Hillary Clinton may have lost her bid to become president twice, but that hasn’t stopped her from passing along the valuable life lesson that she learned from her own trials and failures. And what is that lesson? That the nation is a sexist hellhole.
No, Clinton didn’t put in quite those terms, but the message she sent to 8-year-old Martha Kennedy Morales, who had run for third grade class president and lost, was still unambiguous: “As I know too well,” Clinton wrote in a letter she wrote to the child, “it’s not easy when you stand up and put yourself in contention for a role that’s only been sought by boys.”
Morales, who attends a private school in Maryland, lost to a male classmate, according to CNN. But the margin of victory came down to a single vote. Although the story doesn’t specify how many students voted, even in the unlikely event only 10 votes were cast, it’s impossible to say that the sex of the candidates was a factor.
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Clinton has insisted it was a factor in her own loss to Donald Trump in 2016. She claimed, somewhat paradoxically, in March that women voted against her because of “fathers, husbands, boyfriends, male bosses.” The clear implication is that women are still told what to think and do by men in this male-centric world, though it carries the subtext that women are too weak to stand up for their own beliefs.
Happily, young Martha seems more impressed with the fact of having received a letter from a famous person than she is with Clinton’s cynical message, telling CNN:
It was really touching to know that Hillary Clinton herself sent me a letter. That doesn’t happen every day.
She has also put her loss into perspective. “It’s disappointing to figure out that you lost something that you fought for really hard and you put a lot of effort into it,” she said before affirming that she’s happy with being vice president: “I get to be the tie-breaker when the House and the Senate can’t agree on something.”
It sounds as though she could teach Mrs. Clinton a lesson.
