To feminists like me, the very prospect of a female US President is amazing. Except... I can’t stand Hillary!

THAT Barack Obama’s adviser Samantha Power called Hillary Clinton a ‘monster’ during the 2008 presidential campaign is hard to forget. Particularly for Ms Power. For the fallout from that rather indiscreet outburst led to her having to step down from the Obama campaign.

The word ‘monster’, however, is one that is often bandied around. It is a description that can actually encapsulate a whole tranche of personality aspects. And so it can be used in a throwaway manner about someone who is ‘difficult’, or who has a short fuse, or is simply a not-very-nice person, right through to someone who is seriously destructive and dangerous. Nevertheless, to call Hillary Clinton a ‘monster’ was not the smartest thing that the super-smart Samantha Power ever did.

But for me, it was the sentence that followed her ‘monster’ reference that really did the damage.

‘She is stooping to anything.’ That’s exactly what Samantha Power said. Those were the words she used to describe Hillary Clinton’s behaviour and modus operandi on that 2008 campaign trail when Mrs Clinton was running against the young black senator from Illinois.

And in those five words, it’s hard not to believe that Samantha Power was on to something.

Like everyone else, I woke up yesterday morning to the news that Hillary Clinton had secured seven states in the Super Tuesday primaries. So Bernie Sanders, the likeable, left-wing and somewhat left-field candidate, is now on the run and Mrs Clinton is within touching distance of that prized Democratic nomination.

Generation

Hillary Clinton is 68. I am a decade behind her. Like lots of women of my generation, I have never believed that being female was a bar to anything. The problem, though, is that others did. And do.

I grew up in a home with parents who told me that I could do anything I wanted to do, with a mother who held down a good job all her life, and with a sister who went on to reach the very top of her profession and garner an OBE for herself as a result of her dedication and hard work. Women could do anything if they had the talent.

I cried when Mary Robinson became President of Ireland. Because she was a woman. And because she was such an impressive woman.

I don’t agree with all that Angela Merkel stands for, but I admire her enormously. She is a trailblazer and a female beacon on the world political stage. And she achieves that without banging the female drum. Rather, she is a highly respected, impressive political leader who happens to be a woman.

And now, in America, if Donald Trump is to be beaten at all, it seems the task will fall to Hillary Clinton. Come November, she may well be declared the first female President of the United States. What a ‘wow’ moment for women across the globe.

So why am I not rooting for her? Why does she leave me cold? Why do I not trust her? Why do I wish that there was still an alternative?

I’ll tell you why. Because I can’t get past those five words from Samantha Power back in 2008: ‘She is stooping to anything.’

Not that it should be a matter of simply supporting a female candidate because she is female. Female quotas are not always the answer. Talent is. Commitment is. Integrity is. Honesty is.

Talent, Hillary Clinton has in abundance. She certainly has the political experience and the background to carry the presidency. But what about the rest?

Meanwhile, the ‘first female President’ factor has been a significant issue in this campaign. But when former secretary of state Madeleine Albright said in the wake of Hillary’s New Hampshire defeat that there was a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women, she was wrong. Maybe there should be a few hot spots, alright, for females who don’t support women who genuinely deserve to be supported – but that is an argument for another day. With so many young women flocking to the Bernie Sanders camp and Sanders carrying the day in New Hampshire, however, it was hard not to smile when the veteran political analyst and presidential adviser David Axelrod quipped that they would now need to clear out a lot more space in hell.

The bottom line is that Hillary Clinton can play the feminist card all she likes, but she doesn’t always deliver.

Yes, we remember that famous line of hers from the UN World Conference on Women back in 1995 in Beijing: ‘Women’s rights are human rights.’

And of course she changed the role of the First Lady for the better – not for Hillary the job of White House decorator-in-chief as previously held by Jackie Kennedy, or the walk-on, fawning wife part as inhabited by Nancy Reagan or Barbara Bush.

Hillary Clinton is an accomplished politician who has served as a senator and as a Secretary of State. And she continues to promote the cause of women in society, speaking out against college campus sexual assaults, and highlighting equal pay and planned parenthood issues.

But set against that is the reality that Mrs Clinton has also let women down in the past, and has betrayed her own hard-won feminist credentials – all on the altar of personal power and ambition.

For why else would she accommodate the sexual philandering of her husband and the consequent humiliation that it inflicted on his wife and his daughter? Why else would she publicly defend Bill Clinton, a powerful man who took advantage of a 22-year-old intern? And why else would she tell her friends that Monica Lewinsky was a ‘troubled young person’ and ‘narcissistic loony toon’ when Ms Lewinsky has proved herself to be anything but?

In the pursuit of power, Hillary Clinton was quite happy to ditch her feminist credentials and, to her shame, smear women who were prepared to speak out and tell the truth about Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes. Why? Because, when it comes to the prospect of power, money, and personal aggrandisement, Hillary Clinton has shown that she stoops to anything.

To subterfuge, to secrecy, to double-speak, to gilding the lily. They are all part of the Clinton lexicon.

Indefensible

Throw in the specifics – defending an indefensible adulterous husband, the Whitewater scandal, the personal email account saga while she was Secretary of State, the Wall Street speechifying and its financial rewards – and it all becomes increasingly unpalatable. There are just so many question marks.

How, for example, can a Democrat be in such cahoots with Wall Street? According to The Wall Street Journal, since Bill and Hillary Clinton came into the political arena in the early 1990s, Wall Street has contributed more than $100million to their various campaigns and to their personal coffers.

And as Maureen Dowd recently put it when writing about Hillary Clinton in her New York Times column: ‘While she was giving three speeches to Goldman Sachs for $675,000, Democrats were seething with anger over the big banks that never got punished for wrecking the economy and the reckless billionaires who are still living large. A tone-deaf Hillary was there, sucking at the teat, and that rubs people the wrong way.’

And that’s exactly it. Hillary Clinton rubs people the wrong way.

Not because of superficial things like the fact that her voice is a bit shrill or that she comes across preachy, too smiley and somewhat smug.

But because of much more serious and fundamental issues. It’s hard to trust her, impossible not to be suspicious of her motives, difficult not to dislike her sense of entitlement, and we know we could never be sure that her definition of ‘corruption’ would match our own.

And that’s why I find myself unable to cheer for Hillary Clinton, why I can’t warm to her, and why I still wish there was a better alternative.

There are just too many question marks still floating, cartoon-like, over her wellcoiffed head.

And I can’t quite shake off the feeling that, once her feet are firmly under that Oval Office desk, well, she might just stoop to anything.