It would be hard for anyone to argue that male and female political candidates don't get treated differently. While sometimes this can work to women's advantage-they're assumed to be compassionate and caring, even if they aren't-most of the time the result is that women are asked questions a male candidate would never get asked (like "Who's taking care of your kids while you're out running for office?") and get judged by a bunch of double standards.
I want to point to just one today, because I think we're going to be hearing some version of it a lot. This is from Maureen Dowd's column yesterday:
If you, Hillary Rodham Clinton, are willing to cite your mother's funeral to get sympathy for ill-advisedly deleting 30,000 emails, it just makes us want to sigh: O.K., just take it. If you want it that bad, go ahead and be president and leave us in peace. (Or war, if you have your hawkish way.) You're still idling on the runway, but we're already jet-lagged.
If Maureen Dowd is bored of writing about Hillary Clinton, she has two choices: find another line of work, or maybe-and see if you can keep with me here-don't write about Hillary Clinton. There are plenty of things to write about. She can go with Tom Friedman to plumb the wisdom of Bangalore cab drivers, or debate David Brooks on dime-store sociology. And if you're looking for a slightly angrier version of her argument, you can read Kevin Williamson in the National Review, who calls Clinton a "monster" who is "addicted to political power."
This may be partly because some people just hate Hillary Clinton, for reasons of varying legitimacy. But the idea that a politician is to be condemned for being too politically ambitious is applied way more often to women than to men.
Does Hillary Clinton want to be president? Yes, she does. Does she want it desperately? I'm sure. But you know who else wants it just as bad? Every single person running for president, that's who. Clinton is no more ambitious than Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or Scott Walker or any of the other candidates. There's something almost pathological about a willingness to do the things necessary to reach the White House, and they all share that pathology.
We pretend that if a candidate thinks the same way we do about issues, then their ambition is in the service of a noble cause and therefore not problematic. But they're all ambitious. That's why they're running.
