaped by “money in the bank and ads on the airwaves,” as she put it, that could not be combated with “inadequate funding.”

Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, has twice built a sizable war chest through prodigious fund-raising from Wall Street donors and “super PACs,” just as her male counterparts and opponents have always done. But her success in doing so has fueled charges that she is a captive of financial interests and all too willing to exploit a corrupt system of campaign financing.

Part of what made fund-raising so difficult for women were the prevailing doubts that they could secure the nomination of their party, let alone win a national campaign. There were good reasons for such skepticism. When Senator Smith ran for president, over 40 percent of Americans said they would not vote for a woman for president even if she was “well qualified” and nominated by their own political party.

Mrs. Clinton decisively changed that assumption with her strong showing in 2008. Yet the confidence invested in her by party leaders and elites now stokes criticism that she is “too establishment,” too cozy with Washington insiders and too comfortable with those who have sought to leash insurgent forces within the Democratic Party. Her determined effort to overcome the impediments that waylaid other women who have sought the presidency now offers fresh evidence to critics that she is driven by a craven thirst for power.

Then there is Mrs. Clinton’s career in public service, unrivaled by any female presidential candidate — and almost any male president. Even Mrs. Smith, who served in the Senate longer than any woman in the 20th century, never acquired such clout or standing within her party.

Yet Mrs. Clinton’s pathway through public life has also tied her to what some consider the mistaken domestic policies of her husband’s administration — a forestalled health care reform initiative, a crime bill that contributed to mass incarceration, and an overhaul of welfare that further impoverished some of the poorest Americans. The first woman to be truly competitive as a presidential candidate is thus tagged as an old school insider more often than as a path breaker.

One of the most insidious obstacles confronting female candidates, historically, has been the belief that they lack by nature or experience the capacity to oversee foreign policy. Mrs. Clinton broke through in 2008, when primary voters, according to polling, said she would be a better commander in chief than her opponents in the Democratic race. As secretary of state, she played a central role on the Obama foreign policy team.

In the current campaign, however, her critics blame her for what they portray as failures in the foreign policy of the Obama administration. Their dismay over her handling of her email supposedly demonstrates that she cannot be trusted with national security. One doesn’t have to defend her decisions to suggest that men who have made similar choices in similar situations — former Secretary of State Colin Powell comes to mind — have been spared this sweeping judgment.

Time and again, Americans have deemed men worthy of the White House if they could succeed on the national political stage, raise sufficient money, rally the support of party leaders, appeal to voters and point to domestic and foreign policy experience. That these assets are suddenly negatives, at the very moment that a woman finally achieved them, is curious, to say the least.

In 1872, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to seek the presidency. Her campaign was greeted with curiosity, enthusiasm and a firestorm of complaints from her critics. Among them was Harriet Beecher Stowe, who asked if a woman who survived the rigor of a campaign — “an ordeal that kills a man” — was the “kind of a woman that we would want to see at the head of our government?” A century and a half later, we may have a woman running for president, but she continues to face that same question in 2016.