Basically, yes, she’s taken a beating from the Right, almost all of it unfair, and especially in her first several years as First Lady, horrendously so. Why has this been going on? Because Republicans can raise money off of Hillary bashing.
The result on the Democratic side has been a reaction against the way Republicans have been able to coalesce around hatred of Hillary, with a coalition of support for Hillary. Why were Democrats so eager to make a first lady a senator and then a nominee for president? That’s not how it usually goes.
In 1992, when Bill Clinton came into office, she was a fairly popular First Lady. But Whitewater became national headlines in early 1994, with Hillary Clinton at its center.
“By the end of those first two weeks in January, Whitewater had taken on a life of its own. It dominated the news to such an extent that the Washington Post’s ‘National Weekly Edition’ devoted its full first page to a bold headline ‘WHITEWATER,’ with a subhead ‘More Questions than Answers’” (1996, 263). The first lady was viewed as a key player in the affair and the media attention on her role seriously undermined the public’s confidence in her and her ability to focus national attention on health care reform. That month, President Clinton was forced to ask Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate this matter.
The Clintons were slow to respond and lost momentum on public policy concerns as their attention was diverted to defending themselves on this issue. Thus in the fall of 1994 the administration’s health care bill, which was meant to be a centerpiece of the first administration, was withdrawn from consideration by Congress. Hillary Rodham Clinton was seen as being instrumental in its defeat. In the election of 1994, she was often the target of attacks by conservatives, especially talk show hosts who dominated the campaign. books.google.com/…
This would just be the beginning of conservatives finding a lucrative fundraising tactic with Hillary Clinton as the embodiment of all of the evils of the Democratic Party. This hatred against an accomplished woman who was not adopting the traditional apolitical role of a First Lady, whose husband had cheated on her, brought out a counter-reaction of strong support from Democrats. As Republicans made her the symbol of all that was wrong with the Democratic Party, Democrats embraced her as what was right with our party; the first woman in the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt who was not perpetuating the idea that women should merely be hostesses for their husbands. As Hillary became a uniting force to rail against among Republicans on talk radio and those running for office, she became an icon to Democrats reacting against that hatred. It’s part of why we saw those missteps of older feminists – she represents to them the anti-Republican. (Remember how she answered in the first debate the question of who was her enemy with “Republicans”?)
So what does that mean in terms of her electability and what she can get done? It means that there are not going to be any independents or Republicans (aside from some of their wealthiest urbanites) thinking of voting for Hillary in a general election, the way we see those with open primaries crossing the aisle to vote for Sanders. The Democrats will not be broadening their tent with Hillary. And if the idea might be that young leaning-Republicans wouldn’t be familiar with this history of Hillary bashing – well, Hillary can’t even pull young Democrats; a relatively clean slate with young Republicans and Independents certainly isn’t going to work for her. So how do people think that this person could possibly get elected?
And how would she get things done? Republicans have been united in not working with Obama. Any Republican working with a President Hillary Clinton would risk losing his seat in the next election to a primary challenger – the hatred and the money against Hillary remains.
There would not be any grassroots pushing these Congress members to follow her agenda, which is how Bernie plans to govern. And Bernie has some basis for expecting that, given the excitement of his campaign, the mobilization so far that was entirely unexpected, the fact that he’s getting crossover voting, and the popularity of his issues with all Americans. We’ve seen Republicans like Trump and Ted Cruz in their speeches copying parts of his message, because they see it can get them votes. We’ve also seen Hillary doing the same thing, to minimize the suggestion that there are many policy differences between her and Sanders.
A President Sanders really does have reason to think that people across the aisle will work with him because both Democrats and Republicans who work against this agenda, if the intense and unprecedented populist surge we’ve seen in this cycle is any indication, will actually be the ones more likely to lose their seats, in both primaries and general elections. When he started out, that might have seemed unlikely, but what we have seen so far in these races indicates that yes, this moment is primed for what he wants.
Hillary bashing may not have been fair, but it has shaped our politics on both the Right and the Left for decades. Is it really smart, in this election cycle when ruling establishment political families seem to have gone out of style, for the Democrats to continue their reactive defense of Hillary Clinton, when it’s no longer the Republican establishment who tarred her that are framing the rules of this election?