Clinton puts new focus on gender issues
Candidate’s themes contrast with her 2008 campaign
KEENE, N.H. — Hillary Rodham Clinton waited until the day of her concession speech the last time she ran for president to put the glass ceiling at the center of her campaign.
Eight years later, both the country and Clinton have changed, and her campaign is making a selling point from the start out of breaking the gender barrier.
Where her advisers were once concerned t hat playing up gender would leave the impression among voters — particularly men — that Clinton was weak and inexperienced, those worries no longer apply. She has a new team of aides and a Cabinet secretary credential on her resume.
Longtime Clinton supporters and watchers expect the candidate to repeatedly return to the issue of gender on the campaign trail, as she did Monday in her first campaign visit to the early primary state of New Hampshire. She has already staked out positions on such issues as family leave and universal kindergarten — but has also nodded to her womanhood in more subtle ways, as when she brags about being a grandmother.
“She has been talking about how she looks at the world through the prism of being a mom and now a grandmom,” said Chris Lehane, who advised the Clintons in the White House during the administration of Bill Clinton. “That intergenerational argument is incredibly powerful and compelling. It conveys authenticity.”
New Hampshire is prime territory to focus the spotlight on gender. Two years ago it became the first and only state in the nation to fill its congressional delegation and governor’s mansion exclusively with women.
Clinton’s first campaign stop in the state was at a family-owned business that builds play kitchens and other furniture for small children.
Child care was one of the first subjects raised by the workers hand-picked to participate in a roundtable with the candidate. Asked what could be done to make care more widely available, Clinton riffed on the early days of her career when she advocated for the Children’s Defense Fund, the latest science on childhood brain development, and the importance of singing and reading to babies.
“My whole adult life and volunteer work has been around children and families,” she said. “It can cost as much as $12,000 per year in New Hampshire for quality child care. That is more than community college costs. What are we going to do about that?”
Clinton made a surprise campaign stop Monday in a bakery where she picked up a customer’s baby. Unlike many politicians, she did not just give a kiss and immediately return the child. She held on.
“I’m gonna take her with me,” said Clinton, who was more reticent about such displays during her last run for president.
“She had to overcome the perception that a woman could not qualify to be commander in chief,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “Her advisers told her that is a threshold test females have to pass. Men do not.”
Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state changed that for her, Jamieson said.
Clinton talks often about being a grandmother. She turned to the topic of granddaughter Charlotte once again Monday afternoon, at a New Hampshire house party. “It carries with it a big responsibility, doesn’t it?” Clinton asked a group, the older women in it nodding along with her.
She didn’t shy away from such talk last week in Iowa, a state that lags behind others in elevating female candidates.
It wasn’t until November, when Republican Joni Ernst won a Senate seat, that Iowa elected a woman to serve in Congress. Clinton finished third in Iowa in the 2008 Democratic caucus, a blow to her campaign.
Clinton hammered away on another theme popular with women, family leave, as she debuted her 2016 presidential run in the Hawkeye State. During a small-business roundtable at a fruit-packing company outside Des Moines, Clinton seized on the generous maternity leave policy offered by one of the participants, who owns a Webdesign and marketing business.
“Making your employees feel that you care about these milestones in their lives and you give them the chance to, you know, have a child, adopt a child, recover from a serious illness, take care of a really sick parent and get a period of time that’s paid just cements that relationship,” she said. “It’s an issue I feel strongly about on just personal terms.”