The Pushback

Steve Clemons and my colleague Josh Green both insist that, as per common sense, Patti Solis Doyle was fired from her spot as Hillary Clinton's campaign manager. It seems, however, that yesterday the Clinton campaign put out some more details on the "stepped down" theory:

Ms. Solis Doyle recently returned home after two months on the road to find a family accustomed to her absence, she told colleagues. When her 6-year-old son cried out one night recently, he rebuffed his mom, saying, "I want Daddy." Ms. Solis Doyle flew out of the room in tears and told her husband: "Joey doesn't want me. S- this campaign, I'm quitting."

This is probably something every parent of young children could sympathize with, but at the same time it almost seems calculated to send the message that you can't put mothers in positions of responsibility, doesn't it? After all, if it's really true that Solis Doyle wasn't fired, then quitting a top job in the Clinton campaign at a moment of crisis would have been an incredibly irresponsible thing to do. In the real world, of course, it doesn't make any sense as anything other than a firing, but inside the fiction Solis Doyle just switched from a campaign manager who arguably made some mistakes to being a campaign manager who really screwed over her boss and all her employees and millions of Clinton supporters across the country.