PILLORIED CLINTON
While both Democrats and Republicans may want Hillary to go away, new book makes you wish there was more to the story,
What comes after “Lock her up?” If you’re Hillary Clinton, apparently it’s “Shut her up!”
Clinton, defeated by Donald Trump in the turbulent American presidential election 10 months ago, is in the spotlight again with her just released 400-plus page opus What Happened.
While she’s being interviewed everywhere, has a blockbuster tour underway and her book is already a bestseller, many Democrats and Republicans fervently wish Clinton would just go away.
To the Democrats, their former presidential candidate is a painful symbol of a shocking and inexcusable failure to stop Donald Trump from becoming one of, if not the, most unfit presidents in U.S. history.
To many Republicans, she’s a grim reminder that they not only may have made a fatal error in electing a demagogue with chaotic leadership skills, bigoted tendencies and no known political loyalties, but one who may not have even won fair and square. A Russian politician recently stated that his country’s intelligence “stole the president of the United States.”
Of course Republicans still love to hate Clinton with a white hot vengeance.
Too bad for them — there’s not much to hate in her book. To the surprise of many, it’s pretty good.
What Happened is warm, funny, smart and surprisingly forthcoming in assessing her own faults as well as other reasons why, in Clinton’s words, “I couldn’t get the job done.”
It’s also a historic document: Clinton, 69, made history as the first woman candidate to be at the top of a presidential ticket. She won the popular vote by three million and she battled fierce headwinds — alleged Russian involvement, FBI interference and misogyny.
I, for one, want to know what it really felt like to be that woman in the eye of that storm.
A woman who, when she announced her candidacy in front of a jubilant crowd at Roosevelt Island, thought, “This is really happening. I am going to run for president and I am going to win.”
A woman who went from pollster shoo-in to lying numbly on a bed on election night as the dismal results rolled in: “I blamed myself. My worst fears about my limitations as a candidate had come true.”
Clinton describes her story as “exhilarating, joyful, humbling, infuriating and just plain baffling.”
As much as she tried to project a normal person vibe, Clinton was never like you or me.
The former first lady, New York senator and secretary of state can’t remember the last time she ever needed to make an “emergency run” for a quart of milk.
And yet Clinton is very much like women of her era: growing up on the cusp of a feminist revolution. “I wish I had claimed it more publicly and told it more proudly,” she writes. So do we. Clinton was born “right when everything was changing for women.” Families, jobs and laws were all changing. “Every thing I am, everything I’ve done, so much of what I stand for flows from that happy accident of fate.”
Not only did it lead Clinton to her historic run at the presidency, but it forced her to confront how unfinished this revolution is.
Some of the double standards women face Clinton describes in a lighthearted manner: “I’ve never gotten used to how much effort it takes just to be a woman in the public eye.”
She calculates “how many hours I spent having my hair and makeup done during the campaign. It came to about 600 hours, or twenty-five days! I was so shocked, I checked the math twice.”
But she also offers a darker “Exhibit A” that misogyny played a role in the election: “The flagrantly sexist candidate won.”
She makes a distinction between runof-the-mill sexism, which many people have occasionally succumbed to, and misogyny which is “rage. Disgust. Hatred.”
She was “taken aback by the flood of hatred,” that only seemed to grow as she neared the finish.
Why was she the unlikeable one? Clinton echoes Sheryl Sandberg author of Lean In, arguing that as men become more successful, they become more
Contrary to what critics are saying, while Clinton doesn’t hold back in her book, she also doesn’t whine
likeable, whereas for women it’s the opposite.
One man in Trump’s cabinet publicly called her “the anti-Christ” and then, in a weaselly moment during Trump’s inauguration, meekly made sure his wife got to meet her.
Clinton describes the “unbelievably cruel” trolling of women in public life. The minute a woman steps onto centre stage “it begins: the analysis of her face, her body, her voice, her demeanour, the diminishment of her stature, her ideas, her accomplishments, her integrity.”
Contrary to what critics are saying, while Clinton doesn’t hold back, she doesn’t whine.
She is now less guarded and more human, bravely extolling her love for her husband despite their very public marital troubles.
“I love him with my whole heart.” Their marriage, she states crisply, is no “arrangement.”
And she describes a private life that many women recognize — a great rela- tionship with her daughter, enchanted by grandchildren, buoyed by her women friends.
It’s just that on top of that, she thought she’d make “a damn good president.” Her defeat devastated her. She admits: “at every step I felt I had let people down.”
Most critics won’t ever be satisfied that Clinton has taken enough responsibility for her disastrous defeat.
And there’s no question that new blood is needed in a party that is still in deep recovery.
Clinton calls for a new revolution — one of love, kindness and “radical empathy.” I wonder where that will take her.
She didn’t get the thing she most wanted. To cope, she did yoga and “alternate nostril breathing” and because she’s Hillary Clinton, she gives you instructions on how to do so. She practises “the discipline of gratitude.”
Belatedly — and sadly — What Happened reveals an all too human female leader who is nowhere near as unlikeable as the man who vanquished her.