At some point in the course of her colorful and doomed presidential campaign, I notice that I haven’t met or encountered a single woman who likes Hillary Clinton.* They may agree with her politics, may think that she would be an effective leader, may support her candidacy for president, but they don’t like her. Most express this unfortunate state of affairs with a resigned and mildly regretful air. “Like,” of course, is a slippery and complicated word; it shields us from the responsibilities and revelations of our preferences. It allows us to hide from our own feelings: it is as mysterious and ineffable and outside of ourselves as physical attraction or love. What can we do? Would that it were otherwise! But we just don’t like her. We like her husband, but we don’t like her.
We don’t know her, of course, though we know people like her. To be fair, our impression of her comes from a conglomeration of newspaper clippings and television appearances and photographs in our heads, a hologram, a fantasy, a mystical conjunction, a quirky coalescence of a million tiny experiences of our own with the news. When Bill Clinton was running for president in the early 1990s, I was in school, and everywhere there were fashionable badges and buttons: HILLARY FOR PRESIDENT. In those days, the outlandish, sly slogan had a certain allure: the improbable, humorous point, the flashy rhetorical gesture. And yet as soon as there is a distinct possibility that Hillary could in fact be president, there is a marked lack of enthusiasm surrounding the prospect.
Years ago the New York Post ran a column entitled “Just What Is It About a Phony like Hillary Clinton That Makes My Skin Crawl?” And the word “phony” is the key to a certain strain of animosity against Hillary. It is no longer a revelation that politicians are phonies, that the perfection and refinement and deployment of phoniness is in fact politics at its best. Vast swaths of the country are entirely conversant in the language of spin, completely at home with the constant attempt to describe the mechanism of phoniness, the creation of political character that is everywhere in the news. In fact, integral to the entertainment of the political scene is watching the aides and consultants spin, and the discussion and analysis of that spin. And so: Why should it matter, why should it make our skin crawl, that Hillary Clinton in particular is a phony? Or rather, what is it about her specific brand of phoniness that irks us?
The distrust that many express toward Hillary nearly always returns to the vexed and unresolvable question of her relation to Bill Clinton. The central manifestation of her phoniness appears to be her marriage, which many persist in viewing as an “arrangement,” a word which began cropping up as early as the Gennifer Flowers scandal. The implication is that Hillary is so interested, so pathologically invested in politics that somewhere along the line she made a “deal” that she would tolerate her husband’s infidelities. A Republican strategist once referred to the Clintons’ marriage as a “merger” and this sense of the deal, of the business transaction, of the chilly conglomeration of powers, lingers in the public imagination. When Hillary offended a country singer and her fans by saying on 60 Minutes, after the Gennifer Flowers incident, “I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” she in fact offended a much broader group by the implication that she was not tolerating her husband’s affairs just because she felt the same sort of pathetic, self-effacing love other more ordinary women feel; she was tolerating them because of their shared political goals.
In fact, for a brief time, it seemed that her husband’s womanizing could be a perverse gift to Hillary’s public image. As the Lewinsky scandal broke, Hillary enjoyed a brief but definite surge in popularity. She appeared on the cover of Vogue. She was dignified, yet hurt, a stance we seem to enjoy in our first ladies. But when she started talking about the “vast right-wing conspiracy” one morning on the Today show, she dipped in likeability again. She was back on message. The personal was political. This seemed a jarring and unforgivable swerve away from the story that was supposed to be about intimate and recognizable things like betrayal and pain. Was politics all this woman could think about?
In the wake of the Lewinsky scandal, there was much speculation about whether Hillary was somehow complicit in her husband’s affairs. The summer after the impeachment hearings brought emergent rumors that Hillary faked being mad at the president, that she wouldn’t hold his hand on her way to a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard as part of a deliberately staged effort to appear angry. She was pretending to be hurt because she knew it would play well with the American public, that it would humanize her. While this scenario seems wildly improbable, the fantasy itself is revealing: the idea that she may not have suffered from Clinton’s infidelities was much more disturbing than the idea that she had. A widely circulated anecdote from the sensational book State of a Union: Inside the Complex Marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton, by Jerry Oppenheimer, fed into similar suspicions. It described a letter she allegedly wrote to Clinton before they were married: “I know all of your little girls are around there. If that is what this is, you will outgrow this. Remember what we’ve talked about. Remember the goals we’ve set for ourselves. You keep trying to stray from the plan we’ve put together.” The lingering sense that she might have signed on for the life that she was in fact living was, for some reason, unforgivable. Did she know that he was going to cheat on her? Did she choose to marry him anyway? The possibility that she was in a marriage whose narrative was not centrally about love, or at least monogamous love, informed the image of her as cold, inhuman, a virago, a phony.
Indeed, the question looms over every book about Hillary: How motivated by power and ambition is she? Precisely how detached is she from what we consider the normal human emotions Hillary herself comments wryly on this when, in Living History, she writes, “Some people were eager to see me in the flesh and decide for themselves whether or not I was a normal human being.” A certain hardness, an independence, an ambition in all her endeavors, has always struck observers. Her high school yearbook predicted that Hillary Rodham would become a nun called “Sister Frigidaire.” And this idea of her as mannish, cold, clung to her. One of the Hillary books, Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta, Jr., includes a dark, paranoid account of the “plan” in which each of the Clintons occupies the White House for eight years. And the image of the “deal” continued to shadow the discussion long after Bill Clinton left the White House. When Hillary ran for the U.S. Senate, it seemed to many as if this too might be part of the “deal.” This prospect is often cited as part of her fakery, her sham marriage, even though this sort of deal, on more minor levels, and in more subtle ways, takes place in marriage all the time.
As a thought experiment, let us say that Hillary was in fact all the things that she is accused of being, that all of the most sinister accusations against her involving “plans” and “pacts” were true. Let us say that the idea is that she is using her marriage as a vehicle for power, that she was from the beginning attracted to Bill Clinton because she knew he would bring her closer to the center of power. Let’s say she was one of those people for whom love, erotic attachment, and all of its attendant pain was secondary to her desire to run the world. Let us say that all of what she herself calls “the brittle caricatures” of her are true. Why should unnatural ambition be so alarming in a presidential candidate? Why should the single-minded pursuit of power at the cost of all personal relations be so unlikeable? Why shouldn’t we want Sister Frigidaire for president?
Hillary’s drive, her ambition, her hard work, her deft manipulation of power, her refusal to be vulnerable, her unwillingness to allow love to get in the way of career goals, at least in her mature years, could be seen, if anything, as a sign of strength. She is in many ways the feminist dream incarnate, the opportunity made flesh. Surely if one had said to a group of women waving picket signs in the 1970s, “One day there will be a presidential candidate as ruthless, as cold, as willing to sacrifice relationships for power as any man,” they would have been heartened. And yet, even our admiration for her undeniable achievements has a chilly aspect, an abstract, pro forma quality. If Clinton is in many ways the embodiment of certain feminist ideals, then it may be that many of us don’t like feminism in its purest form.
It is interesting to note that in spite of predictions to the contrary, Hillary has a much more comfortable relation to younger, blue-collar women, a much more effortless popularity. It is, paradoxically, the women most like her, the demographic most similar in their education and achievements, that have the most difficulty with her. This is curious. It makes one wonder whether there is an element of competitiveness to the dislike, a question beneath the surface: why her and not me? Strong, accomplished women who one would think would respect her, would identify with her, may in fact resent her. Could it be that we like the idea of strong women, but we don’t actually like strong women? If we are being entirely honest, we have to admit that there is often an intolerance on the part of powerful women toward other powerful women, a cattiness, a nastiness, that is not a part of any feminist conversation I have ever heard. It is so much easier, so much cooler, so much more appealing, to have a Hillary for President button when Hillary is not, in fact, running for president.
There is also the matter of Hillary’s forced relation to femininity. Her transformation from a woman who cut her own hair and wore work shirts and jeans and no makeup to a coiffed blonde in pink cashmere and pearls has been much noted and commented on. Hillary writes in Living History about the arrival of stylists in her life during Clinton’s first campaign: “I was like a kid in a candy store, trying out every style I could. Long hair, short hair, bangs, flips, braids and buns. This was a new universe and it turned out to be fun.” But of course, one doesn’t get a sense of fun from that particular passage. Here again is the phoniness. Her pleasure and mastery of traditional femininity is not effortless; rather, one feels the labor, the artifice. At one point, Time magazine accused her of “allowing handlers to substitute the heart of Martha Stewart for her own.” And it seemed that way because her relation to all things female felt unnatural, contrived. What is interesting is that this groping for a kind of workable femininity, a palatable, mainstream feminine image, necessary as it so obviously was, bothered us. Hillary was unable to project the effortless image of a strong, yet feminine woman that the next generation, at least, has come to expect. It is meant to be easy, to be seamless, the transition from tough, serious workaholic to lady in kitten heels. It is meant to look natural, and the sheer awkwardness, the effort that Clinton projected, the contradictions that she so conspicuously, so crudely, embodied were perhaps a little close to home. She is trying too hard, and the spectacle of all this trying is uncomfortable, embarrassing. One could feel in a palpable way the smart woman’s impersonation of the pretty woman, the career woman’s impersonation of the stay-at-home mom; one could feel a lack of grace. This is perhaps the quandary of our particular iteration of feminism, how hard even a younger generation is trying, how often it feels faked. Hillary’s “phoniness” may be so irritating, so unforgivable, to so many smart, driven, women in part because it is our own.
* Now that Hillary Clinton has receded into a semi-visible hardworking political role, she is less of a lightning rod than she once was. People can admire her, in a cool or distant way. The controversy of her personality has died down into a sort of dull, and possibly begrudging, respect and is certainly tied more specifically to her political actions. There seems to be something about the platform of presidential politics, with its high stakes and shimmering symbolism, that brought out the dislike and suspicion and competitiveness I chronicle here.