Many Americans who are old enough to remember the black comedian Flip Wilson can remember his character Geraldine, whom he often portrayed in his skits. Geraldine once bought a dress that she really could not afford, and later explained to her husband, “That devil made me buy this dress!”
Apparently, Hillary Clinton, who is not nearly as funny as Flip Wilson, has a new version of the old Geraldine routine. In Clinton’s version, it is not the devil (although to hear some radical feminists, it is about the same thing) who is telling a woman — at least a white woman — whom to vote for, but rather a white man.
Clinton, during her ongoing trip to India, said that Democrats “do not do well with white men, and we don’t do well with married, white women. And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”
And that is why she lost to Donald Trump in 2016, Hillary argued. Even during the campaign, Clinton was making the case that Trump’s voters were a “basket of deplorables,” driven by “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic” beliefs. She later apologized for the comments, but it is clear from her recent remarks in India that she has not changed her mind, but has merely refined her sexist and bigoted rhetoric.
In fact, Clinton characterized the Trump voter as a person who, “You know, you didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs.” And since she was in India, she threw in the remark, “You don’t want, you know, to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are.”
Perhaps Hillary needs to coordinate her message better with that of former Vice President Joe Biden, who once said that a person could not go into a Dunkin Donuts without dealing with a clerk with an “Indian accent.”
But it is Clinton’s derogatory remarks about white women that are most astounding. Notice she did not say anything about how fewer black men (82 percent) voted for her than black women (94 percent). And, while white women certainly supported Trump over Clinton more than black women, they did not support him as much as white men.
Married couples tend to vote more conservatively than unmarried individuals. That is nothing new. And married couples tend to vote more alike simply because people who think alike on politics and religion, for example, are much more likely to get married — and stay married — than two people who have diametrically opposed worldviews. Married couples are more likely to go to church, for example, and we know that devout Catholics and Protestant evangelicals are more conservative, and are more likely to vote Republican.
In the end, white women are more likely to vote for Trump, or any Republican, for president if they are married, not because their husbands told them to do so, but because they wanted to. In other words, Hillary Clinton’s remarks are highly insulting to the millions of women in America who are white and married.
Further, who is to say that the white women did not influence their white husbands? Those who don’t think a wife ever influences her husband have either never been married, or have an unusual marriage.
The most conservative demographic are those who are married, with children. On the other hand, a group that tends to be much more socially liberal are the “DINKs,” or double-income, no kids. Does that mean in the situation of an unmarried couple just living together and voting for Clinton that the female in the relationship is simply following the lead of her liberal husband?
What Clinton is saying is that a woman who did not vote for her is less likely to be able to think for herself, or otherwise she would have voted for Clinton. Can one imagine the reaction if Trump “tweeted” that the reason a woman — any woman — did not vote for him is because she is not capable of making her own decisions because she is a woman?
Not surprisingly, even liberal academics make Clinton’s sexist argument. Kelsy Kretschmer, an assistant professor at Oregon State University, told the leftist Guardian last year that in his “study” examining the voting patterns of women, “We know white men are more conservative, so when you’re married to a white man you get a lot more pressure to vote consistent with that ideology.”
Should we assume that Hillary Clinton, had she been elected president, would have not known what to think, until her white husband, Bill Clinton, told her what to think? Under her reasoning, had Clinton married Donald Trump, she would make a whole lot more sense.
Photo: AP Images
