The New York Times' Amy Chozick predictably celebrated Hillary Clinton as the Democratic victor (in a story filed even before Tuesday’s late night California primary results confirmed her nomination) in Wednesday’s front-page “Clinton’s Trek, Fueled by Grit, To Finish Line – Riding Steely Fortitude to Brink of History.” And flicking pesky Republicans off her shoulder in the process.
Meanwhile, an amazing Times headline on Thursday showed outrage at Sanders for having “Stubbornly Ignored” his Democratic opponent's “History-Making Moment.”
Chozick gushed:
If there was a single moment that captured what would carry Hillary Clinton to the 2016 Democratic nomination, it came not during her sun-splashed campaign kickoff in New York last June, or in any of her speeches celebrating hard-fought primary victories over Senator Bernie Sanders.
No, it was the unscripted instant in which a blasé Mrs. Clinton coolly brushed from her shoulder a speck of lint, dirt -- or perhaps nothing at all -- as a Republican-led House panel subjected her to more than eight hours of questioning in October over her handling of the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.
She may not be the orator President Obama is, or the retail politician her husband was. But Mrs. Clinton’s steely fortitude in this campaign has plainly inspired older women, black voters and many others who see in her perseverance a kind of mirror to their own struggles. And Mrs. Clinton’s very durability -- her tenacity, grit and capacity for enduring and overcoming adversity -- could be exactly what is required to defeat Donald J. Trump.
As a politician’s wife, first lady, senator and secretary of state -- and as a two-time candidate for president -- Mrs. Clinton, 68, has redefined the role of women in American politics each time she has reinvented herself. She has transfixed the nation again and again, as often in searing episodes of scandal or setback as in triumph.
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It was with that same grit that Mrs. Clinton picked herself up after a bruising defeat by Mr. Obama in 2008, when she assured a crowd of tearful female supporters, eight years ago to the day, that they had made 18 million cracks in “the highest, hardest glass ceiling.”
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If age-old antipathies to Mrs. Clinton can be chalked up in part to Americans’ struggles to adjust to changing gender roles at home, at work and in politics, her history of political combat has also left scar tissue that, in part, defines the candidate she is: wide-eyed about the realities of Washington, but cautious and wary to a fault.
After that onrushing torrent of praise, some caveats crept in, though her sharp leftward primary turn was left out.
For 14 months, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has been out of step with younger voters and with swaths of an angry electorate that has demanded more than the competence and hard work she has promised.
Her difficulties with those voters could be a warning sign.
While her husband could draw on the crisp centrist philosophy of the “third way” Democrats in 1992, when he devoted his candidacy to the “forgotten middle class,” Mrs. Clinton has struggled to hit upon as simple and clear a rationale for her campaign. And, though she has issued the most detailed policy proposals and positions of anyone in the race, what she truly believes remains a mystery for many voters.
But Chozick even turned Clinton’s weaknesses into strengths.
But what she has lacked in rhetorical brio, she has made up for by listening to people’s problems and prescribing solutions. She has shed tears in conversations with a man whose mother had Alzheimer’s and a woman who lost a child to a gun accident.
In Thursday’s paper, Michael Barbaro and Yaminche Alcindor (she of “Bernie sexism” infame) teamed for the self-explanatory bout of Hillary hagiography and Bernie bashing: “A History-Making Moment for Clinton, but Sanders Ignores It.” The online headline is even harsher: “Hillary Clinton Made History, but Bernie Sanders Stubbornly Ignored It.”
In a speech of striking stubbornness, he ignored the history-making achievement of his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, who became the first woman in American history to clinch the presidential nomination of a major political party.
Mr. Sanders waited until 15 minutes into his speech to utter Mrs. Clinton’s name. He referred, almost in passing, to a telephone conversation in which he had congratulated her on her victories. At that, the crowd of more than 3,000 inside an aging airport hangar booed loudly. Mr. Sanders did little to discourage them.
Tuesday was, undeniably, Mrs. Clinton’s night, a milestone for women in politics and civic life 95 years after the 19th Amendment guaranteed their right to vote.
But by Wednesday morning, all eyes were on Mr. Sanders. Would he be generous or petulant? Would he let go or keep battling?
At almost every turn, he was grudging toward Mrs. Clinton, passing up a chance to issue the kind of lengthy salute that many, in and out of the Democratic Party, had expected and craved.
You know the Times is perturbed with someone when they start using religious terms.
Declaring that the movement he has begun is “more than Bernie,” Mr. Sanders sounded at times messianic.
“Our vision,” he said, “will be the future of America.”
The Times called in a ghost from Democrats past to shuffle Sanders off the stage and suck it up.
Howard Dean, a Democrat and a former governor of Vermont, can sympathize. “It’s very hard to concede,” he said. “You are tired. You are cranky. You’ve worked your butt off for two years.”
Nobody, Mr. Dean said, resisted ending a presidential campaign more than he did. Once a high-flying front-runner, he had a string of setbacks that left him feeling, by February 2004, much as Mr. Sanders does today: furious at an unfair system and determined to fight on.
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“You don’t get any points for carrying on or complaining about it,” Mr. Dean added. “You get points for sucking it up.”
