ALBANY, N.Y. -- Hillary is with him, not her.
Clinton was set to endorse Andrew Cuomo's re-election bid at Wednesday's New York Democratic convention on Long Island, the New York Times first reported. The governor, of course, is being challenged for the nomination by actor and activist Cynthia Nixon.
Hillary's decision might be surprising if you believed the female solidarity, champion-of-women rhetoric employed during her campaign, along with the willingness to describe anyone who dared vote for Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump as sexist.
"Young women have to support Hillary Clinton," former secretary of state Madeline Albright said at a campaign rally during the Democratic presidential primary, when Bernie was giving Hillary more difficulty than anyone expected. "Just remember, there's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other."
And here's Hillary describing Trump voters two months ago during a talk in India.
"You don't like black people getting rights, you don't like women getting jobs," she said, later adding that women who voted against her faced "a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should."
In other words, women who voted for Trump lacked the independent mind and spirit needed to stand up to the patriarchy. I know a lot of women who voted for Trump and not one did it under pressure.
In truth, women were under no special obligation to vote for Clinton, and many didn't. Exit polls suggested that most young women voted for Sanders over Clinton in the primaries and that a majority of white women voted for Trump in the general election.
Nor is Clinton under any special obligation, other than concern over rhetorical inconsistency, to endorse Nixon.
Gender aside, Clinton and Cuomo have much in common. They are both center-left Democrats with famous last names who live in Westchester County and are especially good at raising money in ethically dubious ways from wealthy donors. They are both, in other words, figures of the establishment who represent why voters distrust the establishment.
Meanwhile, the campaign being waged by Nixon has much in common with Bernie's run. She's following his lead -- attacking from the left, criticizing the conflicts inherent with big-money politics, relying on small donors and taking on the party's establishment.
Nixon also has a few things in common with Trump. She's a celebrity candidate, like he was, with no experience in government. She's an outsider. To some, that's a plus. But you can bet Hillary doesn't see it that way.
Will the endorsement help Cuomo? The governor must believe so.
"He has a primary challenge, and he's going to use every weapon at his disposal to win it," said political observer Steve Greenberg of the Siena College Research Institute.
In the most recent Siena poll of Hillary's popularity in New York, 59 percent of women and 77 percent of Democrats viewed her favorably. That suggests her backing could benefit the governor in the upcoming primary.
Still, Greenberg was skeptical that an endorsement delivered in May would mean much when voters go to the polls in September. And it's likely that many voters will write off the endorsement as the establishment once again helping one of its own -- which is exactly what it is.
Meanwhile, Nixon is trying to smash a stubborn glass ceiling. New York is among the 23 states that has yet to have a female governor. It would be dumb to suggest that sexism isn't a reason for that, just as it would be dumb to suggest that some Trump voters weren't motivated by sexism.
But nothing is ever simple with Clinton, and if you want to see her purely as a victim, consider that her own campaign was apparently infected with sexism that she may have condoned.
In "Chasing Hillary," the campaign book by New York Times reporter Amy Chozick, Clinton staffers are often depicted as brutally sexist and vulgar, and Chozick concludes that Hillary must want them that way. Chozick also writes that Clinton herself was especially distrustful of female reporters.
Chozick's book is generally sympathetic to Clinton. Chozick even admits to crying when Hillary lost the election.
Still, she describes her as a candidate of the, yes, establishment who spent too much time schmoozing in the Hamptons with wealthy donors. She had lost touch with the concerns of voters after years in rarefied circles. She didn't understand the country's mood, its anger.
"Hillary seemed like Rip van Winkle, awoken after a seven-year slumber to find a vastly different country," Chozick writes. "She missed the rise of the Tea Party. She missed the Occupy Wall Street movement and the rage over health care and bank bailouts and the one percent. She was shocked when she heard about the opioid epidemic."
And so many voters decided they weren't with her, because she didn't know them.
Commentary on 05/24/2018