PLEASE don’t ask me this anymore.
It’s such a silly question. Of course Hillary is running. I’ve never met a man who was told he could be president who didn’t want to be president. So naturally, a woman who’s told she can be the first commandress in chief wants to be.
“Running for president is like sex,” James Carville told me. “No one ever did it once and forgot about it.”
Joe Biden wants the job. He’s human (very). But he’s a realist. He knows the Democratic Party has a messianic urge to finish what it started so spectacularly with the election of Barack Obama — busting up the world’s most exclusive white-bread old-boys’ club. And he knows that women, both Democratic and Republican, want to see one of their own in the White House and became even more militant while listening to the G.O.P.’s retrogressive talk about contraception and vaginal probes last year.
Also, Joe genuinely likes Hillary. These two have no appetite for tearing each other apart.
As long as there are no more health scares — the thick glasses are gone — Hillary’s age won’t stop her. The Clinton scandals and dysfunction are in the rearview mirror at the moment, and the sluggish economy casts a halcyon glow on the Clinton era. Hillary is a symbol and a survivor, running on sainthood. Ronald Reagan, elected at 69, was seen as an “ancient king” gliding through life, as an aide put it. Hillary, who would be elected at 69, would be seen as an ancient queen striding through life.
She was supposed to go off to a spa, rest and get back in shape after her grueling laps around the world. But instead she’s a tornado of activity, speaking at global women’s conferences in D.C. and New York; starting to buck-rake on the speaking circuit; putting out a video flipping her position to support gay marriage; and signing a lucrative deal for a memoir on world affairs — all as PACs spring up around her, Bill Clinton and Carville begin to foment, and Chelsea lands on the cover of this week’s Parade, talking about how “unapologetically and unabashedly” biased she is about her mother’s future.
“I can’t see her taking it easy and sitting on the couch eating a bowl of popcorn,” said Randall Johnston, a 25-year-old New York University Law School student who helped pass out “Ready for Hillary” signs on Friday outside Lincoln Center, while her icon was inside enthralling the crowd at Tina Brown’s “Women in the World” conference.
Hillary jokes that people regard her hair as totemic, and just so, her new haircut sends a signal of shimmering intention: she has ditched the skinned-back bun that gave her the air of a K.G.B. villainess in a Bond movie and has a sleek new layered cut that looks modern and glamorous.
In a hot pink jacket and black slacks, she leaned in for a 2016 manifesto, telling the blissed-out crowd of women that America cannot truly lead in the world until women here at home are full partners with equal pay and benefits, careers in math and science, and “no limit” on how big girls can dream.
“This truly is the unfinished business of the 21st century,” she said. But everyone knew the truly “unfinished business” Hillary was referring to: herself.
“She’s gone to hell and back trying to be president,” Carville said. “She’s paid her dues, to say the least. The old cliché is that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. But now Republicans want a lot of people to run and they want to fall in love. And Democrats don’t want to fight; they just want to get behind Hillary and go on from there.”
The real question is not whether but whither. Does Hillary have learning software? Did she learn, from her debacle with health care, to be more transparent and less my-way-or-the-highway? Did she learn, after voting to support W.’s nonsensical invasion of Iraq without even reading the intelligence estimate, that she doesn’t need to overcompensate to show she’s tough? (No one, even Fox News, thinks she’s a Wellesley hippie anymore.)
Did she learn, from her viper’s nest and money pit of a campaign in 2008, how to manage an enterprise rather than be swamped by rampant dysfunction? Did she learn, when she wrapped herself in an off-putting and opaque mantle of entitlement in the primary, that she’s perfectly capable of charming reporters and voters if she wants to, without the obnoxious undertone of “I’m owed this”?
Even top Democrats who plan to support Hillary worry about her two sides. One side is the idealistic public servant who wants to make the world a better place. The other side is darker, stemming from old insecurities; this is the side that causes her to make decisions from a place of fear and to second-guess herself. It dulls her sense of ethics and leads to ends-justify-the-means wayward ways. This is the side that compels her to do anything to win, like hiring the scummy strategists Dick Morris and Mark Penn, and greedily grab for what she feels she deserves.
If Obama is the kid who studies only on the night before and gets an A, Hillary is the kid who studies all the time, stays up all night and does extra credit work to get the A. She doesn’t know how not to drive herself into the ground.
As Carl Bernstein wrote in his Hillary biography, “A Woman in Charge,” her insecurities grew from her herculean effort to win paternal praise: “When Hillary came home with all A’s except for one B on her report card, her father suggested that perhaps her school was too easy, and wondered half-seriously why she hadn’t gotten straight A’s. Hillary tried mightily to extract some unequivocal declaration of approval from her father, but he had tremendous difficulty in expressing pride or affection.”
Hillary was an indefatigable secretary of state — she logged 956,733 diplomatic frequent-flier miles — and a star ambassador, especially on women’s issues. But many experts feel, as John Cassidy wrote in The New Yorker, that, compared with the work of more geopolitical secretaries, her “signature achievements look like small beer.”
Still, the job allowed her to get out of her husband’s codependent shadow and develop a more authentic aura of inevitability. President Obama allowed his former rival to take Hillaryland into the State Department and then build it out, burnishing her own feminist brand around the world.
The idea of Hillary is winning, a grand historical gender bender: first lady upgrading to president. But is the reality winning? The Clintons have a rare talent for finding puddles to step in. Out of public life, can she adapt and make the leaps needed, in a world changing at a dizzying tempo, to keep herself on top?
Her challenge is to get into the future and stay there, adding fresh people and perspectives and leaving the Clinton mishegoss and cheesiness in the past.
The real question about Hillary is this: When people take a new look at her in the coming years, will they see the past or the future — Mrs. Clinton or Madam President?
Copyright. 2013. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved
Comments (2)
I cared enough about the issue of, “Will Hillary Run For President,” that I find myself blogging about it as if I am fully troubled about what happens with another Clinton run. I believe Hillary Rodham Clinton to be among the brightest of American women, and she has paid her dues, so in a country where foreign policy is a disaster with the little freak in North Korea playing with a hand grenade in his front yard knowing that it is an atomic bomb of poor quality, but he’s so busy playing God and King that he does not see it is about to blow his face off, just as one example. A nuclear world has brought us to the point where a Holocaust is not just possible; But from which rogue nation will set one off first, the monster which will change this world in one moment where leaders have personality disorders and visions of grandeur to the point we must lie to children by telling them Moms and Dads can take care of things We cannot, so why do I not believe in Hillary.
She cannot get elected for so many reasons. One is the feminist agenda, for no longer do we see a cute little brainiac, No we see the shadows of the old feminist, the man hating, cigar smoking, “Kick your ass,” women who have buried the rituals of our culture, and have left the, “Stay at home Mom,” left these magnificent women feel like outcast, for they were not raking in the big dollars, wearing the pants suits daily, and they might even be acculturating their children to believe in the goodness and support of home, church, mom, and dad; You know that old time horse dung which was holding women back in the man’s world. I really do not believe that statement, but I think we have lost big time out on the natural progression women had in to motherhood and the class act mothers who felt that kids and home came before careers.
My daughter-in-laws are doing it all, but finding the child care they have needed is so very wearing, but they as I keep pushing on. We are eternally grateful for our salaries, the right to vote was won by champions, and women are still lagging when it comes to equal pay issues, but many early middle aged women are suffering the lack of traditional marriage which is collapsing, for many women still long for their wedding day, their hour to cuddle their babies with dad and grandparents in the room. One just does not feel this tweak of grieving any of what a lot of women feel was lost by over zealous tirades in to the feminist agenda. She has a beautiful daughter who admires her mother’s strength. Perhaps Chelsea will be ideal and fully groomed to carry the office of President of the United States, and by then, we who are older are not apt to be the power house coming in now to vote.
I feel that Mrs. Clinton is a tragic sacrifice who, by age 69, just does not have the Margaret Thatcher persona of, “A poised mom who could garner respect and who could still dress up in proper British woman’s frock, and still get her agenda out to those wild and wacky blocs of the English Parliament. Ms. Rodham – Clinton’s magic hours were lived by George W. Bush, that time when an attractive woman was up to the challenge, so somehow I want to thank her, but I will not throw my vote away, for the price is too great. The democrats are just going to look for either new females who might have a prayer or for the gentleman moderate with progressive ideas on the terms of health care and who can rewrite how welfare is distributed.
Show us the new woman, but not our feisty Facebook ruler, but the woman who has done it all, and the kids are coming home for Thanksgiving — One who has run a home, and has held some public office, but most of all, one who understands what it was to combine business, make dinner, swaddle a baby, and helped to manage from the board room to the bake sale, with a diaper bag dangling on a shoulder, and that is the woman for whom I would vote, though I would not rule out voting for a male who, like his female challenger, has not been bought out by the old boy’s club. Some fresh air would be refreshing in Washington, D.C., for we have had stale old hot air too long.. Which party believed we could retrain middle east nations to be a democracy, both parties, so I pray for a learned male or female who brings everything home and who stands up and admits that we are not appreciated or wanted, for no one appointed America to change the world. How many times do we need to be hit on the head to know that we cannot fix American cities, so how can we possibly police the universe. Hillary’s journeys were many toward that way, and I end with respect for a brilliant woman and let her know that, “Pop corn on your front porch is very pleasant,” but please be a mentor and not a candidate.
Thank you Michael for the platform.
Blessings and Lovingly, Barb Hz
Barbara,
Your Comment, as always, takes my breath away. You have a mastery of the culture that recommends you to have a syndicated column carried in 180 newspapers around the world. What is wrong with this picture, and why do you not have an agent. I don’t know what I should know about this stuff, but I want to find out. I will be your agent for free. I believe in you, and as I have told you, although you have nothing to show from my activities, when I believe in something my passion will come to the fore like an asteroid entering into the atmosphere.
Thank You Always, for your stimulating and insightful comments.
With LOve and Thoughts, and Admiration,
Michael