Clinton’s worst nightmare: Fiorina as an opponent

Bernie Sanders blew the first dog whistle of the 2016 election season during the first Democratic presidential debate, and Hillary Clinton heard it loud and clear.

On gun control, Sanders said: "All the shouting in the world is not going to do what I would hope all of us want, and that is keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have those guns, and end this horrible violence."

Clinton responded on the campaign trail with a line guaranteed to raise demand for over-the-counter nausea drugs: "I've been told to stop, and I quote, 'shouting about gun violence.' Well, first of all, I'm not shouting. It's just when women talk, some people think we're shouting."

This is Clinton using dog-whistle identity politics as a weapon. The identity is women, and the dog whistle is shouting. Sanders, of course, never heard the dog whistle and as a result can't defend himself. This sort of gender bias is subconscious, and Sanders has been conditioned from birth to operate in a gender-biased fashion. He's nothing more than a robot programmed to think negatively about women.

So why doesn't he simply get a list of gender-biased words such as "shouting," memorize it, and then avoid all those words? Sorry Bernie, it doesn't work like that. Clinton gets to make up the rules as she goes along, and a great deal of the media will back her up on it, even when it's nonsense.

MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski dared to call Clinton's display "pathetic," and now social media trolls want to revoke Brzezinski's feminism card. They are completely oblivious to the fact that she's actually protecting feminism from being hijacked.

Jake Tapper said of Hillary's attack, "If you think this is identity politics … you ain't seen nothing yet. Wait until she gets the nomination."

No kidding. With Hillary Clinton all but coronated, a great tidal wave of faux-outrage driven, anti-feminist feminism is coming to drown us all. By this time next year, the list of anti-woman-dog-whistle-language words will have grown to encyclopedic proportions, and anyone who dares to disagree will be outed for their own gender bias. If Brzezinski tries to defend feminism from that onslaught, she'll be run off of MSNBC and forced to join Kirsten Powers on Fox News, where feminism will still mean something.

In the famous story about the boy who cried wolf, the townspeople eventually stopped coming to the boy's defense. But if he'd had an army of demagogic supporters, they'd have never stopped showing up. They'd have written about how they saw the wolf, too, its claws like railroad spikes, its teeth like stalactites.

That crystal-ball-cracking version of the future is why Carly Fiorina really is Clinton's worst nightmare.

If Fiorina dropped a line like Bernie's "shouting" comment, Clinton would look pretty ridiculous accusing Fiorina of subconscious gender bias. Being forced into a matchup with Fiorina would change the landscape of Clinton's general election path in two ways: First, it would neutralize Clinton's ability to find gender bias where none exists. Second, it would neutralize Clinton's tactic of creating excitement for the prospect of the first-ever female president.

In the snooze-fest Democratic debate, the candidates were asked how they'd be different from President Barack Obama. Clinton's response was, "Well, I think that's pretty obvious. Being the first woman president would be quite a change from the presidents we've had, including President Obama." She also remarked that "finally fathers will be able to say to their daughters, 'You, too, can grow up to be president.'"

If Fiorina were the Republican nominee, Clinton's nonsubstantive tactics would become litter on the shoulder of the election highway. The national conversation would not be about who is subconsciously gender-biased or aren't-you-tired-of-men-being-president rhetoric. Suddenly, Clinton's gender-as-weapon campaign would become obsolete. Suddenly, the election would become one about issues and substance, and anyone who has seen Fiorina and Clinton debate issues knows who'd win a battle of substance.

Sexism and gender bias are real things, and substantive gender issues exist. However, it's hard to hold a real conversation about them when a candidate such as Hillary Clinton exploits gender issues and hurls them at her opponents like ninja stars. Real gender issues are important to Fiorina and Clinton, but only one of them is trivializing those issues.

— Eddie Zipperer is an assistant professor of political science at Georgia Military College and a regular contributor to The Hill.