What happened to Hillary Clinton en route to her appointment with destiny? Her new book, What Happened, portrays her as a lifelong fighter on behalf of noble causes, a woman whose quest for the power she deserved was thwarted by a cabal as vast as the one she once said had been after her husband and which this time included (beyond Donald Trump) Vladimir Putin, Julian Assange, James Comey, the New York Times, the Electoral College, a vast swarming army of sexists and racists, and “deplorables” too many and loathsome to count. Her book does not always exaggerate the role of these bogeymen; in particular, its description of Russian interference in the 2016 election seems to reasonably combine press accounts with modest speculation. But overall, What Happened blames everyone but Hillary and her staff for her defeat.
A different view is taken by the journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, whose book Shattered makes a convincing case that Hillary was a dishonest, evasive, and pretty bad candidate. This is also the conclusion that arises from a look back at her record: With the exception of a brief two-year window just before the turn of the century, she has been a bad politician for all her life. She was a bad politician in 1993 and ’94, when she mishandled health care and lost both houses of Congress for her husband and party; a bad politician when she ran for president in 2008 and lost to a novice whom no one took seriously before he began winning; and a very bad politician when she ran again eight years later, nearly losing the nomination to a 74-year-old socialist and then losing the general election to a novelty candidate whom even some of his voters considered a joke.
But the joke as it turned out was the one played on Hillary, who had been told all her life by the people around her that her academic precocity was political genius, that she had a particular gift for inspiring people, that she deserved to be president, and that her ascension was all but assured. Fate seemed to concur and gave her three gifts: a feminist movement that lifted her with it; a president-husband who shared his great power; and a black-swan event in the shape of a scandal that recast her in the public eye. But even these could not overcome her limitations, and she failed twice to achieve her ultimate object—the last time in a way so painful that it almost seemed the universe itself had been taking revenge upon her for her presumption. How did this occur, and what made it happen? Let us look backwards and see.
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Hillary Rodham the feminist icon was first unleashed upon an unsuspecting world in the June 20, 1969, issue of Life. She had been the first student to speak at a Wellesley commencement, in an address excoriating the “prevailing, acquisitive and competitive corporate life,” and so the magazine featured her in a picture spread about five student leaders across the country. From then on, her friends believed she would one day be president, and the publicity sent her sailing into Yale Law School as a person of consequence, a standing she would not thereafter lose.
A photo from the session shot for ‘Life’ magazine in 1969. (Photo credit: Lee Balterman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
When she took a job in early 1974 on the staff of the congressional committee working on the impeachment of President Nixon, her friends saw it as her first step towards a political future. That hope seemed dashed when she decamped to Arkansas later that year to marry Bill Clinton—a decision seen by her friends as an abject betrayal, the end of her chance at a limitless future, the rejection of all that their feminist movement held dear. A friend who drove with her down to Fayetteville was so distraught that she spent the trip begging Hillary to relent and return to Washington, and Betsey Wright, who would go on to work in the office of Governor Clinton, told biographer David Maraniss years later that she had been “less interested in Bill’s political future than Hillary’s. I was obsessed with how far Hillary might go, with her mixture of brilliance, ambition, and self-assuredness. There was an assumption about all the incredible things she could do in the world.”
That assumption was shared by Bill Clinton, who believed in Hillary’s future and had been thinking in terms of his-and-her presidencies—first co-presidencies, then ones in sequence—since they had been in law school together, maybe even since the day they met. Bill marveled before their marriage that Hillary might hitch her future to his. After all, a friend later recalled him saying, “She could have an amazing political career on her own. . . . She could be president someday. She could go to any state and be elected to the Senate.” (The last part would prove prophetic.)
The hopes for Hillary’s political future did not dim even though it was Bill’s career that took them from the Arkansas governor’s mansion to the White House. Their friend Linda Bloodworth-Thomason was fond of telling people that when the Clintons were dead each would be lying next to a president. In For the Love of Politics, Sally Bedell Smith quotes a cabinet member as saying that early in Bill’s first term members of “a small group around Hillary . . . were really feeling their oats. . . . There was a lot of loose-lipped undisciplined talk like ‘We’re going all the way.’ ”
All of this talk disturbed Donna Shalala, a friend of them both and secretary of health and human services in Bill Clinton’s cabinet, who thought “there was too much mythology about Hillary” making the rounds among her friends—talk that he was being a drag on her prospects, that she was the one who deserved to be president, that if life weren’t so unfair and so rigged against women, she would have held office herself. “They assume that [just] being smart is enough,” Shalala told Carl Bernstein for his 2007 biography of Hillary. “And it’s not enough. It’s judgment. It’s experience. It’s being strategic at the right points.” Shalala questioned not Hillary’s brains but her talents and temperament: She clearly was bright, but she had never proven that she could run large organizations, she had never demonstrated a strength for what Shalala described as “conceptualizing original programs and promulgating breakthrough ideas,” and she had problems with what another president memorably described as “the vision thing.”
Chairing a meeting on health care reform in 1993. (Photo credit: Bill Greene/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
None of this would stop Bill from giving his wife full control of health-care policy—his first term’s signature domestic issue—and pitting himself and Hillary’s other boosters against Shalala and most of his aides, who were concerned about his wife’s limited political skills. His gamble would not pay off.
“Much later, when seeing was easy,” Bernstein wrote, “more than a few of the administration’s principals concluded that those first weeks after the election were when Hillary ‘made most of her big mistakes.’ ” The mistakes would be many, and many were big. She misread Bill’s blowout win in the Electoral College as a mandate for a sweeping change, when in reality he was a minority or a plurality president, elected because the center-right vote split between George H. W. Bush and Ross Perot.
She tried to set up a huge and unwieldy government entity.
She resisted ideas that might have won bipartisan backing.
She jealously guarded her power and resented advice that came even from fellow Democrats with vastly more practical political experience. (Lloyd Bentsen complained about her “holier-than-thou” attitude; Shalala’s tactical objections were dismissed as arising from envy; Alice Rivlin’s suggestions were ignored; Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s proposed compromise elicited scorn.)
After many paralyzing months, her health-care project was pronounced dead in September 1994. Six weeks later came the midterms and one of the greatest electoral bloodlettings ever—a loss by the Democrats of 8 Senate and 54 House seats and of control of both chambers. Hillarycare begat the Republican Revolution.
For the rest of his time in office, President Clinton would be forced to triangulate with the GOP-controlled Congress—a fact that would come to serve him quite well in the judgment of history—while Hillary was forced to cut back her ambitions drastically. She had to act more like the usual kind of first lady, focusing less on hard policy than on softer issues. She edited a small book of letters that children had sent to her cat and dog.
Had the health-care flop remained the main thing people remembered about Hillary, it likely would have marked the end of her political ambitions. But life with Bill Clinton was hard to predict.
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The news that one’s husband has had an affair with a young intern is not the sort of thing that a woman would want to wake up to. By all accounts, the Lewinsky scandal was for Hillary personally excruciating and humiliating. But perversely, for her political fortunes it was the best news she would get in her life. Between January 17, 1998, when word of the impending scandal first leaked online, and February 12, 1999, when her husband’s impeachment trial ended with his acquittal, she would be transformed from a shadowy, cool, and remote technocrat to a sympathetic and highly praised woman, widely admired for the grace and composure with which she had borne her ordeal.
The scandal made Hillary popular for the first time with a wide range of people, even opening the door for traditionalists to respect and support her. And it made her for a time the head, heart, and soul of her party. “During the 1998 midterm campaign,” wrote historian Gil Troy, “with her husband subdued, Hillary Clinton emerged as the Democrats’ star surrogate, in demand nationwide.” In the campaign’s closing weeks, the martyred and stoic first lady would headline 50 fundraisers, appear at 34 rallies, and go to 20 states, visiting 5 of them in a three-day span. “Even in the South, she drew huge crowds, and when she left a state or campaign district, polls showed that the Democrats had invariably benefited,” wrote Bernstein. On Election Day, the Democrats defied expectations and history by holding on to all their seats in the Senate and even winning five new seats in the House, a noteworthy feat in the famously dangerous sixth year of a presidency. Most of the incumbents she campaigned for held on, and Newt Gingrich, the House speaker who had led the Republican Revolution four years earlier and clashed with the Clintons at every turn, felt obliged to resign in disgrace. The win went to Hillary, the wronged woman who became the right woman at the right time and place. She reigned supreme over the Democrats, empress of all she surveyed.
She set her eyes on the New York Senate seat Moynihan was vacating. Her husband’s scandal helped cast her desire to run for the Senate not as the power grab that it might have seemed—she had never lived in New York—but as the normal response of a mistreated woman wishing to remake her life in a wholly new venue, far from the scenes of the past. The Joan-Crawfordesque drama-queen phase of the Hillary saga peaked in December that year, when, fresh from rescuing Congress, she love-bombed New York. She lunched with magazine writers and editors, posed serenely in black velvet on the cover of Vogue, and attended the premiere of Shakespeare in Love to the welcoming cheers of the Miramax audience.
She was being rewarded, as Maureen Dowd put it, not for what she accomplished, but for what she endured. Understandably, the person most prone to reward her was Bill, who put the force of the White House behind her campaign, holding fundraisers that harvested millions of dollars, turning the party’s 2000 convention into her personal showcase, arranging fundraisers, tributes, and prime-time TV speeches, lavishing on her all the attention and money that would otherwise have gone to his vice president, the resentful presidential nominee Al Gore. This was unfair—and was hugely effective: Months later, while Gore slipped into recount hell and then bitter defeat, Hillary sailed to a 12-point win over a hapless GOP congressman. She entered the Senate as the next star of her party—the presidential nominee in 2008 if not sooner. Many Democrats felt relief, convinced they had found their next leader.
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Senator Clinton’s legislative career was not distinguished by any especially memorable successes or failures, but she was popular enough in New York to win reelection in a landslide in 2006 and, as was predicted, she announced she would run for president in 2008. People sat back and waited for the magic to arrive. And waited, and waited. It never came.
From today’s vantage—looking back on her primary loss to Barack Obama and her general-election loss to Donald Trump—it is clear that she never really had political magic. The period from 1998 through the 2000 election was a sugar high, an illusion of political strength generated not by her skills but by the drama surrounding her. Once the drama had vanished, the stardust was gone. Even by the end of the 2000 cycle it had begun to dissipate: “Her basic style hadn’t changed much. She was still uninspiring,” Smith tells us, and goes on to quote a New York Times article noting that “it is not uncommon . . . to hear the rustle of conversation rising from the back of the hall before the First Lady reaches the last page” of her speeches.
By 2008, Hillary’s appeal was gone as completely as if it had never existed. All her old problems returned. Post-scandal Hillary was pretty much like pre-scandal Hillary: studious and workmanlike, a fine spokesman for her state and her party, but hardly a leader. By 2016, her appeal had diminished even further: She was eight years older and carrying new baggage picked up from her family’s foundation and her tenure as secretary of state.
Both of her national campaigns lacked vision, and both resembled the chaos of her health-care project. She was disorganized in 1993-94 when she was working on Hillarycare and disorganized when running for president. In Shattered, Allen and Parnes report that Democratic operatives helping out on the 2016 campaign considered it “an unholy mess, fraught with tangled lines of authority, petty jealousies, distorted priorities, and no sense of greater purpose. No one was in charge, and no one had figured out how to make the campaign about something bigger than Hillary.” Organizationally, the campaign looked like “a traffic jam on a Venn diagram.” There was “nothing quite like the aimlessness and dysfunction of Hillary Clinton’s second campaign for the presidency—except maybe those of her first.”
Her old character problems had also reemerged. Again and again in What Happened, she complains that press coverage of the 2016 campaign was “dominated” by questions related to her use of a private email server for government business; she spends some 30 pages walking through the complexities of the controversy. But while she grasps the details of what happened, she never quite seems to understand the why—the reason the emails struck such a note in the national consciousness. It was not primarily due to the New York Times or to FBI director James Comey’s off-and-on investigation. Rather, the secret-server story played into the longstanding public perception of Hillary as untruthful. At least a third of the Americans who voted in the 2016 election are too young to remember the so-called “pretty-in-pink” press conference of 1994 in which a demurely dressed Hillary tried to put away questions concerning insider trading with carefully phrased answers that in retrospect turned out to be evasive, misleading, or not wholly true. But even though Whitewater and the other scandals of the 1990s are receding from memory, Hillary’s aura of dishonesty, obscured for a time by the Lewinsky scandal, is still aglow.
As with the failed health-care project in 1994, Hillary refused during the campaign to admit to misjudgments related to the server scandal. This alarmed even her allies. As her friend and adviser Neera Tanden wrote in an email leaked during the campaign, Hillary’s
But she could not admit mistakes. Among campaign staffers, “it was a self-signed death warrant to raise a question about Hillary’s competence,” Allen and Parnes note. “Concern about being cast out to the perimeter of Hillary’s overlapping circles of influence far outweighed the itch to tell Hillary what she was doing wrong.” This, too, is not new. As Bernstein wrote of her struggles with health care, to accept others’ judgments “would have meant to controvert her most basic notion about herself: that given the responsibility and the power, she could solve virtually any problem she applied herself to.”
Conceding the 2016 election to Donald Trump. (Photo credit: JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)
While griping about the email controversy is a major theme of What Happened, the authors of Shattered focus repeatedly on Hillary’s inability to fashion a message that could engage the public in a cause that was more than herself. This arguably was her campaign’s main problem: She tended to think that she herself was enough. Or rather, that she herself as the first woman president was a cause so transcendent that no more was needed. Whereas successful candidates have tended to run for the presidency on the basis of their beliefs—Bill Clinton was a New Democrat, George W. Bush a compassionate conservative, Obama a progressive—Hillary believed she deserved to be president and left it to her staff to build issues around her. “In her view, it was up to the people she paid to find the right message,” Allen and Parnes write, “a construction deeply at odds with the way Trump and Sanders built their campaigns.”
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The question of “what happened” to Hillary Clinton in 2016 goes back to 1969, when, not much older than 20, she became a generational icon—contributing to her belief that she deserved to be president and the world was her due.
It goes back to 1974, when the young Clintons decided that they both could be president, before it was known yet if either had any political talent—something that does not always go along with high intellect and that cannot be learned.
It goes back to 1993, when she became an instant world figure as a new kind of first lady, a player powerful purely by marriage—without having run something, run for something, or otherwise proven her political worth.
It goes back to 1998, when she became a political power as the woman wronged in an intense and compelling personal drama, and to 2000, when she won a Senate seat for much the same reason.
She turned out to be a good fit for the Senate, functioning well enough within existing structures of power, and, if her personality had been just a little bit different, she might have happily settled there for life. It is her tragedy that her sense of entitlement drove her twice into grueling, exhausting, and heartbreaking contests for the presidency, for which her meager stores of political talent were never enough to sustain her.
Hillary reports that she is consoling herself for her electoral loss by spending time with her grandchildren, decorating her home, and drinking Chardonnay. She still seems bitter and grieving, though, and What Happened is ultimately an exercise in finding people to blame for the disappointments she suffered, while the blame clearly lies with herself.
This too is a habit of long standing. In a 1996 interview with Barbara Walters, Hillary used this bit of nursery doggerel to explain what she saw as her bad reputation: “As I was standing in the street as quiet as could be / A great big ugly man came up and tied his horse to me.” Revisiting that moment after a few months, Washington Post reporters David Maraniss and Susan Schmidt explained what was missing: “The image is of a mere bystander, a good person victimized. But an examination of Hillary Clinton’s public statements suggests someone less passive in her behavior, less consistent in her answers, and less committed to full disclosure than the figure in her self-portrait.” That, once more, is the Hillary of What Happened—conjuring up ugly men who tied horses to her, while the evidence suggests that the horses around her were ones she corralled herself.
Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Washington Examiner.
