Women, Politics and Represention

November 17, 2013

Camille Hayes

There’s something I need to get off my chest. It’s been weighing on me, and I want to come clean before the next election cycle: I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary. That fact is only controversial because I’m a women’s advocate by trade, and there are certain feminist circles in which anything less than full-throated Hillary support is tantamount to heresy.

But 2008 Hillary just wasn’t the candidate for me. I didn’t like the hack Democratic Party operatives she had in her inner circle – strategist Mark Penn and fundraiser-turned-Virginia-governor Terry McAuliffe come to mind – and I didn’t like her hawkishness on Iraq. Most of all, I couldn’t stomach the Clinton-style “neo-liberalism,” she and her husband unleashed in the ’90s, which in my opinion has done more ideological damage to Democrats than anything since Reaganomics.