Hillary Clinton Should Be Allowed to Boast

Hillary Clinton has a bragging problem. It’s not that she brags any more than the average politician, and she certainly does so less than Donald Trump. (Who doesn’t?) But bragging, or if you prefer, self-promotion, is still a trap for women in a way it isn’t quite, or not in the same way, for men. There are a lot of reasons why some Democratic voters can’t warm up to Clinton, and many of those reasons are substantive and gender-neutral: voters on the left of the Party prefer the consistent policy positions of Bernie Sanders, particularly on income inequality, the minimum wage, and campaign finance; they object to the slippery expediency that both Clintons have displayed in their long run on the American political stage. But then there are those many, many other ways that Clinton is somehow not allowed to get it quite right; she’s either too hard or too soft, too much or too little of a feminist. There’s always something wrong, even if the particular something is hard to identify and endlessly open to parsing: her laugh, her voice, her ankles, her hair, her pantsuits, her marriage.