On honesty issues, Hillary Clinton fights own missteps, gender stereotypes
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign may be a case study in the kind of missteps that can be particularly punishing for U.S. political candidates who are women.
Just like society assumes most men are competent, the public gives women the benefit of the doubt on ethics and honesty, or a “virtue advantage,” according to a 2014 handbook titled Keys to Elected Office: The Essential Guide for Women that was updated earlier this year. The handbook, published by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, is based on 20 years of research on public perceptions of female candidates. So when that perception’s tarnished, the results for women can be devastating, the handbook warns.
In the 2016 race, both major party candidates are dealing with ethics issues — Clinton over her use of the email server and her relationship to donors of the Clinton Foundation and Donald Trump over lawsuits from former students and contractors. Just last week, the FBI released more records about about the email investigation, while it was reported that Trump paid the IRS a penalty over an illegal campaign donation.
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Recent research includes a Yale School of Management study that found the public is more willing to accept a mistake by a leader in a gender appropriate role. An NYU Stern School of Business study found women in power are consistently seen as less trustworthy than men in the same positions and a 1995 Journal of Social Behavior and Personality study found women’s mistakes tend to be noticed more and remembered longer.
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“It’s a long way down off that pedestal,” says Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
The Guide stresses the importance of transparency and quickly admitting mistakes. As a candidate and public figure, Clinton has run contrary to much of this advice. Her carefully-worded responses to the uproar over her personal email system has been just the latest in a long line of examples of Clinton’s defensive posture exacerbating concerns about her trustworthiness.
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In this year's contest, a semiannual review by Politifact found 60% of Trump’s campaign claims to be false, to 13% of Clinton's. Yet “we talk a lot more about Clinton’s honesty problem,” Dittmar said. In a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll, 61% said Trump is not honest and trustworthy and 59% said the same of Clinton.
That’s partly because the Clintons have a “sloppy” history of dealing with their controversies that’s made them “vulnerable to the people who genuinely, sincerely and irrationally hate them,” said Gil Troy, author of The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s. That said, he also sees “a whole other thing" underpinning Clinton's honesty challenge "that is laden with gender expectations and healthy doses of sexism."
Jean Harris, a women and politics expert at the University of Scranton, said it's a product of "how she's handled things combined with the pedestal effect."
The 'virtue advantage' and Clinton
The “virtue advantage” is something women often capitalize on, from the Suffragettes, who ran on the fact that they were inherently good, to modern campaigns such as Florida’s 2010 gubernatorial race, where Democrat Alex Sink ran an unsuccessful campaign based on the theme of “leading with honesty and integrity.”
It’s also something opponents seek to undercut. “Because the cost of an ethical infraction is higher for a woman, campaigns against women candidates often use the well-worn strategy of launching negative attacks on character or values early in the campaign,” the handbook warns. “When Donald Trump calls her ‘crooked Hillary’ whether folks see it as strategic or not, it is,” Dittmar said.
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Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said Clinton's been in the public eye for more than two decades, so her image problems are different from average female politicians who aren't nearly as well known. Decades of controversy — and her stubborn reluctance to talk to the press about it — has fanned the narrative.
One of the first of these issues dates back to a failed 1970s (Whitewater) real estate company the Clintons formed with longtime friend James McDougal. Though no investigation found criminal wrongdoing, it made them appear to be part “of that clubby, Arkansas community where people did favors for each other,” Troy said.
Clinton has a reflexive tendency to resist acknowledging a criticism or a gaffe. As the allegations surfaced in March 1992, she fatefully quipped to reporters in Chicago: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas.” She later tried to clarify, saying she "wasn't trying to put anybody else down." Yet it shaped her persona for decades to come.
Now, younger voters unfamiliar with this history are also skeptical of her honesty and trustworthiness, Bowman said. "Doubts have been been there for the generations," she said, even as she allowed "there may be a double standard."
Katie Packer, a Republican strategist who advised 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, found Clinton aligns with her female peers. In 2014 and 2015, Packer conducted surveys identifying Clinton’s potential vulnerabilities with female voters. “There was huge benefit of the doubt given to her by these women, not necessarily because there was some women’s solidarity, but because they didn’t view her as a typical politician because she was a woman,” she said. “We were demoralized by it. We thought, ‘How are we going to pierce this veil because they don’t blame her for anything.’”
There was a possibility. “There was this sense that she was so ambitious that she would do anything to get ahead,” Packer said. “When the email thing popped up, it was a perfect opportunity to exploit the one thing we felt she was really vulnerable on.”
In the spring of 2011, when Clinton was serving as secretary of State, her Gallup favorability rating was 66%. That is 26 points higher than today following years of investigations over the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, the revelation of her personal email system while at the State Department and her 2016 presidential campaign.
Last year, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., credited GOP leaders with dramatically lowering Clinton’s numbers by creating a special Benghazi committee that uncovered her private server. “Any time people can paint you as being just like one of the guys then you come crashing down to earth,” said Packer.
Clinton’s Philadelphia convention was one big choreographed testament to her trustworthiness and character. The six in 10 Americans who still say she is not honest and untrustworthy includes 24% of Democrats, 94% of Republicans and 63% of independents, according to the USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll.
Her own worst enemy
Clinton’s image problems began when, as first lady of Arkansas, she didn’t take her husband’s name. It led to whispering suspicion among other women, Harris said.
As first lady, it was amid the controversy over Whitewater and other issues that her approval ratings went into decline. In April of 1994, Clinton held a news conference to address the land deal in which she acknowledged she'd been “less understanding than I needed to be” of the public’s right to such private information and the impression it created that she was trying to cover something up. It “is probably one of the things that I regret the most,” she told reporters.
To be sure, the 1990s marked “an unprecedented, organized, well-funded effort to dig up dirt and attack them systematically,” often on personal matters, said Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist who was a top adviser to her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders.
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Yet Clinton continued what Devine called a “heavy armor” approach, including a distrust and avoidance of the media that extended to issues clearly in the public domain, including her health care task force. The Clintons also came under fire for the firing of White House travel office staff and controversial pardons, including a couple that came after intervention attempts by her brothers, Tony and Hugh Rodham. The Clintons also later returned some furniture to the White House after departing in 2001. All together, they showed “an inability to comprehend how they’re going to be seen and to learn from experience,” Troy said.
“They fall into the same trap where they get all self-righteous, and that leads to even more over zealousness about their privacy, which is at the heart of the email,” or the latest controversy over her private server, he said.
In 2016, Clinton's hesitance to acknowledge her home brew server was a mistake, along with an evolving explanation and her aversion to formal news conferences, has fed concerns about her trustworthiness. She initially said she did it for convenience and had sent no classified information, a statement she later amended by saying she'd sent nothing marked classified at the time. The story about her server broke in March of 2015, but she did not apologize until a September interview with ABC News. Clinton implied that FBI director James Comey had declared that her response to the FBI's investigation and her public statements had been truthful. Politifact, the nonpartisan fact checker, rated the claim as false. While Comey said her testimony to the FBI was truthful, he said he was "not qualified" to determine if her public statements were truthful.
Yet Trump faces a host of questions about his record as well, with a trail of lawsuits from disgruntled contractors and Trump University students, and he seems to shift positions daily. “Somehow he gets a free pass (on honesty) because it’s expected of him, and she wakes up every day to another headline asking herself, ‘Why are they holding me to a different standard?’” Troy said.
Gender stereotypes nothing new
Gender stereotypes are as old as the nation’s history, and so is the pattern of harsher consequences for misbehavior, dating to how women criminals were punished during the colonial period, said Jean Harris, the scholar who's followed Clinton's career. “We expect men to misbehave — boys will be boys — but when women misbehaved it was more unexpected and more of a horror,” Harris said.
The “liar” label has been effectively used against a number of modern female candidates, though the case of Democrat Alex Sink is particularly pronounced. Six days before the 2010 Florida gubernatorial election, she broke debate rules by glancing at a message on her iPhone during a break.
Though her challenger, Republican Rick Scott, “unquestionably had the greater ethics challenge” after his prior hospital company was fined $1.7 billion for Medicare fraud, he hammered her in last-minute advertising.
It “really undermined the foundational message of her campaign,” said Dittmar, which was her honesty. Not that a male wouldn’t have been penalized. “It’s the scale to which they are penalized and to which their opponents use it,” she said. Republican Carly Fiorina, the only other woman in the 2016 field, was a relative newcomer to politics. Yet, like Clinton, she was described as a "liar" and "dishonest," words far further down the list for Trump and his male counterparts, according to the October USA TODAY/Suffolk University survey.
"Though she (Hillary) has clearly brought some, maybe even a lot, of these questions on herself, it’s hard to escape the long history of questioning women’s trustworthiness," said Regina Lawrence, co-author of Hillary Clinton's Race for the White House: Gender Politics and the Media on the Campaign Trail. "There’s a deeply-embedded notion in Western culture that women should be and just naturally are more trustworthy and honest than men. When a woman leader seems to violate that norm, it’s more noticeable and troubling to many people than when men do it."
