Hillary Clinton claimed that no man who lost a presidential election was ever told to just shut up and go away.
"I was really struck by how people said that to me - you know, mostly people in the press, for whatever reason - mostly, 'Go away, go away,'" Clinton said Thursday during an event at Rutgers University.
"And I had one of the young people who works for me go back and do a bit of research. They never said that to any man who was not elected. I was kind of struck by that," Clinton said.
Maybe the young people who work for her should stick to wiping servers with a cloth.
Nobody is telling Hillary Clinton to go away because she's a woman. (Just as her being a woman had nothing to do with her defeat.) It has a whole lot to do with her constant attempts to litigate the election while saying damaging things. Like suggesting that the states that didn't vote for her are backward or that women didn't vote for her because they're subservient to their husbands.
While no male Dem loser has tried to launch her sore loser tour, plenty of former presidents and defeated candidates wore out their welcome.
Like her own husband. Here's a CNN piece from '01.
How Can we miss you if you never go away? - Smelly pardons, expensive gifts, deluxe offices--is this any way for a former President to behave?
Instead, Clinton's ex-presidency is shaping up to be a shriveled version of his presidency. As he copes with a new crop of scandals--the $190,000 worth of going-away gifts, the $800,000-a-year midtown-Manhattan office suite he wanted to rent, the 177 last-minute clemencies he granted and, above all, the one he handed to fugitive billionaire Marc Rich--Clinton's new life feels like the old one, minus the power and the pulpit and the retinue of aides. His war room is a half-furnished Dutch Colonial in the New York suburbs; his lieutenant, a former White House valet named Oscar who keeps Clinton supplied with diet Coke while the ex-President dials through the numbers he has entered on his new, imperfectly mastered PalmPilot, calling to justify himself to his friends. Clinton's red-faced rages over the Rich scandal have familiar themes: "setups," overzealous prosecutors, unfair legal cases that never should have gone to indictment. What is hard to figure out is whether he is playing out his reasons for pardoning a fugitive or working through his personal grudge against the legal system. Did he pardon Rich or himself by proxy? Either way, sighs a comrade who answered the phone recently to find the 42nd President of the U.S. on the other end of the line, "you get tired of listening to it."
But that was probably sexism too.
The former president and loser who frustrated even Bill Clinton though was Jimmy Carter. When Carter continued to insert himself into foreign policy, the Clintons wanted him to shut up and go away.
And people still want Jimmy Carter to go away.
Mr. Carter is like a Timex watch. He takes a licking but keeps on ticking (though a Timex is, of course, much more accurate). No matter how wrong he is on the issues, no matter how many times his predictions about how organizations like Hamas will change, he just keeps coming back with more advice. This was the man whose record as Chief Magistrate has become a benchmark for presidential failure. Still, he refuses to get the message. He just won’t go away.
Then there's Al Gore. After a period of popularity, some environmental activists are wishing he would shut up and go away. (The reasons are complicated.) But there have been calls for Gore to go away for a long time, whether it was his bizarre bearded post-election withdrawal, his own later sore loser tour or the risk that he might block Obama in '08.
Hillary's comments show that she's oblivious to the reasons for her own post-election unpopularity.
"I'm really glad that, you know, Al Gore didn't stop talking about climate change," Clinton said to applause.
"And I'm really glad John Kerry went to the Senate and became an excellent secretary of State," the former first lady continued. "And I'm really glad John McCain kept speaking out and standing up and saying what he had to say. And for heavens sakes, Mitt Romney is running for the Senate," Clinton said.
In all of those cases, they launched a post-election career that left the lost election behind. Hillary Clinton isn't doing anything new. Instead she keeps blaming everyone else for losing the election.
The issue isn't gender, it's character.