Clinton presents wife as an object of desire
PHILADELPHIA — He spoke of desiring her: her thick blonde hair, her flowery white skirt, her magnetic personality.
He was almost titillating as he recalled chasing after her and getting close enough to “touch her back.”
He used intimate details to reveal her feelings about his three marriage proposals.
Never before has a spouse talked about a presidential nominee at a political convention quite like Bill Clinton described Hillary Clinton on Tuesday night. Then again, a man has never talked about a woman in this context before.
It always had been political wives who shared personal anecdotes to warm up their husbands, especially in the eyes of female voters. Those details were rarely very emotional, though, for fear of feminizing the nominees. Future presidents did not want Americans to hear about them crying.
From the dais of the Democratic convention, Bill Clinton talked about Hillary Clinton crying, and so much more. In doing so, Bill Clinton began redefining the American presidency as a female institution.
A Clinton win in November would obviously give the country a female president. But for 227 years, the presidency has been associated with stereotypically male qualities — strength, resolve, fearlessness — and the embodiment of power in a deeply patriarchal political system.
American attitudes about the presidency would not change overnight with her election, and certainly would not with one speech by a spouse. But Bill Clinton was clearly trying to nudge voters to see a woman’s strengths and experiences as a natural fit for the presidency.
Not everyone appreciated the former president’s lingering over his early attraction to the 23-year-old Hillary Rodham. Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC host, called it “shocking and rude,” and suggested it diminished Hillary Clinton’s many accomplishments.
“It was a controversial way to start, honestly, talking about the girl, a girl, leading with this long story about him being attracted to an unnamed girl and thinking about whether he was starting something he couldn’t finish — building her whole political story, for the whole first half of the speech around her marriage to him,” Maddow said.