As has often been said, Hillary Clinton had one of the most impressive resumes of any US presidential candidate in history: Ivy League education, long record of public service, well-regarded Senator, much-travelled Secretary of State and of course First Lady. That role installed her in national public life, provided a platform for her to begin the long transition from consort to candidate, and offered her insight into the most intimate workings of the White House, an advantage none of the previous 43 male presidents have had. As Barack Obama told the Democratic convention which nominated her: “There has never been a man or a woman more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America.”
She was also a model of endurance on the campaign trail—and of dignity in her concession speech. “I'm sorry that we did not win this election for the values we share and the vision we hold for our country,” she said. “I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling.”
And yet it was that glittering resume—burnished during her long years in Washington—that wrecked her chances of ever becoming president in an election where voters were so desperate for change that they were willing to swallow the preposterous idea that a billionaire born to wealth and privilege in New York knew what it was like to be an outsider. Donald Trump, as Obama and others often said, was uniquely unfit to be president. But that didn’t matter this year.
Clinton’s quest to break the glass ceiling unleashed an onslaught of vitriol and chauvinism that defies precedent. As Trump made breathtaking threats to send her to jail, his campaign surrogates casually suggested that she drive off a cliff and his supporters toted effigies in orange prison jumpsuits, she exhibited few obvious signs of distress. Instead, she kept her cool, until her final dignified concession speech.
"This year gender was not just an issue, it was the issue"But if the campaign revealed her great strength, it also laid bare her deep flaws. It was the life lessons Clinton absorbed while building up her Washington resume—that long list of credentials she hoped would overcome resistance to a female president—that in the end destroyed her. She was forced to play the long game for the White House. But with that waiting came political caution, the belief in what she called the school of small steps, the siege mindset with her penchant for scripted moments and secrecy, and the gradual acclimatisation to the insular world of powerful political and corporate elites.
In the frenzied final fortnight, after the FBI re-started and then re-closed a criminal probe, the dominant issue became—as it had been for much of the year—Clinton’s decision to set up a private email server in her home. Even if, as the FBI decision to re-close the file 48 hours before the voting might suggest, she had not committed any criminal wrongdoing, the whole episode was the product of all her very worst instincts: her tendency towards secrecy, her suspicious mind, and her entitlement—that sense that she somehow was above the rules for cabinet members and other officials. Clinton, the diligent lawyer and wonk, did not seek legal advice before establishing her parallel comms network.
The battle just lost
Her historic run for the presidency automatically introduced the issue of gender into the 2016 race, just as her failed run in 2008 had done. But this year gender was not just an issue, it was the issue—elevated by Trump’s sheer misogyny into the animating question of the campaign. Before he announced his candidacy, Trump had already retweeted “if Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband, what makes her think she could satisfy America?” Once the general election was under way, there was merchandise at his rallies with slogans like “Trump that Bitch” or “KFC Hillary Special: two fat thighs, two small breasts.”The moment when sexual politics completely reset the dial only arrived in October, when a 2005 recording emerged in which Trump bragged that, when it came to women, as a star “you can do anything. Grab them by the pussy.” Its effect was amplified when women came forward to accuse Trump of unwanted sexual advances and assault, opening up a sprawling conversation about gender, consent and violence, and the daily outrages and humiliations that women endure. The angry, snarling nature of the campaign was encapsulated when—in the final TV debate—the tycoon interrupted Clinton expressly to brand her as “such a nasty woman.”
In the uproar over Trump’s brazen misogyny the campaign was persuaded that women would automatically cleave to Clinton and that their votes would propel her to victory. But despite the torrent of insults, and the accusations of assault, Trump won a majority of white women voters, according to CNN exit polls.
White women without a college degree chose Trump over Clinton by a stunning margin: nearly two to one. She did win white women with college degrees, but only barely, taking 51 per cent of their vote compared to 45 per cent for Trump. Clinton had a lock on African-American women voters, and won 68 per cent of Latinas, with Trump taking 27 per cent.
Thus, it transpires, she never was able to make the case to white women that breaking the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” would deliver real change.
A lifetime of fighting
Clinton, as even Trump conceded in a TV debate, is a fighter who never quits. In that, she is her mother’s daughter. Dorothy Howell Rodham’s own mother was just 15 when she was born, and she went on to have a horrendous childhood. After her father won custody in a divorce, he put the eight-year-old Dorothy and her three-year-old sister on a train from Chicago to Los Angeles. Yet the resilient child survived, leaving home at 14 and supporting herself by working as a maid, eventually marrying Hugh Rodham.In her first memoir, Living History, Clinton recounted an episode when she had come home crying after one bruising encounter with other children. Her mother met her at the door declaring: “There is no room for cowards in this house. You go right back out there and stand up for yourself.” She obeyed. The next time bigger girls tried to push her around, she pushed back.
"Hugh Rodham was a man of few words, and what words there were were not encouraging."The lessons from Clinton’s father were even tougher—and so perhaps more formative in shaping her cautious character.
Last July, on a visit to Fayetteville, Arkansas, the town where Bill and Hillary Clinton began married life, I talked to some of her old friends. Ann Henry, the woman who hosted Clinton’s wedding reception, had forged a deep bond with her when both were women lawyers, a rarity in those days. Despite her hard childhood, Henry told me, Dorothy Rodham was a warm and wonderful person. But of Hugh Rodham, Henry said: “He was a man of few words, and what words there were were not encouraging.”
A diehard Republican and anti-Communist, Rodham spanked all three of his children—excessively, according to his daughter. If Clinton longed for praise for excelling in school, and she did excel, she soon knew better than to wait to hear it from him.
She escaped when she left her quiet Chicago suburb for the elite women’s college Wellesley. By the time she arrived at Yale Law School in 1969 she had abandoned the party of her father for the Democrats, and found her calling working on practical issues of child welfare.
At Yale, of course, she met Bill. Her marriage to him has been yet another endurance test. She spent decades in the shadow of his gifts—and his scandals. Bill began his political career when the couple were still in their twenties, with a close run at a hopelessly conservative seat in Congress in 1974. Even then, political friends talked of a “zipper problem,” one which would repeatedly see Hillary humiliated, most publicly over Monica Lewinsky. There have been allegations of sexual assault too, which Trump delighted in reminding Clinton and the country about.
The political path: to what end?
She began seriously mapping her course to become president while still First Lady nearly 20 years ago, when she decided to campaign for a vacant Senate seat in New York. Some biographers have claimed the Clintons much longer ago sealed a “secret pact” to take the presidency in turns. Certainly, politics was a preoccupation from early on—but unlike many of her contemporaries the distrust of the establishment and the radical politics of the Vietnam era held little appeal for Clinton."She wasn’t the sort that would have camped out overnight in the law school courtyard to make the administration change its mind"In 1972, she gained her first real campaign experience in Texas, supporting George McGovern’s run at the presidency. McGovern, who ultimately went down in a landslide to Nixon, was resolutely opposed to the Vietnam war, and well to the left on the domestic policy front. One might imagine that Clinton’s enthusiasm was a marker of the bold thinking among her youthful cohort, not least among the female baby boomers who formed the crest of second-wave feminism. At Yale, she had been one of 27 women in a class of 235. Hers was a generation on the cusp, who wanted a career as well as marriage—and to make the world a better place, too. For some Yale students, that meant immersing themselves in the causes of the left: the protests against the Vietnam war, the Black Panthers’ trial, reproductive and women’s rights.
Even then, however, she was made of altogether more cautious stuff. Her college classmates describe her as a serious student with a strong sense of purpose. But “she wasn’t the sort that would have camped out overnight in the law school courtyard to make the administration change its mind about something. My sense is that she... was just less comfortable being on the firing line,” Susan Godshall, one of her classmates, once told me.
She left Yale to work on the Watergate investigations, surely one of the most thrilling and politicising assignments a progressive young lawyer could have. And yet in August 1974, barely two weeks after Nixon’s resignation, she packed her bags for Arkansas where the Clintons were married in October 1975. A year later, Bill was elected the state attorney general, and Hillary spent the next quarter-century trying to preserve her own identity, even as she adopted public positions that reduced her to her gender—first, the wife of a governor in a sleepy southern state, and then the highly ritualised role of First Lady.
She was determined to turn the ceremonial position of First Lady into a role commensurate with her experience as a corporate lawyer. She originally wanted to serve as White House chief of staff, or maybe attorney general. But she wound up leading a taskforce to reform America’s healthcare system. It was the biggest fiasco of her husband’s first term.
Experienced White House aides argued that she should sketch out broad policy outlines and leave the drafting of legislation to Congress and their staff. But Clinton—the type of control freak to go in for, say, a private email server—ignored that advice and insisted on overseeing the drafting. Her proposals, concocted in secrecy, stretched to more than 1,300 pages and were so complex even health policy experts were confused. The theoretical plan was developed with a perfectionist’s obsession, yet she had no practical plan for making it happen. The plan died without seeing a floor vote.
She later claimed that the healthcare fiasco taught her to be more flexible. “I come from the school of small steps,” she told reporters during her Senate campaign in 2000, but in truth there has never been any doubt about her fundamentally pragmatic political orientation. Her conduct as a US Senator was not suggestive of any particular vision. She swung into line behind the Bush administration’s security crackdown, voting for the Patriot Act along with 98 of the 100 Senators. On the wider domestic agenda she was associated with few significant legislative changes, although her stand against hidden sex scenes in Grand Theft Auto—characteristically on an issue of safeguarding children—resulted in the Family Entertainment Protection Act.
She was, however, known as hardworking, with a mastery of policy detail and—despite her tumultuous years in the White House—she developed good working relationships with a number of Republican colleagues. Most fatefully for her presidential ambitions, she voted for the Iraq war, unlike a certain young Senator from Illinois. Running for the Democratic nomination in 2008, Clinton proved unable to offer a compelling reason for her candidacy beyond her resume. Saddled with that Iraq vote, she lost younger and left-wing voters to Barack Obama. Her bloated, consultant-heavy campaign was consumed by infighting and failed to come up with a plan for competing in the caucus states where ground organisation is key. Obama, a former community organiser, captured the nomination from under her.
The new president brought his former rival onto his team. Obama’s first term was an eventful one to serve as Secretary of State, not least because of the Arab Spring. But Clinton produced no signal accomplishments: no major treaties with her signature, no nuclear crises defused. She ranked her achievements in symbols: countries visited and miles travelled, her efforts to use diplomacy to empower women and children, and repair America’s image abroad.
When it was time to plan her next campaign, the political purpose was thus not much better defined. She adopted the same cautious approach and again ran from within the party establishment. She became the ultimate machine politician, a dubious status underlined when Debbie Washerman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee chair, had to resign when it was revealed that she had favoured Clinton in the primaries.
Again, Clinton drew on her husband’s donor networks, and augmented those old connections with highly paid speeches to corporate audiences. Again, she staffed a campaign team with operatives who had worked on past Clinton campaigns.
There was, however, one big difference. In her first attempt to win the White House, she had tried to persuade voters to overlook gender, presenting herself as the hawkish candidate of the establishment. The thinking, made explicit in an infamous leaked memo from her strategist, Mark Penn, said that Americans saw their president as father of the nation; they were not prepared to see a mother of the nation, but—at a push—might accept a woman having a go at the father role. In 2016, by contrast, there was—from the beginning—much talk of shattering it. After the first African-American president had won two elections, even as cautious a character as Clinton grasped that mould-breaking has a certain electoral appeal.
"Those running Clinton's campaign had misgivings about the lack of basic definition in their candidate"Even with this new emphasis, she had struggled to beat back a challenge from a 74-year-old socialist, Bernie Sanders. The Wikileaks cache of the missives of John Podesta, chair of Clinton’s campaign, revealed that her staffers were deeply worried from the start. On 27th January, a few days before the first votes were cast in the primary season, Podesta forwarded an email to the top tier of her campaign with the subject heading: “Evolving the core message.” As the heading suggests, the email revealed that the professionals running the campaign had misgivings about the lack of basic definition in their candidate.
This particular email contained an assessment of her performance at an Iowa town hall—supposedly an unscripted gathering with regular voters—conducted at Podesta’s request by the Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. She looked and sounded like a president, Greenberg wrote in the email. But she was dangerously disconnected with the mood of the electorate. “I think the overall message is tone death (sic) on what is happening in the country… She addresses change as biography: so you are making the vote choice about her, rather than what is happening in the country.” Podesta forwarded Greenberg’s assessment to five senior staffers, adding: “His dissection of our message is worth paying attention to.”
What next?
The truth is that Clinton always struggled as a politician. This year she was the most unpopular Democratic nominee since 1980, when the modern data on candidate popularity begins. The only reason she had a fighting chance was that the uniquely repellant Trump was generally deemed to be even more unpopular than she was. That bit made sense, but why was Clinton so detested?The 2016 campaign made painfully obvious there is still deep resistance in some sectors to the reality of a woman president. In Living History, Hillary offers her own pithy take on why she was such a consistent target of hostility. “While Bill talked about social change, I embodied it. I had my own opinions, interests and profession,” she writes. “I represented a fundamental change in the way women functioned in our society.”
This is, no doubt, part of her problem—but not all of it. She may genuinely believe that getting women into office embodies progressive change—revolution by resume, if you like—but it was far less clear how far, or even in what direction, she wanted that change to go. In what she regarded as her accomplishments, many voters saw only a careerist impulse to go along with the conventional wisdom. There was the constant political calculation, which put her behind other Democrats in coming out in favor of marriage equality. There was also the inurement to crony capitalism—her sluggishness in grasping why those highly-paid speeches for Goldman Sachs, and the blurred lines around the Clinton Foundation were problematic.
Her political career is now at an end. She may still be a presence on Capitol Hill, though not voluntarily: House Republicans have vowed to continue investigating her emails. But it is difficult to believe that she will retreat completely from public life—much as she plays up the image of a doting grandmother of two.
There is the Clinton Foundation, where she can pursue her lifelong efforts to expanding rights for women and girls. There is the United Nations and the think tanks, being staffed up by her former aides. And in the fears and great uncertainty of the coming Trump Administration there should still be plenty of room for her to fight. Freed now of having to artfully position herself to run for office—to be popular in other words—it could just be she will cease to be satisfied with “living history,” and instead make history by resisting and agitating—as well as by arguing for real change. There is still a chance for that.
