Hillary's Base

I can't help but wonder what kind of message -- explicitly or implied -- the Clinton campaign's treatment of Samantha Power sends to her base of middle-aged white women. Suddenly her campaign doesn't seem like the chummy Girls Night Out it would have many women believe and more like a scene from Mean Girls.

Personally, I'd like to see some backlash from this episode and hope it serves to wipe away the veneer that Clinton's candidacy is somehow the culmination of 50 years of feminism or 15 years of Girl Power (or whatever) and is really just about the acquisition of political power. Samantha Power is an enormously successful female academic, the very person Hillary's presidency is supposed to represent, and instead she's being cut down mercilessly. Somewhere some successful middle-aged white woman should be thinking to herself, "What if that were me? Would Hillary have any problem throwing me to the wolves?"

I think we all know what the answer to that question is now.