The other side of the sexist coin

The audio tape of Trump bragging about his sexual assaults on women is of a piece with the rampant and longstanding sexism directed at Hillary Clinton. Too many on the left, while rightly assailing Trump, have been slow to even acknowledge the other side of this sexist coin. Bill Moyers, on the other hand, gets it right in a recent article, explaining why the race is so tight.

“My point is that Hillary Clinton has been demonized by the right and its media for a quarter-century now. She didn’t bake cookies, as she once said maladroitly. She stepped out of the conventional First Lady role — the first since Eleanor Roosevelt — to try reforming medical care as a sort of deputy president. “Buy one,” as Bill Clinton once said about his family, “get one free.” She represented American feminism at the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Congress on Women, declaring resoundingly that “women’s rights are human rights.” For such sins, in the eyes of freaked-out men, she is the ultimate uppity woman. In the eyes of a critical mass of Americans, two decades — two decades — of demonization have rendered her the female Antichrist.

Which is, to my mind, the single greatest reason why we are slogging through the slime of a single-digit race.”