All day today, the contributing editors will be offering different takes on why Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic primary despite having started as the prohibitive favorite. These essays approach the question from differing angles and are not for the most part mutually exclusive, but attempt to address specific pieces of the complexity of this massive, drawn-out primary process.
I first noticed the nutcracker in late December, next to a rack of doomed "Rudy for President" shirts at a National Airport kiosk specializing in ephemeral topical kitsch. At the time, I was taken aback at the sheer misogynist chutzpah of the product, but I figured that it was a niche political product being sold at a niche political store in a niche political city -- Washington -- and that it would disappear from the shelves in a couple weeks, relegated to fringe online backwaters like the Newsmax store. Yet the nutcracker spread from DCA through the airports of the nation like a tacky virus, and soon one couldn't clear security anywhere without being confronted with its stainless steel thighs. Eventually, the nutcracker escaped from the sterile zones and its TSA protection into mainstream American retail, and became minor fodder for late night comics and "wacky news" types like CNN's Jeannie Moos. But the nutcracker never became a serious news or commentary item -- there was very little discussion, at least in the mainstream media, of what the novelty, and its apparent popularity, said about the 2008 campaign or about the nation itself.
And that was the most remarkable aspect of the nutcracker blight: the manner it which it was just accepted. Here we had a blatantly sexist product which traded on one of the most misogynistic archetypes of the last 50 years -- the castrating, pantsuit-wearing, hyper-ambitious professional woman -- being sold in otherwise anodyne, apolitical stores throughout the country, and no one with a serious microphone was saying anything about it. Anyone with a hint of consciousness about gender politics had to be asking themselves what the hell the deafening silence meant. Is America irredeemably sexist? Does the fact that a similarly racist Obama doll couldn't be sold without massive public outrage mean that casual sexism is more tolerated than casual racism? Would any woman running for president be subject to the same mockery, or is Hillary somehow more susceptible than other female politicians?
I wouldn't begin to presume to try and definitively answer those questions, or to seriously decipher the semiotics of the nutcracker -- at least not in an essay as brief as this. The deeper meaning of the nutcracker is extremely complicated, and myriad intelligent people can and likely will construct wildly divergent hypotheses about its importance and message. But I can, without any hesitation or reluctance, conclude that the existence of the Hillary Nutcracker is symptomatic of a contempt that seriously compromised Hillary Clinton's electoral chances. Regardless of whether people wanted to dehumanize Hillary Clinton personally, or ambitious women generally, the nutcracker was symbolic of their endeavor. Regardless of whether any woman would have been as open to the mainstreamed sexist attacks to which Hillary was subjected, the nutcracker showed that in 2008, it was OK to mock Hillary Clinton -- at least -- as a castrating bitch. The nutcracker was a perfect, plastic, $19.95 incarnation of the invective of Chris Matthews and Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson and every other talking head who used explicitly sexist language to demean Hillary Clinton with relative impunity. And just as we wonder whether Tweety and Rush and Tucker would have gotten away with it if their target had been, say, Sebelius or Napolitano rather than a woman who had been hated by factions on both the left and right for over 15 years, we wonder whether a Napolitano Nutcracker would be blithely accepted by the American public.
But you don't need to know the answer to that question to know that Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign was deeply hurt by a casual, mainstream sexism that earned far less of a backlash than one would have hoped when she entered the race.
For that, all you need to know about is the nutcracker, and the silence that attended it.