Hillary's Human Side

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is the latest to write that everybody wants to see Senator Hillary Clinton’s human side. What DO they think they’ve been looking at?

There is Hillary the wronged spouse who first believed Bill’s protestations that he had not been messing around behind her back and so blamed a broad Right-wing conspiracy for trying to destroy her husband. This was followed closely by Bill’s shamed admission that the rumors were true and her horror at Bill's long overdue admission:

I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him, “What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?” . . .I was dumbfounded, heartbroken, and outraged that I’d believed him at all. (Living History, p. 466)

That is about as human a reaction as one can get.

Then there is Chelsea: Strong, loving, smart, articulate Chelsea who survived her time in the White House without getting arrested for showing a false I.D. to buy booze or driving drunk; who went on to graduate from Stanford and follow in her daddy’s footsteps studying at Oxford though not as a Rhodes Scholar. How did Hillary’s critics suppose Chelsea got that way? Whose example did this accomplished young woman follow if not that of her strong, smart, determined mother?

There’s Hillary who cites her long history of activism—signing up Hispanic voters in Texas, working for children with Marian Wright Edelman; don’t tell me that that’s just evidence of her plot to attain power. Registering voters and working for children are not the most efficient ways to gain power or the world would be filled with politicians who are former social workers and social activists.

She is the same hard-hearted, cold, rhymes-with-witch who talks about how beautiful her husband’s hands are. Do you really think that if she loathed him and wanted to stay married only to feed her ambition, she’d be waxing poetic about his hands?

Hillary gets a little misty and the media goes crazy. She cried! Somebody showed a little sympathy and she cried on the campaign trail! How manipulating can you get? Except that she did not cry; her eyes misted up for a moment which showed how she was just a weak woman OR it showed that she is such political Sarah Bernhardt she can cry on command for the camera.

Last week she was caught in a lie about landing in Bosnia and it is taken as proof-positive that she is a liar!! Human beings slip up; sometimes we lie. It’s one thing to tell a lie about something pretty insignificant and another to lie about hidden WMDs and lead us into a war that so far has cost us 4000 American soldiers but somehow she is the master liar. Does Obama's goof with the real estate deal make him a thief? Or was it a mistake? Good news: he's human.

Hillary portrays herself as a fighter and the impression she makes successfully is that she is tough as nails. Were she to project a softer side, how would that benefit her pursuit of the White House? Softness is part of the intimacy normally reserved for family and is better kept in the private realm. Public softness is a Damocles Sword for women politicians. The media and the public are just waiting for the Sword to fall; witness the reaction of the world to the misting of her eyes on that one occasion. The schizoid accusation that she is a monster and the continual search for her soft side while at the same time trying to find a feminine softness that can be used to disqualify her is a measure of the misogyny of our political life.

Civilized society, said novelist Dostoevsky, is judged by the way it treats its criminals. I would say civilized society is judged by the respect it gives its women.