A FAMILY VIEW
CLINTON LACKED THE COMMON TOUCH, BUT HER POLITICS WERE PERSONAL
Afriend who served as chief of staff to a couple of Ontario cabinet ministers once observed that, in his view, politicians are people who are searching for something in their public life that is missing from their private ones — validation perhaps, or purpose, or recognition.
That’s probably true in some cases. But if you’ve read Hillary Clinton’s new book, you’ll likely agree it doesn’t hold true in hers. What Happened is a portrait of a politician with a rich personal life, from which much of her politics flowed.
What Happened is many things: it’s a careful effort to debunk — or at least question — many of the claims that have been made about the Democrats’ unsuccessful electoral strategy. It’s an exercise in finger pointing, often backed up by data. It’s an apologia, parts of which are convincing, parts of which are not. But what runs underneath it all are Clinton’s views on family: its importance to her personally, and its influence on her vision for the kind of politics America needs.
Clinton talks about her mother — a lot. This mostly works, since her mother’s story truly is remarkable: neglected as a young child, she was sent off at age eight to live with her grandparents, who were so strict they once confined her to her bedroom for an entire year. When she couldn’t take it any longer, she left home to become a housekeeper at 14, and in spite of this grim childhood, still went on to be the affirming mother of a girl who would run to be president of the United States.
This story is effectively the embodiment of the American Dream: a rags- to- riches tale within a gen- eration. Interestingly, though (and as Clinton herself acknowledges), Clinton never managed to transform this story into a compelling narrative — like Bill did with his abusive father, or Obama did with his absent one. That she couldn’t goes to one of her more significant shortcomings as a politician: she was rarely an aspiring orator, and, lacking the common touch her husband possessed, often came across as distant and elite.
But it’s clear that the childhood her mother endured, along with the “comfortable middle- class” childhood Clinton knew, and (by her account) mostly happy home life she created with Bill and Chelsea, all informed what Clinton hoped to accomplish in office. She wanted to have a role in building a society in which all children have an opportunity to realize their God-given potential, is how she puts it at one point.
And it’s clear her commitment to children is genuine. Almost all of the campaign positions she discusses in the book — be it the opi- oid crisis, Obamacare, gun crime, or the Flint, Mich., tainted water scandal — are topics she backs into from the perspective of the children she’s met who are suffering, or the parents who suffer when their children do.
Clinton also tried to work a concept of family into a broader campaign message. She devotes pages, for instance, to explaining her lastminute decision to revise her campaign kickoff speech to include an analogy about America as a family. “We Americans may differ, bicker, stumble, and fall; but we are at our best when we pick each other up,” she declared at Roosevelt Island in June 2015. “Like any family, our American family is strongest when we cherish what we have in common and fight back against those who would drive us apart.”
This was not the first time Clinton had spoken about the need for politics to create a sense of personal connection, place and purpose for citizens. As she notes later, it’s something that had been “gnawing at her for years.” She’d tried to articulate these ideas in a University of Texas speech in 1993, and in her 1996 book It Takes A Village. For both efforts, she was panned for being, as one critic put it, “gauzy and gushy.”
But is it actually insubstantial and sentimental to make children and families a focus of our politics? It’s hard to see how. Many of our most pressing policy issues — class inequality, radicalization, mental health, obesity, crime, education — are ones most effectively addressed by targeting individuals in their developmental years, or ensuring parents have the resources to do so.
What may have made these ideas easy to criticize, then, was not their foolishness but their unfamiliarity. This might be a product of the fact that children’s issues are, in general, ones that preoccupy and resonate most with women, who have been less of a force in western politics since, well, forever.
After taking a drubbing for It Takes A Village, Clinton noted that, “it was becoming painfully clear that there was no room in our politics for the kind of discussion I wanted to have. Or maybe I was the wrong messenger.” Maybe, even in 2016, she was the wrong messenger, or the right messenger at the wrong time.
But it’s difficult to see how her message was wrong. Family life, religious belief and spirituality, she noted at the World Economic Forum in 1998, are not separable from political and economic reform, but integral to it. It is ironic that a politician who struggled to connect with voters on a personal level built her political life around these deeply personal ideas. It goes to show that we cannot always take politicians’ public personas at face value, and that, on occasion, this may actually be a good thing.
IT’S DIFFICULT TO SEE HOW HER MESSAGE WAS WRONG.