Hillary mountain the climber
The former first lady has spent most of her adult life in public and the scars could be on display when she visits New Zealand this week.
Yes, Hillary Clinton did change the world. She was the first female candidate of a major political party for the United States presidency. She earned the second-highest popular vote tally in US history.
She also, famously, lost the 2016 presidential election to a New York real estate developer turned reality TV star. In contemporary reporting, she has mostly been vilified: for electoral mistakes, for use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state, for not being authentic enough as a political candidate.
She has been maligned in preposterous conspiracy theories involving child trafficking out of a pizza parlour and the death of a young Democratic National Committee staffer.
Setting that noise aside, and casting an eye back over five decades of public service, her record speaks for itself.
Clinton was the first prominent US political spouse to have equal education and a profession in her own right.
She was the first first lady to have a portfolio of political issues in the White House. She took the leap into politics on her own terms, and nearly broke that last glass ceiling.
Because she blazed a trail few women had, she became a hero to many. To others, particularly those who were products of her generation, she was aloof and aggressive. Hillary Clinton just didn’t know her place.
Hillary Diane Rodham was born on October 25, 1947 in Chicago.
Raised by a Republican father and a Democrat mother, she was exposed to conflicting and contrasting political views from an early age. She was a ‘‘Young Republican’’ in high school, and supported the presidential campaign of arch-conservative Barry Goldwater in 1964.
But by the end of high school, she had turned away from Republicanism, supporting Democrat Eugene McCarthy’s anti-Vietnam war presidential campaign in 1968 and working for Democrat George McGovern’s presidential campaign, along with Yale Law School classmate Bill Clinton, in 1972.
By 1976, she and Clinton were married, and he was the freshly
minted Arkansas Attorney General.
It was in Arkansas that the Hillary Clinton the world came to know first emerged: a working mother, an equal spouse, a political partner. By 1980, she became the first female elected partner at her law firm. That year, Chelsea was born, and Bill ran his first campaign for Governor. He lost.
Three years later, Bill won the governorship, an office he would hold
for 11 years and 11 months. An atypical Arkansan first lady, Hillary stuck with her law firm career. Detractors thought she should know her place. But she maintained her profession, while using her political platform to advocate for women and children – a constituency she would serve the entirety of her public life.
By January of 1993, Bill Clinton had made a one-term president of George HW Bush, and she was First Lady of the United States.
In the eight years her husband held office, Clinton’s greatest achievement – and controversy – was her re-making of the role of first lady. Clinton championed laws designed to curtail domestic violence, streamline adoption, and assist teenagers emerging from foster care.
She also took ownership of a complex policy area – healthcare – and tried to find a solution that would guarantee healthcare for all Americans. Ultimately, she failed. But not before suffering a barrage of criticism for trying in the first place. Didn’t she know her place?
As Senator for New York, she obtained $21 billion in federal aid to rebuild Manhattan after 9/11. As Secretary of State, she made the rights of women and children a cornerstone of US foreign policy. Clinton was popular when she held office. But much less so when she was running.
Clinton lacked the charisma of her husband, a fact she long knew. And she was sometimes criticised for being what Americans call a ‘‘policy wonk’’ – someone with her head in the complex details of her proposed solutions, but lacking the political skill to sell them with clarity.
I had a front row seat in the primary and general elections of 2015-2016 as a Clinton supporter on US television and radio. In conservative media, the attacks were relentless and often unfair: her private email server and the transmission of classified information, the illness she concealed late in the election, her shifting positions over the years.
All of this could be explained and defended, of course. But I learned that when you’re explaining, you’re losing. The media also never held her opponent fully to account for his attacks on women and minorities, or his lack of respect for the norms of presidential campaigning. His dark and divisive tone connected with Americans’ fear. Clinton preferred the light, campaigning on the promise that we’d be stronger together. It would not be enough.
On the night of November 8, 2016, the bloody presidential campaign was finally over, and Hillary Clinton lost. She conceded early in the morning of November 9, and retreated to her home in Chappaqua, New York. Detractors thought she should stay there. Didn’t she know her place?
Clinton eventually emerged to tell her story of the 2015-16 election cycle in her 2017 book, What Happened. She pulled no punches, explaining her views on her asymmetric treatment by the media and Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Clinton will be sharing some of those insights during her Australasian tour, and some of you will have the opportunity to see Clinton in the flesh.
You will hear her famous, fullthroated laugh. You will understand how knowledgeable she is across a broad array of issues, both domestic and international. You will learn about her commitment to a values-driven life, and you might see the scars from decades of public service up close.
And you’ll be glad she didn’t ever give up, or give over, to just knowing her place.