Head girl Hillary knows best despite the Barack effect

Being a woman, one imagines, is a curse for Hillary and women don't trust a woman who acts like a man, writes Kate Holmquist

Being a woman, one imagines, is a curse for Hillary and women don't trust a woman who acts like a man, writes Kate Holmquist

WHEN YOUR own supporters start wearing buttons that say "Chelsea in 2018", you'd think it would be time to throw in the towel. Not our Hillary, who is determined to hang in there until June 3rd in the belief that the voters of Puerto Rico, Montana and South Dakota will save her.

Somebody has to tell Hillary Clinton that Da Nile isn't just a river in Egypt. However tempting it may be to take away her paddle, she'd only start canvassing the crocodiles for their support. Denial has always been something she's good at - she's the Queen of Da Nile, turning a blind eye to her husband's philandering for years. But there's another reason she won't accept her fate and concede that Barack Obama has effectively won the Democratic nomination - grandiosity.

She knows she can rescue America from its own ignorance because head girl Hillary knows best, even if it means allying herself to the white working class and betraying her traditional ethnic support base if she has to. It must kill her to see Democrats using their hearts rather than their brains by falling for Obama's killer idealism and charisma, backed up by a full two months in the Senate. Hillary doesn't have the charisma, she can't possibly overcome Obama's New Camelot - so why doesn't she just lay down and die? She's delusional in her self-belief because she is a particular type of feminist powerhouse typical of her generation. Tough, stocky and - one suspects - a bit of a bully.

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Always rational and pragmatic (even her tears appear false), she denied her true nature when she pushed her husband towards power, rather than following her own dreams. Obviously uncomfortable as first lady, she has never appeared comfortable since. There's a sense that being Billy's wife was humiliating for her - and not just because of Monica. She's always known that while Bill may be smart, she's smarter. Being a woman, one imagines, is a curse for Hillary rather than a blessing.

Just look at the early photographs of Hillary and Bill as students. He's much prettier. He's even got better hair. At some point, she decided that he was her ticket and that the two of them would be equals scaling the power wall - an idealistic fantasy.

In the background, she quietly nurtured her feminist colleagues in academia and held seances with Eleanor Roosevelt (or so it is alleged), always struggling to rationalise the fact that she'd lost her power the moment she helped put a womaniser, albeit a brilliant womaniser, into office. Women hate that. They don't trust a woman who acts like a man.

In Washington during the Clinton years, people were, frankly, intimidated. She and Bill demanded total loyalty. Asked to campaign for her wholeheartedly, a good number of them did so believing that even if she wasn't likeable, Hillary still had a great grasp of domestic and foreign policy.

How easily they were seduced by Obama's passion and rhetoric. If the Republicans had genetically designed a candidate who could beat Hillary, they couldn't have done better. Obama has stolen away the voters of colour, who Bill and Hillary traditionally regarded as their possessions. And Obama seduced many of the old-guard feminists. Why? Because the old dears remember the euphoria of campaigning for Bobby Kennedy and marching on Washington after Martin Luther King was assassinated. They want to feel, as well as think.

They're tough cookies, these gals. But they like a little romance, too. And wow! Obama has got them into bed without even having to take his clothes off.

So what does Hillary do when she sees card-carrying feminists becoming camp-followers headed to Barack's? She plays the gender card. Big mistake, but typical of the sort of pushy American broad she is. After decades of public life in which she has behaved so unemotionally, so rationally, so asexually and so bull-headedly that the press, at times, unfairly speculated on her gender identity, she turns around and says, the press are persecuting me because I'm a woman. Some agree: the New Statesman declared this week that the media have displayed "gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind".

Maybe that's true, but Hillary has no chance of winning that argument. With the press celebrating a man of colour, how could they possibly even have noticed that Hillary is a white woman? Obama has been so clever, describing members of his Benetton family as being white, black, multicultural.

He even says that some of his female relations look like Margaret Thatcher. By which he means to say, appearance (ie, gender) is meaningless.

Hillary didn't see that one coming. And she didn't because she's a dinosaur, trapped in a construct of what it is to be a feminist woman fighting upstream. She remained by Bill's side because she had her feet on the ground, while all along she has been reaching for the stars.

Today's Americans want to be true to themselves. They see her as having sold out to the Clinton political machine, when any feminine feminist woman would have dumped him after that infamous dress-stain. And, after years of George Bush and his oil connections, selling out for power is exactly what Americans don't want.

Kate Holmquist is anIrish Times journalist