Brooks: Hillary Victory Did Not Feel Like Huge, Momentous, Breakthrough Moment Like Obama in ’08

Friday on PBS’s “NewsHour,” while discussing presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton becoming the first major party female presidential nominee, New York Times columnist David Brooks said Hillary Clinton’s achievement didn’t compare to Obama in 2008.

When asked if he felt the history of the moment, Brooks said, “Weirdly not. Maybe I’m a chauvinist or something, but, you know, obviously, the transformation of the role of women is the biggest event of our lifetime  — the biggest transformation after thousands of years of human history, to getting closer to equality on that front. But Hillary Clinton, it was so long in coming, it didn’t, to me, feel like the big seismic shift, frankly, the way Barack Obama felt in 2008. I  think because she’s such a familiar figure and because the social trend has been gradual in coming that it didn’t feel like sort of this huge, momentous, break-through moment.”

“And this maybe speaks well of the situation we are in but it wasn’t like a feminist tide,”he continued. “It was a tide of her grown grit, a lot of issues, the Democratic establishment. If you poll Sanders voters versus Clinton voters, Sanders voters were more likely to think there was structural discrimination against women than Clinton voters. She road on the tide of merit, on issues, but not necessarily a feminist tide. So this particular event did not feel a seismic opening, at least to me, that say, the Obama thing did.”

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