The young women I talked with don’t care about her personal life and compromises — most shrug at the name Monica Lewinsky — but they do care that she seems old hat, a compromised and plodding pragmatist versus an old but fervent Vermont leftie.
There is no question — and this is where Albright was absolutely right — that many young women do suffer from historical amnesia. We are at a time when abortion rights are being whittled away, when sexual assault on campus is an epidemic and when the leading Republican contender has called women “bimbos” and “fat pigs.”
The problem with Clinton’s campaign is that she is only half playing the women card. She needs a more compelling narrative if she is going to play it. She’d have to go big, stir up some gender passion. Better yet, she should go around and listen to and try to enlist every young woman beyond her daughter Chelsea and Lena Dunham — hard-working women of every background — she can find, gather them around her, put them on campaign buses, ignite their sense of destiny, of excitement, of outrage at the extant sexism that surrounds them. She needs to listen to them — not shame them. Then make their stories part of her story.
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