Hillary is flawed, a Washington insider, 67 and has a strange marriage. Let’s hope she’s the next president

IT is a very good thing that Hillary Clinton is running for the presidency of the United States. Hillary Clinton is about as far from being an anodyne, identikit candidate as it is possible to be. She’s controversial, battle-scarred and teetering on the verge of old age. And there’s no sign of anyone who can stop her. That’s a good thing for women everywhere.

They used to say that if the Clintons did not exist then we’d have to invent them; now it looks like somebody did. As Hillary Clinton rolls towards the White House, TV viewers are already watching what will happen when she gets there. Or are we watching what happened the last time Hillary was there?

Whatever, we’re watching House Of Cards. Come on, it’s the Clintons, just with better clothes.

Claire Underwood: ‘We’ve been lying for a long time, Francis.’

Francis Underwood: ‘Of course we have.’

Who else would that be – the Obamas? The Reagans? Any of the Bushes?

There is a whiff of sulphur about the Clintons. They seem to be locked in a Faustian pact. Is their extraordinary story a series of opportunities brilliantly exploited, or did they have all this planned decades ago, when they first married?

It’s hard to tell which option is more impressive. It’s a mark of their power that it’s difficult for us to imagine them in the ordinary world. Just the thought of them settling down to watch Antiques Roadshow together – which Hillary has said they do regularly – is somehow spooky, like seeing monsters sleeping.

The Obamas were new when they came to the White House; and so were the Reagans. In contrast, the whole planet is so familiar with Hillary it is almost as if she has been President already. As Bob Shrum, a Democrat commentator, put it last week: ‘It’s very hard, unless there is some major, unforeseen event, to imagine Hillary Clinton not being the nominee.’

Or, indeed, the President. Even something that is seen as one of her weaknesses – the length of time she’s been in public life – might work to her advantage.

When other American presidents arrive in office, they carry the hopes of their country and of the world with them.

Americans, particularly, like to vote for new beginnings and a fresh start. But the truth is, we’ve been disappointed by Hillary and her husband since the 1990s. With the Republican Party so weak that three firstterm senators – Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio – are shaping up for their party’s nomination Hillary’s experience starts to look good.

Hillary – she no longer needs a surname – has been called the Lady Macbeth of Little Rock, and that was long before Claire Underwood was heard of. Like many celebrities, Hillary is both thoroughly examined and a total mystery. We may think we know her, but who knows what she really believes, or if she believes in anything?

THE Clintons aren’t infallible political operators. It is their own mistakes that wound them most. Hillary spoke about how she and Bill were ‘dead broke’ when they left the White House. Her political enemies will be concentrating on how removed she has always been from the lives of ordinary Americans.

For example, Hillary was paid $300,000 to address a function at UCLA. Naturally, people are going to calculate how long a middle-class American – the person Hillary claims to speak for – would have to work in order to earn that money.

The alleged shady dealings, the philandering husband, the adored new grandchild – we have been watching the Clintons for a long time, whether or not they’ve been lying to us over that period.

Kevin Spacey says that the Underwoods in House Of Cards are based on other political couples but, as the Republican party is now asking itself, who else is there? House Of Cards is about the power play between a power couple. The Clintons are the cyber couple of politics, a self-regenerating machine.

While her enemies try to paint Hillary – entirely justifiably – as a ruthless politician in pursuit of power for its own sake and a Washington insider of the most privileged kind, her life, played out for years before the public, also shows her to be a vulnerable woman enduring humiliations which make people sympathise with her.

It is true that she doesn’t have her husband’s glamour or his charisma, but in a way Hillary’s is a Cinderella story.

As a fan of House Of Cards put it: ‘The first two series were about him, but now…’

Hillary is stepping out from the shadow of the husband she helped create, and has stood by, we observers believe, through thick and thin. This is her moment, and she is such a dominant candidate that the main danger to her campaign will be its own hubris. It was interesting to note that, in the slick video in which she announced that she was going to run, Hillary was careful to talk about ‘earning your votes’.

She can’t look as if she’s taking anything for granted, and sometimes she tries too hard to be ordinary. In 2008, she gave up wearing Donna Karan clothes because they were viewed as ‘too expensive’.

Hillary has some surprising things on her side. According to Atlantic Monthly, in the American election of 2016 the battle will be for the votes of married white women. And Hillary is very, very married. In fact the Republicans face a real danger that the women who voted for their party last time will now turn to Hillary, especially if the Republicans attack her on the wrong grounds. These grounds include her age. Hillary is 67. Republican Marco Rubio, 43, has already called her ‘a 20th century candidate’, in what was taken to be a reference to her advanced years.

But Rubio daren’t go any further. Opinion polls apparently show that women of all political views resent the fact that a female candidate’s age would be used against her.

SIMILARLY, it is believed that female voters would be turned off by attacks on Bill’s past sexual behaviour. After all, who can control a wandering husband? Not Hillary, as history shows. Her campaign must work to contain Bill Clinton, making sure that her husband neither overshadows her nor undermines her with his angry and impulsive responses when he feels she has been wronged, as happened when she ran against Obama in 2008.

The Republican party is fractured and short of ideas. The only sure thing Republicans have is an obsessive hatred for Hillary.

A young woman on #WhyImNotVotingForHillary posted: ‘Someone who can’t even handle two emails should not be leader of our great nation.’

This is hardly political debate. It is a reference to the controversy over Hillary using her personal email account to conduct State Department correspondence (thus enabling the deletion of emails, which would not have been allowed on the official account).

In recent weeks there has been strong media criticism of Hillary over the email shenanigans, but opinion polls showed that most Americans could not have cared less about it.

Hillary Clinton is the towering figure in this presidential election. She’s flawed, she’s a Washington insider, she’s in politics so long she may well have forgotten why she went into it in the first place – or maybe not. She’s 67 and she has a strange marriage. Let’s hope that she does become the first female president.