Former Hillary Clinton campaign aide Jess McIntosh is happy for Beto O'Rourke and his 2020 plans. She just wishes her former boss would have received the same positive media treatment that he's now enjoying. She sounded off on the "double standard" during an interview with CNN's Poppy Harlow on Thursday.
In Thursday's glowing Vanity Fair cover story about O'Rourke, the former Texas state senator said he was "born" to run and that he had to follow his calling, despite how it might affect his kids.
As long as the double standard is part of the Beto conversation (and I even feel like he could be supportive of that), I’m thrilled he’s in the race. pic.twitter.com/iLudP72GfQ
— jess mcintosh (@jess_mc) March 14, 2019
“The only thing that I want to make sure is part of a conversation when we talk about Beto is that it would be near impossible for a woman to run that same kind of race,” McIntosh said. “Trying to imagine a woman saying ‘I was born to do this’ is really pretty impossible.”
It seems McIntosh is saying that a similar profile on Clinton or another female candidate would not have been so flattering, because the media places a different emphasis on mothers and on women in general.
“So as Beto is rightfully praised for the outside-the-box candidacy he’s putting forward, I want to make sure that double standard is part of the conversation, because I think it could do us all a lot of good if we started treating everybody about the same,” McIntosh added.
Clinton herself believes the media treatment she received in 2016 had something to do with her defeat. Maybe if they had stopped obsessing over her emails, she mused, there would have been a different outcome. In her book "What Happened," she claimed that none of Trump's scandals" generated the kind of sustained, campaign-defining coverage that my emails did."
It's unlikely that fewer headlines about Clinton's email scandal would have helped. She had already done irreversible damage to her campaign by taking important demographics for granted and just flat out failing to relate to voters.