How did an extraordinarily well-qualified, experienced, and admired candidate — whose victory would have been as historic as Barack Obama’s — come to be seen as a tool of the establishment, a chronic liar, and a talentless politician?

That’s the question Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Susan Bordo, Ph.D., asked and answered in her new book, “The Destruction of Hillary Clinton” (Melville House Publishing, April 2017). Bordo, a media critic, cultural historian and feminist scholar, presents myriad reasons for Clinton’s shocking defeat. The biggest culprits included sexism, the right’s attacks on her, Russian interference in the election, and “media madness.”

Bordo told the Forward in an exclusive interview, “We’re inundated every day with sound bites — fragments of supposed breaking news. Anyone on Twitter or Facebook, or watching CNN, MSNBC or Fox News, saw this endless repetition of clickbait headlines. Phrases became stamped into brains: ‘Momentum for Bernie Sanders: Hillary Clinton likely to be charged with email crime.’”

The author also referred to “two immensely powerful assaults” on Clinton’s candidacy. One was FBI Director James Comey’s “inappropriate, inaccurate, and inflammatory interference in the general election.” Bordo was, of course, referring to Comey’s letter, made public 11 days before the election, stating that the FBI was opening a new investigation into recently discovered emails from Anthony Weiner’s laptop. By the time Comey issued his second letter to Congress, on November 6 stating that those emails did not change the FBI’s July decision that neither Clinton nor her team had committed any prosecutable offenses, it was too late.

The other huge offense, according to Bordo, happened much earlier, during the primaries. In February, we all saw Senator Bernie Sanders throw shade on Clinton, shouting to his growing millennial fan base that Clinton wasn’t a “true progressive.” He branded her “The Establishment.”

Bordo told me: At first, I’d identified with Sanders. He and I have virtually the same background. He grew up in Brooklyn. I grew up in Newark, New Jersey. Both working class Jewish families, left-leaning, secular. He sounded like one of my relatives—kind of fun, a bit exotic. I think for many young people across the country, he was like a character from a situation comedy.

His appeal to the younger generation of voters seemed to be a combination of his grandpa persona and his socialist-sounding ideals. Bordo writes that Sanders became a bigger problem in May when he referred to Clinton as “the lesser of two evils.”

“People who think if Bernie had gotten the nomination he would have been able to defeat Trump, just don’t get it,” Bordo said. “Anti-Semitism, with the power of the GOP to use that in ways to alienate people from Sanders, was just lying in wait. You even saw it creep up for Clinton although she isn’t Jewish.”

That reminded me of the sickening Trump tweet with an image of Hillary Clinton surrounded by money, with its white lettering against a red Jewish star that read, “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever.” Millions of Clinton supporters, like myself, have been left mourning what could have been while having to listen to the deafening blame heaped onto Hillary: that she ran a weak campaign.

Bordo said, “All campaigns make mistakes. It’s as though the critics were blind to the enormous character assassination that was happening to Clinton on a daily basis. On the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, millions gathered around the world to protest his policies. A newscaster asked, ‘Where was this energy before the election?’”

Clinton lost, Bordo said, “because of a slender but critical mass of voters” who decided late for Trump — after the second Comey announcement — or voted third party or didn’t vote at all. Most were “hardworking people with little time to research facts, and trusted the morning and evening news.” That segment included “white, middle-class, suburban women who’d seen Clinton caricatured as untrustworthy, a self-centered elitist who didn’t understand the problems of ordinary people,” as well as “rust-belt men who learned from fragmentary sound-bites that Clinton was a corporate shill who had proposed putting coalminers out of business—rather than an honest candidate describing an economic reality.”

For the many of us still shell-shocked by this unrecognizable America, Bordo’s book offers a clear analysis of how a candidate who received the overwhelming majority of the popular vote, did not win the presidency.

“Until Trump actually won,” said Bordo,

many young, straight, white women may have believed that the rights they had enjoyed all their lives were somehow secure. The election woke them up, and propelled them to become a part of the resistance that Blacks, immigrants, and LGBTQ citizens were already engaged in — because they always knew safety was an illusion. If that resistance remains as diverse and committed as those first post-inauguration protests it will change the landscape of American politics.

Perhaps change has come already — since election day, according to Emily’s List, close to 13,000 Democratic women are ready to run for office and 7,000 have signed up to help them win.

Click here for more articles on the Forward.

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The Women’s March in New York City • January 21, 2017 by Sally Wendkos Olds

A wire clothes hanger bearing the stark message “Never Again.” The woman marching next to me saw this sign and confided that her mother had nearly bled to death after the self-administered abortion of what would have been her fourth child, one she could not take care of.

“My Life Matters.” A heart-wrenching sign carried by a small African-American boy riding on his father’s shoulders. His message is more important than ever in the months and years ahead.

“Putin’s Poodle.” Donald Trump’s head on the body of a dog. What does the election of this man mean to the independence of our nation?

The signs held aloft during the marches in cities and towns across the United States and in nations around the globe were many and creative and inspiring — and emphasized why we — millions of us — were marching on the day after the inauguration of the least qualified person ever elected president of our country.

The Women’s Marches the day after the inauguration of Donald John Trump as President of the United States exceeded expectations in every way, in cities and towns across the United States and in nations whose citizens feared not only for our government but for theirs and for the world. Many more thousands of people took part than anyone had estimated (2.9 million in the U.S. alone), and more goodwill was shown, with one police officer in Manhattan saying on television there was not a single problem for all the hours that people were on the streets – other than handling traffic. Civility pervaded the streets throughout the day, even when the march was at a standstill because so many people joined from so many different directions.

The streets were filled for hours with citizens — and non-citizens — of every ethnicity, every color, every age from infants in arms to ancients in wheelchairs (and yes, many grandmothers and grandchildren). Many wore the ubiquitous “pussy hats” – hand-knitted pink hats with little ears — to hold up to ridicule President Donald Trump’s vulgar videotaped acknowledgment of his own sexual predations. A large contingent of men joined in the continual chanting with “Her body, her choice!”

My group, under the aegis of Eleanor’s Legacy (an organization inspired by Eleanor Roosevelt and dedicated to expanding the role of pro-choice women in government) met at 10 a.m. at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza at the United Nations. Although it was impossible to hear the speakers during the two and a half hours we stood there before we were able to begin marching, they must have said good things because there were periodic shouts and waves. Despite impatient chants of “Let Us March!” there was no pushing or elbowing, and people were unfailingly courteous in stepping aside to let small groups of friends and family stay together.

SEE ALSO: March on Washington Video

When I heard that women would be marching to protest the ascension to the presidency of the most unqualified person in our country’s history, I knew I wanted to be part of it. Why? When people asked me what good it would do, I could have quoted Mahatma Gandhi when he said “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it’s very important that you do it.”

Or I could have quoted Harry Belafonte who called the street march “one of the great weapons of a democracy.” I wanted to be part of a global statement to let this administration know how many worldwide were shocked by what this singularly unqualified president has been saying, the people he has been appointing to his cabinet, and what this council of governing know-nothings plan to do.

I had not marched for a long time – since demonstrating for civil rights in Chicago, pro-choice in Washington, anti-war on Long Island, and probably others I can’t remember. Did these marches bring about the Voting Rights Law and the Fair Housing Law, the Roe v. Wade decision, and other changes in government? Yes, they moved public opinion and reached Congress and the Supreme Court and eventually led to changes in the laws of our land.

So what will be the real impact of this march? Nothing unless people involved take it further. And this we must do. We must build democratic structures at local levels in red, blue and purple states. We must engage our young people and inspire them to become leaders. We must educate ourselves and be alert to any encroachment of power upon the rights of the people. We must support the organizations carrying on this work – Planned Parenthood, The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Coalition against Censorship, others fighting for a better world – with our efforts and our pocketbooks.

We need imagination, effort, and knowledge to do this. Donald Trump talked about returning the government to the people. We the people must do this ourselves for ourselves and our fellow citizens, since his promises as put into practice so far will take it away from us. What can we do? We need to organize at local levels, we need to fight the gerrymandering that has paralyzed forces for progress, we need to urge reformers to run for school boards, for city councils, for judgeships, for elective offices at the most basic levels. Only then will our country be able to reap the democratic rewards for the many, not the few.

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