If I were Donald Trump, I would pick Hillary Clinton as my opponent. He is like a peacock. All he has to do to delight the people is fan out that brilliant tail and rant on in the folksy, unsophisticated shtick beloved by Americans.
Hillary, on the other hand, is simply too darn smart. Too intellectually-driven, too out of touch with the feelings of the electorate. Like Obama, she doesn't claim them. Indeed, she sometimes acts as if she doesn't like them and that makes them not like her. As her polls drop, she is derided as tight, unemotional and unreal.
Her friends, even those she has personally talked to, groan at these adjectives. She is, in fact, kaleidoscopic, they say: humorous, emotional, hot tempered, compassionate. "She wears her heart on her sleeve," commented a member of the Clinton administration. Her staffers, unlike Bill's, are so fiercely loyal, they refuse to leak a morsel of gossip to the press.
So why is there this disconnect between the private and the public Hillary? Why can't a skilled politician who is in a historic race to become the first female president manage to marry the two?
She wasn't always this way. Watch her television interviews when she became First Lady. She was so warm, so full of little smiles and dainty gestures, you might mistake her for the President of the Junior League.
But this pleasing woman was unrecognizable at a recent private meeting with radical black activists, an event emblematic of her image problem. The activists talked of their outrage at the burgeoning black deaths by police and in response, she wagged her finger like a schoolmarm, lecturing them on their lack of policy. "A black man in a hoodie still evokes a twinge of fear," she suddenly blurted, shooting herself in the foot.
During the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1999, I travelled on a press plane with Hillary through North Africa. Women in poor villages were selling beads, feeding their families because Hillary had helped start a microcredit program to finance their ventures. In spite of their wild cheers, her guard was up. She looked puffy, refused to dance, ignored the press. Then, as a reporter doing a magazine profile, I finally came face to face with her. To my surprise, she bubbled forth like one of the earnest Midwestern girls I knew in my childhood. Time zoomed backward. This was the first time she had publicly talked about her humiliation, but she opened up like a night-blooming water lily.
"I am angry, very angry" she said about Bill, her eyes flashing. "...he can just go off and do his own thing and I'll do mine." She didn't dispute that he was addicted to sex, in fact she confessed that they'd long seen a psychiatrist, and that she'd thought he was cured. Distraught, she said she didn't know about Monica until the public did. Her eyes filled. "But I still love him...he's a wonderful man. You know he had an abusive childhood..."
She wanted to take them both off the victim list. And she wanted to save a marriage that gave her emotional and political satisfaction, so she found a way to explain Bill, if not immediately forgive him.
After the scandal had quieted, she gave me another interview. We were riding in her limousine when her car phone rang. "Oh hi!" she brightened. "Do the plastic leg braces hurt? Oh, good. Well, I plan to come out to see him when all this is over." She refused to tell me about the call until I persuaded her I would keep it off the record. She said she had met this boy at a rally for parents and disabled children and ended up paying for the child's leg operations and polyurethane braces to replace his heavy metal ones. "But I don't want reporters to besiege him when he's so young...he looked up at me with these beautiful brown eyes. He was irresistible. " She talked about him, smiling, through the rest of the ride and she kept smiling through the speech that came afterward.
What happened to that genuinely happy woman?
Certainly the Liberal Blame Machine has made her justifiably paranoid. The media, carrying one negative story after another, wants to kill her off. She's worked tirelessly for the rights of women, blacks, jobless men, but she is called a racist, an anti-feminist, a misandrist and a candidate who lacks vision, though her visionary mind (think health care bill) has been her undoing. If there was a tornado in Kansas they would find some way to hold her responsible. This unending stream of excoriation would turn the strongest of men into petrified wood.
But I think there are more profound reasons for the gulf between the authentic Hillary and the one-dimensional one on the stump. Millions witnessed her being cuckqueaned (f., cuckolded) by the most powerful leader in the world. Beneath her dignified response, she heard the whispers - 'sexually frigid, ' 'No backbone - can't leave him.' The elemental nature of who she was, her very gender identity, was shaken.
Thus she holds back her feminine feelings, depends on her discipline and considerable will. This is coincidentally useful for she know she needs to appear as presidentially strong and tough as any man.
But she also knows that you can't prevent people from judging women by how they look. At night she probably frets about her weight, her hair. Should she apply more makeup or less? Wear blue, or is black more flattering?
Yet couture won't bring back the deep womanliness she has lost. This missing piece drives some men crazy: she won't act like a woman's supposed to act, won't 'give out' so to speak, Some female audiences are disappointed that she can't seem to talk intimately, as if she is talking to each of them alone. Her new campaign strategy is to counter that by bringing her before smaller groups, where she is more relaxed.
Running for president, as well as being a spouse, a housewife, a mother, a mother-in-law, and a new grandmother can leave your mind a blur. Perhaps within the year, her two personalities will connect and the real Hillary, integrated and whole, will emerge.
"I'm trying very hard," she told me, " I'm just trying to keep it all together,"
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