The Erasure of Hillary Clinton

This cartoon, which has been circulating freely on social media, was removed by artist.

In 2017, when Hillary Clinton emerged after a well-deserved hiatus to resume public service, the calls for her to quietly leave the stage and take up gardening or knitting began to pour forth. After Hillary’s first post-election interview, RealClearPolitics’ A. B. Stoddard advised Democrats to tell Clinton that “she’s done enough damage and it’s time to pack it in” and ask her to “keep her rehabilitation journey as far away from their own as possible.” After a second interview with journalist Christiane Amanpour, Gersh Kuntzman, in the New York Daily News, told Clinton to “shut the f — up and go away already.” Vanity Fair’s T. A. Frank accused Clinton of being “not just a nuisance but a hindrance” to the Democrats achieving coalition; his piece (poisonously alluding to Dylan Thomas’s poem about resisting death) was entitled “Can Hillary Clinton Please Go Quietly Into the Night?” And when Hillary published What Happened, the journalistic kvetching about the length of her memoir made me wonder if half the population of reviewers was suffering from untreated ADD. The book, by the way, is approximately the same length as Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution, published barely a week after he lost the primary, in which he made it very clear that he was not about to go away. Sanders wasn’t berated for sticking around or burdening us with such a long, narcissistically-timed tome. Hillary, in contrast, was chastised for having…