Spot on

Via Shakesville come this excellent article on Media Matters laying waste to the idea currently being flogged to death that Hillary Clinton is a spurious spoiler (and that Barack Obama is "whipped") simply because she is speaking at the Democratic National Convention:

Even after all these months, I still don't completely understand why Clinton's essentially centrist campaign for the White House ginned up so much open contempt from the press corps, which has felt completely comfortable addressing her in an openly derogatory and condescending manner. The issue of her convention involvement simply allowed the press to whack her around like a piñata one more time, regardless of the facts.--Eric Boehlert, "Hillary Clinton speaks at convention. The press concocts a story."

It's well worth a read, particularly if you are among the many Americans who believe that Clinton's failure to clinch the nomination had nothing whatsoever to do with institutional sexism.

Now, I was never a big Hillary Clinton supporter. It wasn't that I had anything against her, it was more pragmatism on my part. I've always felt that her negatives are/were too high. There are just too many people who hate her--not just dislike but hate her, as if she ran over their dog or personally snatched toys from the hands of their babies--and not even a Swiftboat-load of soft-focus ads or heartwarming family stories was going to change that. Even people I consider to be rational, middle-of-the-road types can be unhinged in their feelings toward her.

I've never understood just what it was that she did that made people so crazy. She gets the blame for the failure of healthcare reform in the 1990s--because, you know, insurance company lobbyists and Congress had fuck-all to do with that. She is held responsible for her husband's serial penis problems--because, you know, if she'd just been keeping the home fires burning, there would have been no need for him to screw around with interns. She had the nerve to create a political life of her own after supporting her husband in his for 20-odd years--because, you know, she only stayed with him to advance her own career.

What it keeps coming back to for me is that people hate her--whether they recognize it on a conscious level or not--because she is a powerful woman, and we're still not quite sure, as a society, what to do with that. We like our women a bit more like girls: Olympic gymnasts, say, or the pop idol of the day. Powerful women, ambitious women--they're scary. And the press feeds that notion like crazy.

I'm sick to death of it, and it makes me sad--sad as a woman, sad as the mother of a baby daughter, and sad as a human being. We've come a long way, baby, but not nearly long enough.