When all else fails, just say she’s too good at it
From the You just can’t win files, or is it the Balance at all costs files, or the Let’s not get too smartyboots around here files, or the Women who know stuff aren’t feminine files, or the We have to say something bad about her files.
.@chucktodd: #debatenight exposed Trump's lack of preparation, but Clinton seemed over-prepared at times.
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) September 27, 2016
#debatenight exposed Trump’s lack of preparation, but Clinton seemed over-prepared at times.
Over-prepared. She’s running for a huge complicated job with a lot of moving parts, and she seemed “over-prepared.” What would that even be?
I’m sure that they’re just concerned that Clinton is overqualified and thus likely to leave halfway through her term for a better job, like, uh, well… never mind.
It reminds me of when I was in high school and I was being bullied by some other girls. The headmaster said that although the girls were wrong to do what they did, perhaps I brought it on myself by being so clever and so I would have to be put in detention too. Age 14, I had no idea how to respond to that. And maybe that’s just as well, a snarky comeback probably would have landed me in even more trouble.
My mother came down to the school, and let’s just say she tore several strips off him and he rescinded my detention. And I learned the lesson that being intelligent wasn’t valued, at least in girls. Luckily, my personality is rather bloody-minded, so I didn’t back down and pretend to be stupider in exchange for a quiet life. But that doesn’t excuse it.
The ‘overprepared’ thing is just such bullshit. Were there things about Clinton’s performance I disliked? Sure. The ‘Trumped-up trickle-down’ line didn’t work for me, and there was a moment where I worried that she was letting herself get drawn into one of Trump’s slanging matches. But overall, I thought it was solid and I think that’s at the heart of this kind of commentary. The media have spent so long painting Clinton as an emotionless bitch, that when they saw her warm and witty and affable, they didn’t know what to do with it.
Hillary Clinton is so mean, you guys. Did you see how she made Trump look stupid?
The thought of being over prepared to be President of the US leaves me speechless. When supposedly intelligent people say shit like that I can only think your society is fucking doomed. Sadly, that applies to the rest of us too.
Claire, even guys aren’t allowed to be smarter than ‘normal’ people. I was badly bullied at school because I was a non-athletic kid who was quiet and studied in a working class school. At 15 I joined a sports team just to make the bullying stop, but I still respond with anger toward anyone who suggests bright kids shouldn’t show they are bright.
@Rob I’m going to be charitable and assume you didn’t mean to sound patronizing. Let me simply say that there was definitely a gendered aspect to what happened to me. My mam, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of the law and local education policy, intimidated the headmaster into dropping the disciplinary action against because of the gendered nature of what he said. My mam is awesome. :-)
Are boys also discouraged from being academic? Sure. Because knowing stuff is not ‘manly’? I guess we file this into the box labeled ‘How Patriarchy hurts everyone’.
Claire, your mum does sound awesome. Also, my apologies. That could well sound patronising in print – which was certainly not my intent. I was intending to be reinforcing of the discriminating against the intelligent, but do appear to have put a gloss on the sexist bit. Easy to be thoughtless apparently :-(
I do think it falls into the patriarchy hurts everybody camp. Just a couple of weeks ago there was a report of some group complaining that ‘feminised’ education was putting boys off school which was leading to women taking over in business, medicine, science, engineering etc etc while boys ended up as tradesmen and unemployed. I’m sure some of my brain cells died just reading the article. Whoever wrote it has both a very poor opinion of boys and a gross inability to analyse the situation and place blame in the appropriate place (i.e. many boys are taught not to value anything that appeals or might appeal to girls).
@Rob
Oh, that’s the Christina Hoff Sommers position. According to Ms. CHS, attempts to make education more girl-friendly has resulted in wholesale punishment of boys for natural boy behavior, like exuberance, and a need to monopolize teachers’ attention.
Apparently, in ye Olden Tymes, schools were free range, and boys romped and roamed to their hearts’ content. Then feminism happened, and they’ve all been stuffed into battery cages and forced to read Jane Eyre. True story.
snort
Honestly I wasn’t a fan; the Science Debate and this has put me firmly in her camp.
Re ‘…and thus likely to leave halfway through her term for a better job…’
I confess I snortled.
There just always has to be something. Even if it’s a stupid something. And that one really was.
… and, hey, I believe Ms. Clinton already addressed this. To the last guy who tried on that ‘damn you organized, prepared people, anyway’ line. Think it went something like: “I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate. And yes I did. And you know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be president. And I think that’s a good thing.”
And yes. Yes it is.
I gotta wonder: is this guy gonna complain, say, his surgeon is ‘overprepared’ to treat him? The fire crew is ‘overprepared’ to save his house? What, does he worry NASA is overthinking it, when they try to work out every damned contingency, when they launch a vehicle carrying a human crew? Geez, you guys, all this getting ready, thinking through possible variations on what you might have to deal with, trying to be ready as possible to do exactly the right thing, when everything is on the line, just where will it all end? In _success_?
For what it’s worth, he later explained that what he apparently meant was that she was trying to cram too many points into each answer. I don’t think that’s a particularly sensible criticism either, but it’s not as bad as how the Meet The Press Twitter account phrased it.
https://twitter.com/chucktodd/status/780623923855630336
“Overprepared” is the assessment given to a speaker when the listener making the criticism, who thought they were equal to the speaker, finds out they weren’t as up to par as they thought.
The short answer… sour grapes!
@Rob No harm, no foul. And yes, my mam rocks!
As a general point, and not just thinking about it from a sexism point of view (although that’s part of it), how do we address the growing anti-intellectualism movement on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s frustrating to me as a rational human being and a scientist that knowledge, experience and understanding is not only dismissed as unimportant but actively derided and disparaged. The Brexit debate and the rise of Trump both seem to play into this phenomenon. Regardless of how you feel about her personally, Hillary Clinton is objectively one the most well-qualified people ever to run for president and Donald Trump one of the most hilariously (if it weren’t so serious) unqualified. How did we get here? And how do we fight back?
In 4 years, I’ll be eligible for US citizenship, and you better believe I’m going for it as soon as I can. Sitting here as a LPR, subject to this shitshow without any power to do anything about it is maddening.
And on the other side of that coin, the idea that, because science doesn’t know anything with 100% absolute certainty, that all knowledge is up for grabs, and everyone else’s idea, seen in a dream or just popped into their head, whatever, is equally valid with results obtained through painstaking research. A 99% certainty doesn’t mean, well, it’s probably not true, then, or at least no more true than my idea over here that something something harmonic convergence, something, auras, and something religion caused the phenomenon of interest.
Claire @ 13 – I’ve been asking that question for literally decades. Trump is the worst but there was also Reagan – famous because movie star! Not bright and not well informed! And there was Bush Junior – famous because child of president! Thick as a plank and not well informed! And now this. It makes me despair.
On its own I wouldn’t know what “over-prepared” means, but in this context it’s just another way of articulating an undyingly popular line of attack against Clinton: that she is supposedly cold, calculating, lacking in spontaneity to the point of being robotic or otherwise inhuman.
@ Ophelia Yeah, I know. But I feel like 2016 has set new records of outright buffoons and people so intellectually incurious it beggars belief being handed the mantle of ‘voice of the people’ or some such nonsense. People like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson and even Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and of course Trump and his band of merry deplorables rampaging around the US making life demonstrably worse for everyone.
I had a conversation with someone who takes colloidal silver as a protection against infections. She also feeds it to her kid. I begged her to give it up, told her how dangerous this supplement was and how utterly ineffective at preventing flu or anything else. ‘Don’t tell me that!’ she exclaimed. ‘I have to believe it works for it to work!”. She’s voting for Gary Johnson, because she doesn’t like Trump, thinks Clinton’s untrustworthy and muttered darkly about Jill Stein being some kind of double agent (for whom wasn’t clear). She thinks libertarianism has the answers to America’s problems.
@ The Great God Pan If I’d had to put up with a tenth of the crap that’s been slung at Hillary Clinton over the decades she’s been a public figure, I’d have long since given up and gone to live in a cabin in the woods or something. I genuinely don’t know how she manages to keep going, doggedly fighting for what she believes in and smiling through vicious attacks and pejorative remarks disguised as questions from the media. Watch her early TV appearances as a young woman through to today and you can almost see the shell she’s built around herself forming. I don’t agree with her on everything, but if I were eligible to vote I’d gleefully pull the lever for her. Having said that, 8 years of Obama has given us new depths of appalling racism, and I imagine the horror of a woman as president will subject us all to unimagined depths of misogyny too. (That’s not meant to say I blame Obama or Clinton for this).
Claire, I’ve actually had something of an epiphany with respect to the vitriol people direct at Clinton. It could be that it’s entered into a positive feedback loop, where people subconsciously intuit that the only reason someone would have withstood all of this horrible shit being slung at them would be if they *were indeed* obscenely corrupt and profiting handsomely in some nefarious way to make all the effort of surviving the shit-slinging worth having done. It may stem from some kind of guilt, perhaps, where people have to justify their own hatred and previous bad action (or that of others who came before them).
Because otherwise people would have to own up to their own mindless misogyny, and people are really good at not doing that.