One day, when he was running for the Democratic nomination for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter was asked what he thought about Hubert Humphrey. In fairness to Carter, it should be remembered that Humphrey—the former vice president and 1968 Democratic candidate—was lurking in the background that year, awaiting the summons if Carter’s campaign should falter. So Carter, the first self-professed “born-again Christian” to run for the White House, fixed his trademark grin and quoted a favorite aphorism: “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.”
I mention this not as a reflection on Jimmy Carter but as a basic truth about politics at the presidential level: All successful candidates—even most unsuccessful candidates—have some percentage of ice in their bloodstreams. We expect them to be intensely driven, ambitious, self-centered, even ruthless individuals; they could not possibly endure the marathon task of running for president if it were otherwise. But defeat and disappointment are revealing in their way. In every contest for the White House there is a winner and loser, and while losers always run the risk of settling into oblivion, history tends to be kind to the good losers. And whatever it means to be a “good loser,” Hillary Clinton seems resolutely determined not to be one.
I should also mention that, while I have not read her campaign memoir and probably never will, like most Americans I have been cognizant of Hillary Rodham Clinton for the past quarter-century or more, and I did wade through her State Department memoir, Hard Choices (2014). Now, the near-universal judgment seems to be that What Happened is vintage HRC: resolutely self-referential, defensive, vindictive, and alarmingly tone-deaf. The consensus among conservative reviewers is that it reveals (unintentionally, of course) why she lost the election to Donald Trump. Democrats have been lamenting her failure to exit gracefully, stage left.
Nor have her anguished friends been much help. A series of admiring press and television interviews has given her a platform to amplify her worst retrospective instincts. The other weekend the New York Times featured the transcript of a three-way, three-page, fulsomely illustrated chat—“over late afternoon snacks of charred shishito peppers, crispy brussels sprouts and cheese . . . at the Lambs Club restaurant in Manhattan”—with interviewer Philip Galanes and actress America Ferrera, TV’s “Ugly Betty.” The conversation veered predictably between worshipful deference to Mrs. Clinton and angry reflections on the American electorate.
On the one hand, it is possible to feel some tremors of compassion for Hillary Clinton, winner of the 2016 popular vote. She and her husband Bill have been plotting their extraordinary political careers very nearly since the moment they met at Yale Law School in the early 1970s. To have worked so long and so hard over the decades, to have endured an unprecedented series of public triumphs and setbacks, and then to have fumbled the ultimate prize to the unlikeliest of adversaries would be enough to send anyone to the Chardonnay cabinet.
On the other hand, there are inconvenient truths about Hillary Clinton that shouldn’t go unmentioned, including her status as a pioneering woman. Yes, she was the first major-party female presidential nominee in American history, but she was hardly the first woman to run for president. Moreover, while no one would deny her brains and dogged determination, how well would Americans know her—would they know her at all—if she hadn’t been married to her spouse? Margaret Thatcher did not become the first female British prime minister because of her husband Denis; nor, for that matter, was John O’Connor responsible for his wife Sandra Day O’Connor’s historic elevation to the Supreme Court. Hillary Clinton had not “stayed home, baked cookies, and had teas”—in her famously defiant words from 1992—but her stature owed a considerable debt to being Mrs. Bill Clinton.
Indeed, the woman who stepped aside in 1999 to allow the first lady from Arkansas to run for the Senate in New York the following year—Rep. Nita Lowey—might well have become the first female presidential nominee. Yet Congresswoman Lowey, so far as I am aware, has had little to say publicly about her thwarted ambition. She is a good loser, in that respect. So was Henry Clay, the founder of the Whig party, arguably the most influential American statesman of his era and his fellow Kentuckian Abraham Lincoln’s political hero. Clay ran for president on five separate occasions, was the Whig nominee in three contests—and lost every time. Clay wept in his wife’s arms at the final defeat, but kept his own counsel on the vagaries of ambition.
In modern times, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson (1952, 1956) is another instructive comparison. Stevenson’s reputation as an eloquent orator and droll scholar in politics—“Eggheads of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks”—was partly an invention of admirers and speechwriters. But he did use humor to effortless effect. And his public reflections on the pain of political failure were invariably self-deprecating, expressed not in petulant, but genteel, terms. No doubt, Stevenson believed that he was a more suitable White House occupant than his two-time opponent, Dwight D. Eisenhower. But he was equally aware that his chances of success in those elections were nonexistent—an occasion, for him, not to rage at injustice and list, in churlish detail, the excuses for his loss, but to accept reality, rebuild his party, and inspire a rising generation of public servants.
Like Hillary Clinton, Stevenson was from Illinois. She was an infant when he was elected governor in 1948, and only 5 years old when he first ran for president. As the daughter of a staunchly Republican household, the future Goldwater Girl was unlikely to have heard much praise for Adlai Stevenson. But grace under pressure, like unselfishness, knows no partisan bounds—and, in defeat, can be something like redemption.
Philip Terzian is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
