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Yesterday I was reading The Economist article “Hillary Clinton, Her latest incarnation: presidential front-runner“. This does a very good job of describing Hillary’s strengths and weakness and explains why she is presently in the best position to win America’s top political post. The way things look, Hillary will most likely win the primaries and become the Democrat’s candidate. Some pundits say that Hillary can beat Obama but would lose to Giuliani, whereas Obama would lose to Hillary but beat Giuliani. Who knows? Personally, I would prefer to see Obama win the national elections, not because I am per se in favor of his positions, but I think that the U.S. does not need two things that a Hillary victory would bring to the American political scene: (i) more divisiveness (especially after George W.’s divisiveness) and (ii) further another political dynasty (adding the Clinton’s to the Bush’s and Kennedy’s).

In any event, what really caught my attention in The Economist’s article was the following sentence: “[Hillary] is lionised by feminists and demonised by cookie-baking traditionalists.” This reminded me of something that really upset me back in 1998-99 during the whole Clinton-Lewinsky comedy — how Feminists abandoned their core beliefs to blindly follow both Bill and Hillary.

Let me start by saying that I personally share many of the core feminists’ tenets. So, when Bill Clinton not only violated most of the basic rules of Attorney professional conduct through his attempts to keep Monica Lewinsky from testifying in the Paula Jones case, I was not only personally offended as a newly admitted lawyer to the practice of law, but I was also offended by the general chauvinistic modus operandi of the President.

If you look at the basic facts, feminists should have immediately abandoned President Clinton:

  1. He called Ms. Lewinsky, “that woman”, as if she were another lying, self-interested female conspirator.
  2. He consistently used his superior position of power as a means to seduce his employees. If we consider sexual relations between two people as an agreement between people who have equal bargaining power, then isn’t any sexual relationship between a superior and an insubordinate per se unequal? From a feminist point of view, isn’t there inherent sexual harassment?
  3. How would President Clinton or feminists feel about any 50 year old CEO receiving sexual favors from their 22 year old daughters?
  4. Even after Clinton’s own manicured definition of “sexual relations” as mutual stimulation of the genitals of both parties and his testimony that, as based on this definition, no sex actually occurred, wouldn’t Clinton’s own self-centered sexual habits (only he received pleasure from Ms. Lewinsky) indicate his egocentric chauvinism? Wouldn’t a man who respected women also seek to pleasure Ms. Lewinsky?
  5. President Clinton repeatedly justified his alleged “obstruction of justice” as having been in response to Ms. Jones’ unfounded and frivolous lawsuit. But if the President shared his feminist constituents’ beliefs and trusted the legal system, he would have allowed justice to run its normal course instead of trying to impede a woman’s right to bring a sexual harassment case against her employer.
  6. President Clinton’s marital infidelity and Senator Clinton’s acceptance thereto indicate that their marriage is strictly of political convenience.

So, why do the feminists blindly support both Bill and Hillary? Is it that the ends justify the means? Is it that the political alternative is so bad that they will sacrifice their beliefs for political gains? I remember feeling disgusted seeing the Susan Sarandons and Barbara Streisands publicly rallying in favor of Bill. Is it that easy to forget one’s self? Is preaching better than practicing? In politics, do words speak louder than politics?

If the Lewinsky scandal had a happy ending, it was that the personal sexual lives of politicians were no longer considered so scandalous. So, why didn’t Hillary wait until after her husband’s presidency to divorce him? Maybe the focus groups showed that she was more electable when married than divorced? Maybe Bill and Hillary simply have a very open relationship. Who knows? The nice thing is that no one, especially not the feminists, seem to care.