Hillary Clinton Tackles Sarah Palin’s ‘War On Women’ Charge

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Hillary Clinton on Tuesday responded to former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s accusation that President Barack Obama fired the first shot in the “war on women.”

Palin tweeted an excerpt from Clinton’s new memoir “Hard Choices” on Monday, in which Clinton recounted how then-Sen. Obama’s 2008 campaign asked her to issue a statement criticizing Palin after she was chosen as Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) running mate.

“Look who fired the 1st shot in the real ‘war on women,'” Palin wrote. “Hint: it wasn’t the GOP.”

“That’s not exactly what I said,” Clinton told ABC News’ Robin Roberts. “What I said was that in beginning the process of working with Sen. Obama after I ended my campaign, we had as I describe in the book, an awkward but necessary meeting to clear the air on a couple of issues and one of them was the sexism that unfortunately was present in that ’08 campaign.”

Clinton told Roberts that the Obama campaign did ask her to “go out and criticize Palin.” In the excerpt, Clinton wrote “I was not going to attack Palin just for being a woman appealing for support from other women. I didn’t think it made political sense, and it didn’t feel right. So I said no.”

“I think it’s fair to say that I made it clear I’m not going to go attack somebody for being a woman or a man,” Clinton told Roberts. “I’m going to try and look at the issues, where they stand, what their experience is, what they intend to do and then that’s fair game.”

She added that the atmosphere for a potential female candidate on a presidential ticket is different now than it was during the 2008 campaign.

“I think it’s different for women across the board, because it’s not just in the political sphere that we continue to have these obstacles to women’s full participation … But I think that over the last six, seven years there has been a much greater awareness in the American public about the double standard,” Clinton said.

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Notable Replies

  1. I look forward to the campaign trail, during which Hillary (for whom I’m by no means a partisan) stomps the living snot out of both GOP men and GOP women on this issue. I would give a lot of money to see Hillary “debate” Palin on live TV [edited to add: “but I don’t seriously believe Hillary needs to do this! Am just fantasizing about Palin getting smacked down.”]

  2. Clinton is being too kind, not necessarily a winning strategy in Presidential Elections She had a wonderful opportunity there to go for the kill

  3. Palin thinks the “war on women” started in 2008? Even if she really has forgotten GOP’s attacks on Hillary from back in the 90’s, I somehow doubt Hillary has.

  4. she’ll have many wonderful opportunities to do just that. she did the right thing.

  5. Avatar for msny msny says:

    Yep. That’s the ticket. No sexism before '08. Who knew? Thanks for clearing that up.

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