At a town hall meeting this week, the first question posed to Hillary Clinton was from a first-time caucus-goer called Taylor Gipple.
“It feels like there are a lot of young people like myself who are very passionate supporters of Bernie Sanders,” he said. “And, I just don’t see the same enthusiasm from younger people for you. In fact, I’ve heard from quite a few people my age that they think you’re dishonest, but I’d like to hear from you on why you feel the enthusiasm isn’t there.”
Clinton’s response sounded like a mix of Edith Piaf and Sir Elton John: Je Ne Regrette Rien blended with I’m Still Standing; stern resolve with a touch of telegraphed theatricality. “Look, I’ve been around a long time,” she told him. “They throw all this stuff at me and I’m still standing. But if you’re new to politics, if it’s the first time you really paid attention, you go ‘oh my gosh, look at all of this’. And you have to say to yourself, ‘why are they throwing all of that’? Well, I’ll tell you why. Because I’ve been on the frontlines of change and progress since I was your age.”
Not for the first time, Clinton finds herself in an existential battle with a rank outsider – Bernie Sanders cast in the role of Barack Obama – which threatens to derail her anticipated processional journey to the White House. Her experience and ever-presence on the public stage seem to be equal parts hindrance and help.
In the generation since Hillary Clinton first entered the public gaze, attitudes to women, feminism, politics, marriage and the presidency have undergone fundamental shifts. Her challenge, as a presidential candidate, is to tell a personal story and embrace a political platform that are both true to her past and chime with the electoral mood of the present. That, in turn, demands that she reminds some – particularly the young – of what she has done and been while hoping that others – particularly those who are older or on the left – forget much of what she has said and done.
A new ad showcasing various clips of her throughout her career speaking about the rights of children – panning through the range of hairstyles and speaking styles of her adult life, from bookish to bullish – intends to leave the viewer with a sense of her longevity and consistency as a campaigner. Truly, it sets forth the Seven Ages of Hillary, and ends with the line: “I’m Hillary Clinton and I have always approved this message.”
“What I love most about America,” the late Susan Sontag once told me, is that, “you’re allowed to change your life, to reinvent yourself.” There have been several versions of Hillary Clinton. Her success will depend in no small part on which one people think they’re voting for.
It is easy to forget what a mould-breaking, badass figure Hillary cut when she first appeared on the national stage in 1992. Neither the media nor the political establishment knew quite what to do with her. “Meet the new political wife,” said Ted Koppel as he introduced her on Nightline in 1992. “She has a career, she has opinions. A partner in every way … Never in a presidential campaign has the candidate’s wife become such a strong symbol of the campaign’s strength and weakness.”
She courted controversy simply by existing, working and thinking. She was a late-20th-century woman, in a modern, troubled marriage, being publicly interviewed for an 18th-century job as first lady – a job only available through the achievements of her serially philandering husband. The contradictions were manifest and multiple; the couple’s ambitions were insatiable and undeniable.
The appeal, for some, was enduring. “When Bill was running for president, I knew she was something special,” said 76-year-old Norma McCuen, who saw Hillary speak at a bowling alley in the small town of Adel, Iowa, (population 4,047) earlier this week. “I liked him, but I was hoping that one day she would run. She stands up for women. I know she had to work hard herself, and I think she wants women to have the same opportunities as men and to stand alongside them shoulder-to-shoulder.”
The mould had been set by a patriarchal political culture in which women could rarely be viable candidates themselves and as candidates’ wives were supposed to be essentially decorative and supporting, not independent and engaging.
It was broken by second-wave feminism of which Hillary Clinton was both a clear beneficiary and moderate advocate, riding the wave to both academic success and professional accomplishment. She was a valedictorian at the Wellesley women’s college the same year as Woodstock and graduated from Yale law school, which was 90% male, the same year the landmark abortion ruling Roe v Wade was passed. In 1979, a year after her husband became governor of Arkansas and a year before her daughter Chelsea was born, she became the first female lawyer at the Rose Law firm in Arkansas. Throughout this time she kept her maiden name: Hillary Rodham.
“I had watched her when she was the first lady of Arkansas,” the late Maya Angelou told me, explaining why she backed Clinton over Obama in 2008. “I thought this white girl would come to Arkansas and play croquet on the lawn and throw tea parties. And she was just the opposite. She worked on public health and education … even prisons. When her husband ran for the presidency and she said she was not going to bake cookies, I thought, ‘I’m going to watch her for a while.’”
Almost everybody had a view about her and few of those views were moderate. Feminist author Susan Faludi described her at the time as a symbol of “the joy of female independence”. The American Spectator branded her the “Lady Macbeth of Arkansas”. Asked to pick out words that best described her years later, members of the public chose “intelligent” and “smart”. The third word, pollsters at the Pew Research Center said, is a pejorative term that “rhymes with rich”.
When Bill failed to be re-elected as Arkansas governor in 1980, Hillary was told that it was in part because she didn’t take his second name. Ever aware of the need to be strategic in pursuit of power, she changed it to Hillary Rodham Clinton. He won re-election in 1982.
As the presidential campaign continued in 1992 she actually entered a bake-off against other candidates’ wives in Family Circle with a recipe for chocolate chip. (She won.) By the time she stood for president in her own right for the first time 16 years later she went by Hillary Clinton and she baked cookies.
Today, she’s just Hillary, no second name necessary. Earlier this week, before a hundred or so supporters in Adel she delivered her stump speech, focusing her fire on the Republicans. “We live in reality, they live in ideology,” she says.
She’s a more fluent orator than her chief opponent, Bernie Sanders, and has a far less abrasive style. But while Sanders unfurls a vision, on huge canvas in broad strokes, of the kind of society he would like to see – free healthcare, no state tuition, $15 minimum wage – Hillary paints by numbers. Better rates of interest for student loans; an infrastructure bank; building on Obamacare. All of it possible; none of it exciting.
“When Democrats are in power the economy improves,” she says citing her husband’s tenure. “We lifted people out of poverty,” and “We created jobs.”
It is problematic to judge a woman by her husband’s deeds. In Hillary’s case it is also impossible not to because she weaves herself so seamlessly into Bill Clinton’s story. Being first lady is part of her “experience”. “It was Hillarycare before it was Obamacare,” she reminds the crowd, referring to the time she was appointed by her husband to head up healthcare reform and failed.
Before she ran in 2008, the New Yorker’s Judith Thurman wrote: “It’s not that Mrs Clinton hasn’t paid her dues. But rather that she hasn’t paid most of them from her own account. Her official credit history in national politics starts in 2000 [when she was elected to the Senate].”
Bill is not simply her spouse but her most loyal and fiercest advocate and a former president. The chairman of her campaign, John Podesta, was his chief of staff. For two years she sat on the board of what is now the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation – the multimillion-dollar global philanthropic venture he set up.
But if she is to align herself with the economic successes of those years then she must also claim ownership of less attractive elements of its legacy. While her husband was president the rate of black incarceration grew exponentially, key elements of financial regulation were repealed, paving the way for the economic crash, welfare reform was passed, removing essential support from the most vulnerable (of whom women of colour were over-represented) and the Defence of Marriage Act was signed, defining marriage exclusively as the union of one man and one woman for the purposes of federal law.
It is true that millions emerged from poverty and incomes grew: it is also true that economic inequality skyrocketed. Given the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, Occupy Wall Street and marriage equality, these are all liabilities for those asking: “How did we get here and whom should we hire to get us out”?
Finally there are the revived claims of her husband’s sexual harassment and infidelities and the accusation – unsubstantiated but no less accusatory – that she was complicit in either denigrating the victims or slut-shaming his mistresses. Those who lived through the drama of the Monica Lewinsky scandal – the witch-hunting by the special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, the hounding of the intern Lewinsky, the barefaced lies of the president, the lurid details of the report – will in part draw their conclusions about her loyalty, credibility and humanity through the prism of that moment.
In an episode of The Sopranos, Carmela Soprano and three friends are lamenting their men’s unfaithful ways over lunch when the conversation leads to Hillary Clinton.
“I can’t stand that woman,” says one.
“I don’t know. Maybe we could all take a page from her book,” responds the second.
“What, to be humiliated in public, and then walk around smiling all the time? That is so false,” argues Carmela.
“All I know is she stuck by him and put up with the shit and in the end, what did she do? She set up her own little thing,” says the second.
“She took all that negative shit he gave her, and spun it into gold. You got to give her credit,” says another.
“She is a role model for all of us,” concludes Carmela.
Today her “own little thing” amounts to an impressive record in its own right. She was elected to the Senate from New York in 2000, ran for president in 2008 and was secretary of state for four years. For a significant portion of the electorate under the age of 35, this is the only Hillary they really know.
But thanks to strides in women’s representation her presence in those roles no longer feels groundbreaking in a way it would have done when she first appeared on the scene. The first female secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, was appointed by Bill Clinton, and there has been another (Condoleezza Rice) since. There were four female senators when Bill was elected president; by the time Hillary went to the Senate there were three times as many.
And her experience cuts both ways. It’s true that she was in the situation room when Osama bin Laden was executed; it’s also true that she was one of the Democratic senators who voted for the Iraq war.
The depiction of her as an establishment candidate is a paradox, she argues, given that Sanders was elected to Congress two years before she became first lady. But throughout that time Sanders has been railing against entrenched interests as an “idealist” while she has been horse-trading with them as a “pragmatist”. Those who have followed her for the past 25 years might see the Benghazi hearings and furore over her email account as more smears by the right. But as she pointed out to the young questioner at the town hall meeting, those not familiar with her past may well see her as damaged goods – a scandal magnet to which something will inevitably stick.
“I don’t like Hillary,” said Karen Sanchez, a 19-year-old Sanders supporter from Marshalltown, Iowa, who attended a Trump rally for the pure spectacle of it. She has no memory of Clinton facing down patronising media questions with chutzpah – “You know, I’m not sitting here like 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.” Karen, a first-time voter, barely even remembers her stint as secretary of state. But she knows Clinton is being investigated and believes she promises little in the way of change.
“I think she should be in prison for all the embezzlement that she did and the emails that she sent. Setting that aside I just don’t think she would do much. I would love to see a woman president. But not her.”
Sabrina Siddiqui contributed to this report
