Hillary Clinton: “Go Away!”/“Come Back!”

She was hated, then sent to the woods, and the media has apparently forgotten all of it.

An Irritating Morning.

It ‘s Women’s History Month, and last week there was a big conference happening in Abu Dhabi: the “Forbes 30/50 Summit,” featuring the “world’s most powerful women,” both those under 30 and those over 50. The “over 50” part is Mika Brzezinski’s baby, and she’d been advertising the biggest event—an International Women’s Day panel featuring Gloria Steinem, Billy Jean King, Malala Yousafzai, Ayesha Curry, and Olena Zelenska—every day on Morning Joe.

Mika and Hillary Clinton were to be co-moderators, and there was always a too-excited, abrasive quality to her voice whenever she said the words “Hillary Clinton.” She and her husband Joe Scarborough had been among the most anti-Hillary of the MSNBC crop during the 2016 election. I know because I had followed them every damned morning (had to, I was writing a book) as they took endless schmoozy calls from Trump (“…and how’s the family?”) and sucked up to Bernie Sanders every chance they got, including the “special, exclusive” announcement on their show of his “personal invitation” to visit the Pope. (There was no such invitation; there was an academic conference at the Vatican and Sanders was just one of many attendees.) After the primary, they were dedicated promoters of the “untrustworthy Hillary” and “evasive Hillary” tropes and sneered over every every mockable sound-bite. Their dislike of Hillary was so obvious and so relentless that people in pro-Hillary groups began to speculate about whether there was something “personal” lurking in the background.

Hillary Derangement Syndrome, of course, has been poisoning collective consciousness for decades, and in my book (which also was disappeared by the mass media, who preferred the nasty tunnel-vision of Shattered) I explore how it developed and the brew of sexist discomfort, right-wing strategizing, and media malpractice that generated it. We’ve all had to “move on,” though, including Mika and Joe. Joe now touts himself as one of those who saw how dangerous Trump was from the beginning, and the day of the Abu Dhabi panel, he can’t heap enough praise on Hillary. He recalls with fondness a meeting with Hillary 30 years ago, and how “down to earth” he found her. “What a remarkable woman,” he says. Ya think?

But Mika isn’t able to muster Joe’s admiration—which actually seems quite genuine. Maybe—as some suspected, it was “know your value” Mika who was mostly responsible for the animus Morning Joe had directed at HRC. She’d tried to cover up whatever ill-will was still lingering with her enthusiasm-bordering-on-hysteria announcements of the panel. But she showed her true cards when, at one point, Gloria Steinem said she’s just got to mention “How different the world would be if we had elected Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump.” 

It seemed for a moment as though cheers and applause would escalate, and Hillary is a bit taken aback. “Well that’s a conversation….” she starts, and then quickly adds “…stopper.” She’s graciously backed away from any celebrations focused on herself.

Mika, unable to hide her anxiety (cheerleading for the panel is one thing, a spontaneous Hillary love-fest would be quite another), quickly shuts it down: “That’s a conversation for another day.”

Don’t count on that conversation happening any time soon. It’s too close for comfort to the question of why we didn’t elect Hillary. And that’s something the mass media mavens may never take on (preferring to focus on “why Trump” rather than “Why not Hillary?”) because they hold a large share of the responsibility. Mika and Joe are at the top of that list.

So they’ve disappeared that history. And any time I or others try to recall it—in the interests of historical accuracy and legacy—we’re told to “move on.” Well, I for one have moved on, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten—or that I’ll stop reminding others whenever I can.

The Erasure of Hillary

It’s not just the various campaigns against Hillary that many are hoping will fade into collective forgetting. It’s also how, after the 2016 election, so many tried to disappear her entirely.

In 2017, when she emerged after a well-deserved hiatus to resume public service, the calls for her to quietly leave the stage and take up gardening or knitting began to pour forth. RealClearPolitics’ A. B. Stoddard advised Democrats to tell Clinton that “she’s done enough damage and it’s time to pack it in” and asked her to “keep her rehabilitation journey as far away from their own as possible.” Gersh Kuntzman, in the New York Daily News, told Clinton to “shut the f — up and go away already.” Vanity Fair’s T. A. Frank accused Clinton of being “not just a nuisance but a hindrance” to the Democrats achieving coalition; his piece (poisonously alluding to Dylan Thomas’s poem about resisting death) was entitled “Can Hillary Clinton Please Go Quietly Into the Night?” And when Hillary published What Happened, the journalistic kvetching about the length of her memoir made me wonder if half the population of reviewers was suffering from untreated ADD. (The book, by the way, is approximately the same length as Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution, published barely a week after he lost the primary, in which he made it very clear that he was not about to go away. And he hasn’t.) Sanders wasn’t berated for sticking around or burdening us with such a long, narcissistically-timed tome. Hillary, in contrast, was chastised for having the hubris to diagnose her loss (very astutely, as it turned out) and berated for doing so at such length (which apparently didn’t bother the lines of fans who circled the city blocks and clogged mall parking lots, waiting to buy the book.)

The “Go Away, Hillary” trope, at the time, seemed yet another symptom of Hillary Derangement Syndrome, which I expected to gradually dissipate as the facts of the many-faceted campaign against her emerged and the mass media might take some responsibility for all the crap it created during the election, from the tropes of “unpopular Hillary” and “untrustworthy Hillary” to the all-consuming “email scandal.” Perhaps then Hillary’s accomplishments would be acknowledged and she would take a vastly earned place among other public servants who, far from being shoved into the woods, began to glow more brightly after their official service ended, sometimes at the expense of the historical record. (The Republicans have elevated Ronald Reagan, who arguably tilled the path leading to Trump, into one of the greatest POTUS’s of all time.)

But no. Instead of long-overdue apologies from her own party and the media for blaming the 2016 loss on her (you’ll find all the receipts in my book), the most she got from liberal pundits were some newly respectful interviews and surprise at what a “different person” she seemed now that she wasn’t running for office. So relaxed! So candid! Well, duh. Haven’t you yet realized that the devious, evasive, stiff caricature you helped create was a fiction? Rachel Maddow did comment, after her interview with Hillary that she had never interviewed anyone who acted and talked more “like a president.” Again, duh. But even that level of media admiration was unusual. No, all during Trump’s reign, even with the bludgeoning our country suffered, HDS persisted. I saw it evidenced every day on the google alert I have set for her name.

It was not much of a surprise to me, having chronicled decades of Hillary-hate. What I never expected, though, was her erasure. After the 2020 election, Hillary-supporters were over the moon with the prospect of Kamala Harris as VP. We were so ready to celebrate. And we did — until media commentators kindly decided to present some feminist history for us. Brian Williams — just one example — ended his post-inauguration broadcast with a tribute to women’s power, with song and protests from 4 years ago leading up to the glass-ceiling-shattering moment when Kamala was inaugurated. Elizabeth Warren, Stacey Abrams, Jill Biden — all rightly honored. But where — as the mass media used to feverishly ask when she had pneumonia and escaped to Chelsea’s apartment— was Hillary?

An anomaly? Nope. On another night, Laurence O’Donnell did the same, acknowledging those who had challenged the glass ceiling before Kamala, including Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin. And the woman who made 66 million cracks in that ceiling? I guess while other women were making all that progress, she was off knitting…in the woods….quietly.

OK, that was infuriating — but we’re used to being roused to fury by the mass media’s HDS. What was more surprising were the cartoons and photo-collages that came dancing across Twitter and the pages of Facebook, colorfully honoring the famous women who had attended the celebration. I unfortunaely can’t post them all here, as the creators were not pleased with me, complained to Medium, where a version of this piece first appeared, and had them yanked. But here’s a few alternative examples:

Somewhere along the line, it appeared, the generation that now controls the cultural means of production (as Marx would call it) had come to see Hillary as irrelevant to the victories of progressive causes, including — astoundingly! — feminism.

When I showed my husband the cartoons and documentaries, he suggested that Hillary’s absence might be the result of liberal guilt over the terrible treatment she has received, even by the Democratic Party, who were so quick to blame 2016 on her. Rather than face complicity in all that Hillary-abuse (which, after all, delivered Trump to us), just pretend the person who suffered it doesn’t exist. Edward is a literature professor, and read her erasure from the inaugural celebrations as an enigmatic text to be deciphered. I found that an intriguing and elegant explanation, but on the other hand….guilty conscience? I wish! I sure hadn’t seen any evidence of that when Hillary wasn’t invited to speak at the 2017 Women’s March protesting Trump’s inauguration. Hillary’s exclusion from that march was not only a prefiguring of the 2020 inauguration erasure but a sign that feminism had been collared and held captive by Sanders supporters, who had learned everything they believed about Hillary and her generation of feminists from the very man who had opposed her in the primary, declaring whenever he got the chance that she wasn’t “a real progressive.”

The perception of Hillary as an outmoded “establishment” feminist without credentials either in the movements for racial or economic justice or the “correct” kind of gender politics (she stayed with Bill! Oh my god, could you be more 1950’s? And then she expected us to vote for her just because she’s a woman!) has stuck among many self-identified “progressives.” It’s not so surprising then, that as the 20 and 30-somethings who supported Sanders (many of whom continued to do so when he ran in 2020) began to play a more central (can I say “establishment”?) role in political and cultural representation, Hillary’s historical importance would be diminished. The Right continued to despise and vilify her; “the left” simply erased her. And that deliberate erasure spread its tentacles into the imaginations of a more collective forgetting, including many who voted for Hillary.

It’s been happening for a long while. But the irony of it — one might even say perversity of it — in post-inaugural accounts of the “breaking of the glass ceiling” by Kamala Harris in 2020 was astounding. Had we forgotten that had it not been for (James Comey) (the Russians) (Right-wing disinformation) (media malpractice) (those who voted third-party or stayed home, convinced by Sanders that Hillary was an establishment tool, barely better than Trump) Hillary would have been the first woman to break the thickest, most shatter-resistant glass ceiling of them all.

(I should add that after my piece appeared and created a stir, some of these images were quickly “revised” to include Hillary. I sure do wish they had chosen a different image to paste in there than the one that appeared on television alongside the depressing election results of 2016. I guess it’s some kind of “official” 2016 portrait. But still…..)

Why Any of This Matters

There was one photo from the inauguration that suggested the erasure of Hillary was not as complete as it might have seemed then.

Kamala’s grand-niece may not be aware of the events of the 2016 election or the decades of Hillary Derangement Syndrome that the media is now so intent on “moving on” from. She was born too late to experience the Sanders branding of Hillary, and the media never, ever talks about the sexism in their own 2016 election coverage. She is also growing up at a time when the truths of history are as floppy and fragile as they were when court factions, partisans and priests constructed reality for the people. And she has no memories of a time when it was different.

It’s her generation that will suffer the most if the Right’s efforts to revise our past and disappear the books in which that past is recorded are successful. The history of feminist struggle and the long persistence of sexism in all its forms is a big part of that history. And if Mika truly wants those girls to grow up “knowing their value,” she should make sure there is that “other day” when what the world would have been like had Hillary won and why she didn’t win (it wasn’t just the Trump charm offensive) will be fully and accurately addressed.

Hillary herself recognized that it is the future of those little girls (and boys) that is most at stake. She specifically addressed at her concession speech: “Never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world.” She spoke here, not to the “under 30’s and after 50’s” who had achieved power, but to little girls like Kamala Harris’s grand-niece, whose greatest wish during the inauguration was that she get to meet Hillary (of course, she did.) With the authority of fact so undermined, getting history right for them isn’t a failure to “move on”; it’s part of the task of doing so.

(If you’re interested in my book about the 2016: The Destruction of Hillary Clinton: Untangling the Political Forces, Media Culture, and Assault on Fact that Decided the 2016 Election)