The elephant in the room for Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign is the fact that women are harder on other women.
This goes deeper than lingering fears of another marital scandal during a Rodham Clinton Presidency. The media doesn’t ask, for example, whether America is ready for another Oval Office affair. Rather, it poses the question over and over again, “Is America ready for a _woman_ President?”
As far as I can tell, no one has come up with a good answer.
Watching someone not unlike themselves become successful is perhaps more than most women can bear. It is deeper than envy, it’s regret over opportunities lost.
Most of the women I know desperately want independence and self-sufficiency. Hillary Clinton or Martha Stewart serve less as role models than as modern day Marie Antionettes, indulging in a public feast while their sisters are ravenously hungry. It makes people angry, not at the individual, but at their own fate.
So, if I were Hillary Clinton, I’d make this a major campaign issue: providing opportunities to women, whether it’s judicial rigor to protect victims of abuse, or a pledge to enforce already-existing laws to promote women-owned businesses.
This might help the rest of us to relate to Senator Clinton as someone who is empathetic to the majority as opposed to a self-righteous do-gooder who would use her authority for the benefit of a few.