Rosie DiManno
The bar was always set too high for Hillary Clinton,
I like Hillary. I really do.
Pretty much always have liked Hillary Rodham Clinton. Except maybe during that impossible-topull-off 60 Minutes interview in 1992 — right after the Super Bowl game — in which she indisputably rescued her horndog husband’s presidential ambitions but damaged herself with women across the ideological spectrum.
A lounge singer by the name of Gennifer Flowers had just gone public about her long-standing affair with Bill: 12 years a mistress.
“You know, I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him and I respect him, and I honour what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together. And you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck — don’t vote for him.”
As a Politico feature from exactly a year ago observed, Clinton’s job in that sit-down being “strong enough to help him but not so strong as to hurt him.”
Ah well, ancient history now. As is, 10 months later, a U.S. election that rocked the world.
One way or the other, Hillary Clinton has been walking that fine line — with Bill and without Bill — for the entirety of her public life. She displeases too easily. Too hard and she’s shrill; too soft and she’s phoney. A deplorable woman who — twice — reached too high, as her legion of haters would have it. As even a sizable contingent of Democrats would have it, blaming Clinton for the fact that Donald Trump now occupies the White House.
“(I) have come to terms with the fact that a lot of people — millions and millions of people — decided they just didn’t like me,” she writes in her election post-mortem, What Happened, the memoir which Clinton came to Toronto on Thursday to promote. “It hurts. And it’s a hard thing to accept. But there’s no getting around it.”
It should be noted that, when she resigned as secretary of state, Clinton was polling as the most popular and admired woman on the planet. What happened, indeed.
Well, Trumpism happened. And tribal populism. And unprecedented filthiness on the hustings, misanthropy meets misogyny. And Russian hacking happened. And altright fake news happened. And, 11 days before Americans went to the polls, Jim Comey happened — an astounding intrusion on the political landscape, with the thenFBI director telling Congress he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server (three months after announcing there was no basis for criminal charges), but saying not a word about the ongoing investigation into whether some of Trump’s closest associates had colluded with Russia.
Days later, Comey revealed nothing had been found in the additional emails examined.
Too little too late.
It was oxygen for the worst of Trump’s “Crooked Hillary” attacks and his braying LOCK HER UP! mobs.
The record shows that Comey’s tacit criminal implication of Clinton — take-back notwithstanding — was the lead story in the country’s new cycle in six out of seven mornings from Oct. 29 to Nov. 4, as the Republicans dumped upwards of $17 million into Comey-related ads in battleground states.
Clinton’s lead in the polls collapsed, dropping by three points in the following week. The extent of the erosion would not truly be realized until election day — and despite the fact she won the popular vote by nearly three million.
Emails. For the love of God, those damn inconsequential emails. A fart in a mitten, a scandal without substance, and so clearly incomprehensible as an issue to most Americans.
Except, with media banging that drum relentlessly — led by the New York Times (Trump should get down on his knees and thank the “The Gray Lady” rather than endlessly excoriating the paper) — those trivial emails, that nugatory transgression of not using a secure server while at the State Department, were elevated into a monumental controversy. A fortnight before the election, network newscasts spent 32 minutes nightly on Clinton’s policies versus 100 minutes devoted to her emails. It is to laugh, now. Or to cry. A false equivalency, as media mishmashed Clinton’s puny indiscretion with Trump’s outrageous calumnies, from bragging about sexual assault to the chicanery of Trump University to the bromance with Vladimir Putin etc. etc. etc.
“If it’s all my fault, then the media doesn’t need to do any soul searching,” Clinton writes.
We’re still blaming Hillary, vilifying her even more from the left than the right.
A recent review of What Happened in the Guardian, that most sanctimonious of left-wing newspapers, slams Clinton for blaming everyone else but herself, “with no twinge of remorse.”
We must have read different books because Clinton blames herself on almost every page. She wears all of it, revisiting her mistakes, admitting that her policy wonkery often didn’t play well, regretting that she hadn’t gone down ’n’ dirtier with Trump — although she won all of their debates.
But the bar was set so stupidly high for Clinton, with that surname and that gender and that public resume.
In my travels across the U.S., especially during this election campaign but also in her 2008 bid for the nomination, I’ve never understood the vehemence, the virulence, Clinton provoked.
I wanted Clinton to win that first run at the nomination over Barack Obama because it was her time more than his. Yet she became a tireless and praiseworthy secretary of state, doing so much of Barack’s heavy lifting in the complex dimension of diplomacy.
And I say that even while unsatisfied with Clinton’s non-mea culpa for the debacle of the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, a ghastly event she barely touches on in her book apart from reminding that she spent 11 hours answering questions about it before House and Senate committees.
Many Democrats apparently didn’t want Clinton to write this election memoir, just as they disapprove of the interviews she’s given in recent months. A New York Daily News columnist actually wrote: “Hey, Hillary Clinton, shut the f--- up and go away already.”
I found the book deeply poignant in places, bewildered in others and humanizing in its behind the scenes detail.
All of us wondered, on the morning of Nov. 9, how she could bear it, when just about everybody — certainly including the Clintons — had pretty much assumed victory. And losing to . . . that man.
“A lot of people have asked me, ‘How did you even get out of bed?’ Reading the news every morning was like ripping off a scab . . . There are times when all I want to do is scream into a pillow.”
Her personal motto is simple: Keep going.
With a husband she loves, a daughter she adores, two grandchildren who give her endless pleasure and the knowledge that 65,844,954 Americans cast their ballots for her.
She would have made a damn fine president. Look what they got instead. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.