Clinton Hillary Rodham - Who is Hillary Clinton? : two decades of answers from the left

Katha Pollitt, a winner of two National Magazine Awards, has contributed to The Nation since 1975first as a poet and later as literary editor, film reviewer, contributing editor, associate editor and, since 1994, Subject to Debate columnist. Her most recent book is Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (2014).

Richard Kreitner is The Nations assistant editor for special projects.

Published in 2016 by

I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd / The Nation Company, LLC

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Copyright 2016 The Nation Company, LLC

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ISBN: 978 1 78453 635 0

eISBN: 978 0 85772 875 3

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S hes a radical feminist. Shes just a wife. Shes Emma Goldman in a pantsuit. Shes a corporate sellout. Shes a liberal. Shes conservative. Shell move all women forward. Yeah, right: The only woman she cares about is herself.

Some days it feels as if Americans have been debating Hillary Clinton for my entire adult life. Its kind of amazing that a woman who has lived so much of her life in public can still be so mysterious. Shes a Rorschach test of our attitudesincluding our unconscious onesabout women, feminism, sex and marriage, to say nothing of the Democratic Party, progressive politics, the United States and capitalism.

How ambitious can a woman be before she attracts scorn from men? From women? Not very. As Arkansas first lady, Hillary Rodham couldnt even keep her own last name. She started a media firestorm in 1992 when she defended her choice to work at the Rose Law Firm with the famous words, I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life. Fair enough, although conservatives professed to feel grossly offended at the imagined sneer at stay-home mothers. (Hillary was actually referring to the typical hostessy life of a governors wife.)

The cookies remark was actually the second time Hillary seemed to separate herself from other, less accomplished women. A few months earlier, she and Bill appeared on 60 Minutes to deny that he had had a long affair with Gennifer Flowers. You know, Hillary told Steve Kroft, Im not sitting heresome little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. Not only did she needlessly insult every woman who stayed with a straying mate, every country-music lover and the great Tammy Wynette, given her husbands proclivities she was either self-deceived (or Bill-deceived) or lying. As the Monica Lewinsky scandal would show, she was not so different from those little women. Only by then the zeitgeist had shifted: By the late 1990s wives who put up with unfaithful men looked like doormats to the sort of people who write op-eds. For pundits, staying with Bill made her either a fake feminist or an opportunist, or both. Her feminist admirers were put in the uncomfortable position of withholding judgment on her loyalty to her marriage, while at the same time her public humiliation increased her popularity with the general public. Why had it taken so long for her to realize that people like women more when they suffer?

The same ambiguity and ambivalence marks her politics and its reception. While much of the country sees Hillary as way left of centershes a Democrat, a woman, pro-choice, in favor of unions and expanded access to healthcare, or, in other words, a communistthe further you go on the actual left, the more she is perceived as the enemy, a friend to corporate capitalism, the woman who doomed national healthcare, a supporter of welfare reform and a warmonger. John Edwards, briefly the hope of progressives in the 2008 Democratic primary, also voted for the Iraq War, but somehow he escaped the heavy-duty and permanent opprobrium visited on Hillary, even after she attributed her vote to faulty intelligence as she geared up for her primary campaign. Not good enough. (For the real apology, the world would have to wait until her book Hard Choices came out in 2014.) Why were those three little words I was wrongnot misled, but wrongso hard to say? John Edwards said them easily enough, and that was the end of the issue as far as public opinion was concerned. You would almost think apologizing canceled out all those dead people. But would that have been the case for Hillary? A man can admit fault and emerge even strongerit takes a real man to admit he was wrongbut can a woman apologize without being seen as an indecisive flip-flopper, weak-minded and totally unfit to be commander in chief? Would it even have mattered to progressives, who already disliked her? The truth is, the difference between Hillarys foreign policy positions and those of President Obamas are paper thin. Even during the primary campaign he was talking about bombing Pakistan, and one of his foreign policy advisers was Samantha Power, a major proponent of so-called humanitarian intervention. Yet he was seen as the peace candidate and Hillary as the war candidatethat was why I supported him in 2008even after the peace candidate made the war candidate his secretary of state.