7 minute read
Hillary
Hillary Clinton’s life, as told in the new docu-series Hillary, is not just a life story, but an important story about American politics.
There is something about Hillary Rodham Clinton people just do not like. In Hillary, the riveting four-part documentary directed by Nanette Burstein that was released earlier this year, it is something the interviewees – a cast of old school and college friends, staff, colleagues and journalists – keep coming back to. No one seems able to explain it, and, more importantly, no one on her formidable staff seemed to know what to do about it as it became increasingly important in her election race against Donald Trump in 2016. For some reason, too many people did not trust her, or quite believe what she said or had faith in her motivations.
Nevertheless, Hillary Clinton is the most famous and probably the most popular woman politician of her own time.
Many people do love her. They scream and cry when they see her as if she were a rock star. She has been lauded, admired and praised to the hilt: high office, awards, covers of Newsweek and Time magazines. She has proved herself to be an incredibly effective politician, working intelligently and pragmatically within the system to make realistic changes. And she has consistently fought for decades for a stable set of clear beliefs, not least women’s rights, civil rights and children’s rights.
At the same time, however, her career has been dogged by controversies and scandals. The documentary recounts the steady stream of accusations and investigations, from the Whitewater scandal in the 1990s (a controversy about an apparent conflict of interests related to a real estate investment) to her husband, former president Bill Clinton’s affairs, which led to his impeachment trial. And of course, there was the ongoing question of her emails – official state correspondence during her time as Secretary of State that went through her private home server rather than the government server, and thus supposedly posed a security risk (and a crime). This apparently insignificant infraction was repeatedly deployed to derail her campaign. “I’m the most investigated innocent person in America,” Clinton says at one point in the documentary.
But more interesting than the question of whether she was guilty of any kind of misconduct over her long career is the way in which her life and so many of the great issues of the times run parallel or reflect each other, particularly the issue of women’s rights and the ultimate question of whether a woman could ever occupy the highest office in the US.
US Senator Hillary Clinton at Wynn Las Vegas in first CNN Democratic Debate.
The documentary represents Clinton’s life story as culminating in the presidential race of 2016. It cuts between footage from her election campaign to her biography, interspersed with commentary. How did the rest of her life add up the result of that crucial battle for the presidency? Did it?
She was born and raised in the homogenous suburbs of Chicago, a good republican girl, where she soon set the tone for the rest of her life as an achiever and a leader. At university, she distinguished herself again, being involved in student politics and shifting her sympathies to the democrats. In the mid-60s, she did the unthinkable and ran to be president of the student council. (She lost, coming second. The first thing the boy who won did was ask her to do all the work, which she says she did because the work was what she was interested in.)
She famously also gave a speech at her graduation in 1969, following an address by a wellknown senator, in which she impulsively departed from her script, but articulately debunked his conservative sentiments and laid out a new generation’s corrective, earning herself a seven-minute standing ovation, her first flush of fame and a mention in Life magazine.
She went on to Yale University, where she studied law, taking an interest in children’s rights. She also met her future husband, Bill Clinton, there in 1971. She immersed herself in politics and worked on various campaigns, and even on the Watergate scandal, laying the foundation for her political career.
To everyone’s surprise, however, after repeatedly rebuffing Bill’s marriage proposals, she eventually married him and followed him to his home in Arkansas, far from the heart of the political action and the bright future in politics that seemed her natural path. She practiced as a lawyer, did well, becoming a partner in a prominent law firm, and chaired various important committees and championed causes close to her heart. Bill became governor of Arkansas in the late 70s, a position he held consistently but for a small break in the early 80s, until he decided to run for president in 1992. (Throughout the 80s, Hillary earned more than her husband.)
Bill and Hillary Clinton at a St. Louis campaign rally in 1992, Bill Clinton's final day of campaigning in St. Louis, Missouri.
While supporting Bill’s presidential campaigns, she learnt many hard political lessons about balancing her own beliefs and the demands in politics for tactical diplomacy. By this time, she’d taken Clinton’s surname as her own – initially sticking to Rodham until it became a political millstone – embraced a more groomed personal image, and learnt to watch what she said. (In one famous blunder, when asked about why she continued to work when she was a governor’s wife, she sharply retorted, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfil my profession.” In the process, she alienated a slew of stayat-home mothers and cost her husband precious votes.)
The more recent history – including her husband’s affairs – is fresher in our memories: Working as a senator in the noughties, running against democratic candidate Barack Obama in 2008, ultimately losing but serving successfully as his Secretary of State, and then the fateful battle against Donald Trump in 2016 as the first woman ever to run for president.
In the aftermath of 2016, the documentary presented an occasion for Clinton to reflect on her life in a more candid, human way than the persona she presented on the campaign trail. By the end of this four-hour docu-series, you certainly feel as if you’ve been allowed closer to Clinton than before. But there is still a sense of something missing – a distance; a failure to connect. In fact, that central point about whether people ever feel they can know her, and therefore like and trust her, is perhaps the main subject of this documentary.
US Presidentelect Donald Trump points to the crowd during his 'Thank You Tour' at Ladd- Peebles Stadium.
One famous quote summed up many Americans’ attitude towards her during her 2016 campaign. Asked whether they would vote for a woman to be president, many said yes, they would, just not “that woman”.
The great achievement of the documentary is the way it teases out the contradiction at the heart of the distinction between any woman presidential candidate and “that woman”. In other words, was it not necessary for Hillary Clinton to become “that woman” in order to make it as far as she did in American politics? Did 40-plus years in the political trenches give her the strength to get so far, but simultaneously imparted the guarded exterior that ultimately made her “inauthentic” to voters?
One key element that perhaps was lost in the election coverage at the time, but which comes into sharp focus in the documentary, is the misogyny she was subject to for decades and decades as a woman in politics. From men at rallies holding up banners with slogans like “iron my shirt” to the more subtle discriminations, such as the disproportionate attention the public paid her appearance compared to male politicians (she estimates spending a total of 25 days, 600 hours, during her presidential campaign just having her hair and make-up done)– the way we deal with gender in contemporary culture has massive consequences in politics.
Americans go to the polls again this November. How would the picture look if that 2016 election had gone differently? Sure, as many have pointed out, it is not as if Clinton’s divisiveness or polarising character would have evaporated had she won. It would most likely have followed her back to the White House and dogged her presidency.
But perhaps the point to remember is that in 2008, in the race to be democratic candidate against Barack Obama, and eight years later in 2016 as the democratic candidate herself, she was there, and she was a real contender. The documentary ends on a hopeful note, showing how many more woman politicians in high office there are now in the US compared to when Clinton began her career. It represents Clinton, if not as the smasher of the ultimate glass ceiling, then as someone who broke a great many others on her way almost to the top, creating a groundswell in her wake.
President Barack Obama and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton greet a crowd of thousands gathered on Philadelphia's Independence Mall on the eve of the election, Monday, November 7, 2016.
But the fact remains that in 2020, none of those women was a candidate. No one has caught up. No one can fill her shoes. So far, Hillary Rodham Clinton stands alone in her achievement. •
Watch the trailer for 'Hillary' here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViAAwc0BtiE
