Why do people distrust Hillary Clinton?

[Nonhlanhla]

11. Various reasons

I think the primary reason is the decades of right wing smearing of Hillary. A lot of the older Democrats don't fall for that, because they know the history, but younger Democrats as well as people who have never really been into Dem politics until now, take it as fact. When the Benghazi thing started, I knew right away that this was all pre-emptive strike against Hillary.

Secondly, gender. There is an ancient distrust of women who seek power. This goes back centuries and is part of the Western world's cultural legacy. It is slowly fading, but there is still a lot of knee-jerk reaction to women who seek power. A lot of this is underlying and unexamined. I'll give a race analogy: there are tests that see how people associate different races with animals, and those tests often reveal shocking results with regards to how black people are viewed (I remember a very interesting session on this by Philip Atiba Goff, who does important research on issues of police brutality and unexamined prejudice). People are very naive when they think that things like racism and sexism are just on the surface, and as long as you don't feel racist or sexist you are not. It's just not that simple.

Finally, Hillary herself. She has not flip-flopped nearly as much as Bernie's people suggest, but she has at times changed her position. Some of that is inevitable, and a lot of it was positive, e.g., that time when she opposed a bankruptcy bill after learning how it would harm women and children. But at other times it was less positive. Add to that her Iraq vote, which disappointed many liberals, myself included. Now, I do think these positions are misrepresented severely by the Bernie campaign (which is one of the most underhandedly negative campaigns I've seen in quite a while, since it appears as if Bernie's hands are clean, while the whisper campaign against Hillary's integrity is waged under the surface). But she did, unfortunately, give them some ammunition to work with. I think her Iraq decision is particularly misrepresented, since even a brief analysis shows that she was in fact not ra-ra about the war. But the fact that she did not see through the Bush administration is still a disappointment.

To be a Hillary supporter therefore requires not buying into the right wing manufactured image of her, to not have underlying knee-jerk reactions to an older woman seeking power, and to have a more nuanced perspective on her positions than is often possible during a heated campaign. Not all of Hillary's detractors necessarily oppose her for all these reasons, but I think we can see quite a lot of it in some responses to her. The problem is that she cannot really address #2 in my list, because then she is accused of "playing the gender card." And #1 and #3 seem to reinforce each other.

So we've got our work cut out for ourselves.