“I’VE ALWAYS BEEN A YANKEES FAN”“I’VE ALWAYS BEEN A YANKEES FAN”
She went to the Yankees so that she could run for senator from New York. It’s so obvious. Why is she—doesn’t she know she looks like a fraud?
—Chris Matthews, Hardball
For as long as Hillary had been in the public eye, her advisers had been trying to give her a makeover. At times, she cooperated with these Pygmalions, but more often than not she resisted their efforts to transform her into someone more pleasant and likeable.
But whether she chose to cooperate or not, the makeovers never stuck.
During Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, his top pollsters, Celinda Lake and Stan Greenberg, issued a confidential memo identifying “voters’ discomfort with Hillary.” Voters admired the strength of the Clinton marriage, they wrote, but “they also fear that only someone too politically ambitious, too strong, and too ruthless could survive such controversy so well. What voters find slick in Bill, they find ruthless in Hillary.”
What Lake and Greenberg wrote about Hillary almost a quarter of a century ago could just as easily be written about her today:
[Voters] perceive a political ruthlessness in her that is reinforced by their image of Bill Clinton. As one voter put it, “She knows what she wants and will do anything to get it.”
Women have their own contradictions and insecurities about the many roles they fulfill, which heighten their ambivalence about Hillary’s life. They wonder whether Hillary shares their values or understands their lives.
In the spring of 1993, four months after Hillary and Bill moved into the White House, the journalist Michael Kelly wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine titled “Saint Hillary.” In it, Kelly quoted Hillary as saying that she had grown tired of trying to be like Mother Teresa.
“I know that no matter what I did—if I did nothing, if I spent my entire day totally disengaged from what was going on around me—I’d be criticized for that,” Hillary complained. “I mean, it’s a no-win deal, no matter what I do, or try to do.”
Two years later, in 1995, Hillary’s press secretary, Lisa Caputo, presented several ideas to make Hillary more appealing, including a guest shot on a popular television sitcom. “Home Improvement is the most popular television show on the air,” Caputo wrote. “They are willing to do a show on women, children and [family] issues or a show on whatever issues Hillary would like. The outreach would be enormous and it would present Hillary in a very likeable light I believe.”
A year after that, in 1996, when Hillary’s polling numbers tanked and she was at the nadir of her term as first lady, she hired Michael Sheehan, Washington’s top media-training guru. Sheehan was tasked with helping Hillary with an image makeover and with prepping her for the tour of her upcoming book, It Takes a Village.
On Thanksgiving Day of that same year, Hillary phoned Diane Blair, a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas and one of Hillary’s closest friends. The two women spoke for nearly an hour. Later, Blair wrote an account in her diary of Hillary’s self-pitying rant:
“I’m a proud woman.” “I’m not stupid; I know I should do more to suck up to the press, I know it confuses people when I change my hairdos, I know I should pretend not to have any opinions—but I’m just not going to. I’m used to winning and I intend to win on my own terms.” “I know how to compromise, I have compromised, I gave up my name, got contact lenses, but I’m not going to try to pretend to be somebody that I’m not.” I’m a complex person and they’re just going to have to live with that.
In 1999, Hillary’s staff sent her a memo urging her to be “real.”
In 2000, Hillary turned again to the media-training expert Michael Sheehan. This time he tried to work his magic during her race for the U.S. Senate seat from New York being vacated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. But Liz Moynihan, the senator’s formidable wife, who managed all of his political campaigns, was less than impressed with Hillary’s latest makeover.
“She’s duplicitous,” Liz told the author of this book. “She would say or do anything that would forward her ambitions. She can look you straight in the eye and lie, and sort of not know she’s lying. Lying isn’t a sufficient word; it’s distortion—distorting the truth to fit the case.”
Liz Moynihan wasn’t alone in calling Hillary a fabulist who concocted dishonest stories. The New York media had a field day when Senate candidate Hillary, who hailed from Chicago and had always rooted for the Chicago Cubs, donned a Yankee baseball cap and declared in a Today show interview with Katie Couric: “The fact is, I’ve always been a Yankees fan.”
Members of the New York press corps weren’t the only ones who were on to Hillary. Female participants in the campaign’s focus-group sessions described Hillary as “cunning,” “pushy,” and “cold.” Complained one woman: “We really don’t know who Hillary Clinton is.”
Her eight years as a senator only served to solidify Hillary’s reputation as a shameless hypocrite. With her eye firmly fixed on the White House, she put aside her left-wing convictions and demonstrated a newfound flair for bipartisanship. By her third year in the Senate, she had already sponsored bills with more than thirty-six Republicans.
To avoid being branded a liberal, she Vaselined her image to the point where the old left-wing Hillary was almost unrecognizable. She cosponsored a bill to criminalize flag burning. And, most famously of all, she voted in favor of the Iraq war in 2002 (when it was popular) before she voted against it in 2007 (when it wasn’t).
“Hillary told [Obama] that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political,” an appalled Robert Gates, the former secretary of defense, wrote in his memoir, Duty.
In 2008, a stiff and charmless Hillary was pitted against a loose and charismatic newcomer named Barack Hussein Obama for their party’s presidential nomination. Her epic battle against Obama in Iowa and New Hampshire brought the issue of her unlikeability out of the shadows of confidential campaign memos and closed-door focus groups and to widespread public attention.