Hillary Clinton won the debate.
She slayed. She crushed. She dominated. She addressed racism and unconscious bias with both boldness and nuance. She all but got Donald Trump to admit that he doesn't pay taxes. She performed as well as any candidate probably could, ever.
Donald Trump blustered, bragged, lied, lied again, sniffled like a cokehead (IS HE DYING? WHAT IS WRONG WITH HIM? WHAT IS HE HIDING?), and kept fact-checkers in business all night.
This should far and away be recognized as a rout, on all fronts. And yet! Cue to this tweet from Meet The Press last night, quoting host Chuck Todd:
Come the eff on.
This may be the most offensive false equivalence of all time. How on earth is it possible to be over-prepared for this kind of thing? For being president?
Let's just say it bluntly: It is not. It is not possible to be over-prepared for a presidential debate, or for being president, and here is why: In both instances, you walk into the arena with nothing but yourself. You stand and face whatever is going to come at you and you handle it. Which is exactly what Hillary Clinton did last night—like a boss.
And yet, we have Chuck Todd, presumably one of the leading political observers in the nation, certainly a voice of influence and authority, calling Clinton "over-prepared" like it's a bad thing.
Would he have said that about a man?
We can't know, of course, because no one would ever call Trump over-prepared. But I'm going to hazard a guess that a man coming onto a presidential debate stage with a strong command of the facts and an impressive grasp of the issues would be characterized as having "a strong command of the facts" and "an impressive grasp of the issues." Heck he may have even been called "presidential."
What makes the Chuck Todd comment even more glaring is that it echoes a dis by Trump. He zinged Clinton for staying off the campaign trail leading up to the debate, saying "I've been all over the place. You decided to stay home, and that's okay."
It was a hit she was ready for. "I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate. And yes, I did. And you know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be president. And I think that's a good thing."
[youtube ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jydHCKtjOak [/youtube]
It one of the few moments that spurred spontaneous applause (otherwise discouraged among audience members). But Chuck Todd, whose job it is to watch the debate with a critical eye, saw that moment and instead of taking Hillary's point, he took Trump's. Why? For the same reason that both candidates have been graded on a curve in this election: the gender double-standard.
"This is a way of shifting the criteria of evaluation around so that she still gets dinged," says Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. "The criteria really is, are you prepared or not?" For a candidate to be described disparagingly as "over-prepared" changes the evaluation criteria, says Cooper, "in a way that she then gets penalized for."
Cooper, who was also the lead researcher on Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, notes that this is a common phenomenon in the workplace: "It happens with women in a job search—people will change the criteria that they think are important to conform to the candidate they want." The candidate they want, Cooper says, often conforms to gender stereotypes.
These stereotypes—spoiler alert!—tend to favor men. As Jessica Bennett, author of the recently published Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace, puts it: "Women must be twice as qualified to be viewed as good [as a male candidate]—more so if they are a woman of color. Every move, every mistake, is scrutinized more and more and remembered longer." Bennett—along with numerous other people who expressed their exasperation on Twitter—thinks the "over-prepared" line was ludicrous: "Literally there's no such thing".
It's not just that Trump is being graded on a gentle, forgiving curve. It's that Clinton is being on a tougher, stricter version. Consider this exchange from MSNBC's Morning Joe this morning:
Mika Brzezinski: He was not as bad as you would expect him to be.
Joe Scarborough: He was not as bad as he was in a number of the Republican debates!
Brzezinski: She was not as great as she could've been.
Two different standards, laid out neatly and clearly. MSNBC contributor and former GOP strategist Nicolle Wallace was the one who put things back in perspective shortly thereafter:
We held her to unrealistically exceedingly high standards, and she exceeded them … I thought she was quick on her feet, I thought she was charming, I thought she was funny—but this is a parallel universe where he also came out still breathing, and where Donald Trump is concerned, that is adequate.
These are the standards to which we're holding our two candidates: supreme competence vs. "still breathing." While Donald Trump may seem like an outlier in terms of his bananas unqualified lying demagoguery, this wildly lopsided standard of competence is actually nothing new to many women in the workforce.
In an impassioned Facebook rant, Alisa Leonard, the founder of The #Breadwinners Project, which focuses on diversity and inclusion for women in the workforce, called the spectacle "traumatic": "Traumatic because it was like watching the most epic version of what women everywhere in the workforce and in politics deal with on a near constant basis. Traumatic because all of the mansplainery interrupting reminds you of all those times you have been interrupted when talking about the thing you have the most expertise in. Traumatic because you realize that here in 2016 even the most powerful woman in American politics and possibly the world, has to behave according to a code that women have honed over the decades in order to even have a seat at the table."
In an email, Leonard called the over-prepared double-standard "maddening." "Women don't have the luxury of being cavalier," said Leonard, noting that women are often well-prepared so they "can be accountable to the things they say." Can you imagine if Donald Trump was held to that standard?
Somewhere Hillary Clinton would be bonking her head against a wall at all this, except she's too damn busy to waste her time with this crap. After all, time is short, and she's got some preparing to do.
This post has been updated.
