The New York Times has covered Hillary Clinton’s botched attempts to hide her illness in two successive lead stories. But as if to undercut that journalistic skepticism, Tuesday’s front page also included a short essay by reporter Susan Dominus (disguised as a “Reporter’s Notebook”) painted Hillary as a sexism victim: “A Resilient Figure Stumbles, And Her Fans Wince in Turn.” The Times correctly assumes that it's mostly Hillary's "fans" that read the paper.
For all of her famed competence, Hillary Clinton has also been, from the beginning, something of a stumbler....She has stumbled in traps of her own making -- those emails -- and traps set by others.
And yet, even after years of those missteps, Clinton has always somehow righted herself. She has withstood not just her own missteps but also the relentless attacks on her personally: on her cankles, her coldness, her hairstyles, her marital choices, her audacity, her arrogance, her calculatedness. This summer, a gift shop at Baltimore-Washington International Airport sold a novelty item called the “inflatable mini Hillary bop bag”; the box displays a large, presumably male fist in contact with the side of Clinton’s head and the words: “She falls down, but pops back up!” It is a hateful and misogynist object that can’t hide its grudging admiration, which is much of Hillary Clinton’s public perception in a nutshell.
(Meanwhile, Times news stories celebrate Donald Trump piñatas. So much for sensitivity.)
That hard-won resiliency provides an unavoidable -- even poignant -- subtext of the widely viewed video that surfaced on Sunday, showing Clinton stumbling as she tried to enter a waiting van following a sudden departure from a Sept. 11 memorial event. A young woman -- it is touching that it is a young woman -- is holding her under her left arm as they wait for her vehicle to pull up....
Dominus, who is after all a journalist, sounded strangely regretful that Hillary didn’t quite make it into the van and out of reach of public and journalistic scrutiny:
... Inside that door is safety, privacy, a quick escape to her daughter’s home; no one will be the wiser if she can just get to the car....
Then Dominus pulled out the graduate school reading list.
It seems unlikely that Donald Trump has familiarized himself with Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor,” in which Sontag argued that illness is often perceived as a result of weak character traits. But for weeks, Trump seemed to be working off some kind of Sontag-inspired playbook. Clinton was not just lacking in the physical stamina required to fight ISIS, he said, “but the mental stamina”; his team often spoke of her as “frail.”
Typically, Dominus blamed Trump for the Hillary camp’s lack of honesty:
In turning illness into a personality flaw, a dangerous side effect of femaleness, Trump most likely made it all the more difficult for Clinton to acknowledge straightaway whatever health issue was in fact troubling her....
Dominus previously shored up her feminist credentials while attacking a pro-life Catholic website, in a 2010 article. After first damning it with faint praise as “relatively oblique – a far cry from a brick in the window or a death threat to a member of Congress,” she belittled the effort as “propaganda masquerading as therapy.”
