(In These Times) — Whether or not the email controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton will matter nine months from now, it threw some of us back to a place we didn’t want to go: wishing someone else might be the one to become the first woman president. Reports surfaced that she had used her personal email account for State Department business, allowing her considerable control over her email records. In a defensive press conference, a somewhat haughty Clinton said the main reason for this practice was “convenience” and that she and her attorneys would decide which emails to release.
As various commentators have pointed out, Maureen Dowd most scathingly, Hillary’s handling of the email controversy has reminded people of her prickliness, her sense of entitlement: “You seemed like an annoyed queen, radiating irritation at anyone who tried to hold you accountable.” As this gendered criticism suggests, Dowd has it in for Clinton: Last June, Media Matters analyzed 195 of Dowd’s columns on Clinton since late 1993 and found that 72 percent of them were negative, casting her as power-hungry, a phony and a betrayer of feminism.
