22:58

Bernie Sanders’s first question at tonight’s Democratic forum was to explain he’s a socialist; Hillary Clinton was asked to explain why young people don’t like her and think she’s dishonest, notes Lucia Graves.



There’s a long history of calling female candidates dishonest, and Clinton in particular has spent decades fighting off such gendered attacks. I’ve written before about why women in power are typically seen as less trustworthy than men in the same positions, but it bears revisiting tonight.



Clinton’s response started out as a wooden lecture how she intended to go about winning, and vague remarks about how she was “totally excited about young people getting involved in any way”, but she soon pivoted to something more personal. While she didn’t call out the gendered nature of the attack explicitly, the tenor was there in her comments that she’s been around long enough that “people have thrown all kinds of things” at her.

The irony is Clinton’s part of the forum explicitly started with a conversation with the moderator about how Barack Obama had said in an interview Clinton had to put up with attacks she didn’t deserve.