The tragedy of being Hillary

So many of my liberal friends really....really.....really....HATE Hillary. Can you blame them? She's a mean-spirited, ambitious politician. She's artificial. She practices dirty campaign tricks. I've got proof, just look at some of the things she's done in just the past couple of months:

* She had to return over $150,000 in donations that were raised by a businessman who is being investigated for fraud, and with whom she's had shady business dealings for 20 years.
* She turned her back and pretended not to see Barack Obama at a recent Senate gathering, because she's so vindictive she could not bring herself to shake his hand.
* She refused to apologize after one of her senior campaign staffers launched a personal attack against Obama, in which he claimed that Obama's personality would make it impossible for foreign leaders to work with him. When asked why she had not fired or reprimanded this staffer, Hillary disingenuously replied "It's not clear to me why I'd be apologizing for someone else's remark. I have said repeatedly I have the utmost respect for Obama and have considered Obama an ally in the Senate and will continue to consider it that way throughout this campaign."

You can see what a horrible person she is - we should all vote for Obama! He's so pure, so wonderful, so fresh, so different. So inspiring. He'd never do the things that Hillary does. Except there's a problem with this judgment. It's wrong. Hillary didn't say or do any of the above. Obama did.

Why are we so willing to give Obama a free pass, and to assume the worst about Hillary? Obama has been connected for twenty years to Tony Rezko, the Chicago real estate exec who's being investigated for fraud, who arranged in 2006 for Obama to make a huge profit on a shady land deal, and whose $150,000 in campaign donations Obama has had to donate to charity so as to clear them from his books (you can read all about that here - (http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/obama/749138,obama20web.article ). It doesn't seem to matter, nobody (neither the media nor Obama's supporters) says "Boo" about Obama's shenanigans, while people are still going after Hillary for the phony White Water scandal. Obama turned his back on Hillary when she approached him with out-stretched hand a month ago at the State of the Union, and he's still admired by all for his warmth and charm, while we think her cold and aloof. Obama's chief of staff told the press that "no world leader could negotiate with Hillary because they can't trust her" and Obama (and the media) let it go, while Hillary fired one of her staffers for opining that Obama's admitted drug use may be a problem when campaigning against the GOP nominee in November. No matter what actually seems to happen in the campaign, Obama remains the "nice guy", and Hillary is the bitch.

Why do we hold this double standard?

This is what I call the tragedy of Hillary. She is the first woman to come down the pike with a real chance (not a Geraldine Ferraro chance) to become president. In fact she may be one of the most qualified and capable candidates we've seen in years. She's tough, she's experienced, she's wicked-pisser smart, she is one of the hardest working people in the Senate, she has compiled detailed policy positions on every domestic and foreign policy issue, she's very well-connected, she has tremendous name recognition, she is respected world-wide, she was re-elected to the Senate by a wide margin (doing well even in conservative upstate New York), and she has proven her ability to work with both Democrats and Republicans. What does this deep, rich and powerful resume get her? Not just the hatred of the Rush Limbaughs of the world, but the dislike and distrust of liberals and Democrats, even women! People accept and admire such a pedigree when it belongs to a man, but it's not enough for a woman. Hillary is smart, strong and experienced but she lacks a lovable side, she's not warm, she's not cuddly. It's okay for a man running for President to be intelligent, calculating, driven - but not a woman.

"It's not discrimination", my friends say, "I would love to see a woman in the White House, I just don't like Hillary." I beg to differ. It's not just Hillary, we'd be saying the same things about Maggie Thatcher, who served longer than any British Prime Minister. Maggie could not get elected here. We'd be saying the same things about Angela Merkel. I think that we hold a serious female candidate to a different standard than we do a man, and that is discrimination. There's even a name for it, it's called the Goldberg paradigm. Scientists have studied our gender bias, and demonstrated over and over that we judge the same work authored by "Joan McKay" to be much lower quality than when authored by "John McKay". It turns out that we judge a woman's work much more harshly, especially in a "man's world" such as science or politics.

I see the Goldberg paradigm being applied to our judgment of Hillary and of her campaign. My Obama-mama friends (and I should mention here that I voted for Obama, although I could happily support Hillary), tell me "I don't like Hillary, she's too ambitious". Of course she's ambitious, anyone who signs up for the grueling two-year gauntlet of a presidential campaign had damn well better be ambitious. I will guarantee you that Obama is ambitious, as was Bill, as was LBJ (LBJ dripped ambition). Is Hillary any more ambitious than JFK was? Why is it wrong for a woman to be ambitious? My friends say "Hillary's just like Karl Rove". All I can say is that anybody who thinks that Hillary's campaign tactics bear any similarities to Karl Rove's has a very short memory. Hillary has run a tough campaign, but she has been fair (does anyone remember Kerry's swift-boating? McCain's "illegitimate black child"?). Hillary immediately fired the staffer who mentioned Obama's drug use, Rove would have promoted him and then hired agents to plant crack vials in Obama's hotel room. Karl Rove would be insulted to know that people compare his Machiavellian dagger-in-the-dark campaign tactics with Hillary's.

I don't know if we'll get to the place in this country where we can vote for and even celebrate a tough, smart, experienced, ambitious woman, instead of demanding that she be warm and fuzzy and motherly. I don't see it happening any time soon. Meanwhile, there's really not much that Hillary can do (short of a sex change) to escape the tragedy of being Hillary. She's trapped in a solipsistic, self-fulfilling prophecy. We just don't like her. She's not electable, she has such strong "negatives". We're not ready to vote for a woman who has what it takes to be President.