With the primary season coming to an end, I’ve seen a lot of valedictory praise for Bernie Sanders’ campaign. Most of that praise is well-earned. He used an impressive grassroots fundraising model that we haven’t seen before, leveraging social media and extremely passionate supporters into $200 million. As a result, he was able to offer Hillary Clinton a real challenge. This is not an achievement that can be easily dismissed, nor should it.
At the same time, I can’t help but think that Clinton deserves far more credit than she has received for her own brilliant campaign.
Here are just a few of the obstacles she overcame:
- She was outspent, often 2-to-1, in the primary states. She was saving cash for a general election throughout, which Sanders never did.
- She got crushed on social media. Supporting Sanders was cool, edgy, hip. Supporting Clinton? Not so much. It was considered boring, stodgy, et cetera (and that’s on a good day; on a bad day it was “evil”, “corrupt”, or “ignorant”.)
- She had to fight a two-front war, taking all of the Republican fire as well as fire from the Sanders campaign. This was especially true in the last two months, after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee.
- She couldn’t return any significant fire against Sanders, for fear of alienating his supporters. She threw a few jabs on policy, usually gun control, but never brought out the big guns the way she did on Trump last week.
- She faced an extraordinarily negative and skeptical press throughout, always looking to wound the front-runner. She got far more negative media coverage, and less positive media coverage, than Sanders or even Trump.
- She had to contend with Republicans in Congress launching multiple “investigations” whose sole purpose was to destroy her.
- Most importantly, she faced literally millennia of sexism and cultural conditioning that still leaves us far more skeptical of women in leadership positions than their male counterparts. This manifested in many different ways, including the obsessive focus on her vocal volume and “shouting” and the gendered insults and threats against her and her supporters (from a tiny but vocal fringe). And the combination of her gender and her age made it even more difficult — our society treats older women terribly when they are on the national stage.
In short, Hillary Clinton had to fight this entire primary season with about one and a half hands tied behind her back. Nevertheless, in the face of all sorts of headwinds, she held firm and won the nomination handily. Her tenacity will serve her well against Donald Trump this fall, and it will continue to do so when she is the 45th President of the United States.