Hillary Clinton claimed a historic victory Tuesday night, exactly eight years to the day since her first presidential campaign ended in defeat. She is now the first female major party nominee for president of the United States.
But it’s been an even longer time coming than that for Clinton, a controversial public figure for over forty years. She is now getting ready to run against a Republican who might be even more controversial.
After recalling the battle for women’s rights at Seneca Falls, praising Bernie Sanders and calling for Democratic unity, she set out to draw sharp contrasts between herself and Donald Trump.
“Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president,” Clinton said, on a day when some elected Republicans were echoing that criticism. “When he says let’s make America great again, he means let’s take America backwards.”
“To be great, we can’t be small,” she said, in yet another dig against Trump’s campaign slogan. Tipping her hat to her “it takes a village” catchphrase, Clinton preferred the slogan, “We’re better together.”
For Clinton, it was a hardfought primary campaign. Sanders stuck around in the race until nearly the end despite being a relatively obscure lawmaker. But she never surrendered the lead and survived an eight-state losing streak to come back and secure a majority of delegates before the last primaries had even occurred.
The general election campaign is also likely to be a tough slog. The polls are competitive even though the Republican Party has been divided and there has been so much criticism of Trump across the political spectrum.
For much of Clinton’s public life, she was inextricably linked to her husband Bill Clinton — his progressive better half to some feminists, evidence of his stealth radicalism to many Republicans.
Her decision to keep using her maiden name was controversial when Bill Clinton first served as attorney general and then-governor of culturally conservative Arkansas in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was a frequent target in Bill’s 1992 presidential campaign.
“Elect me, and you get two for the price of one, Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse,” Pat Buchanan proclaimed in his keynote address at the 1992 Republican National Convention. “And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have a right to sue their parents, and she has compared marriage as an institution to slavery — and life on an Indian reservation.”
“Well, speak for yourself, Hillary,” Buchanan cracked.
“I’m not sitting here some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” Clinton told “60 Minutes” in a 1992 joint interview with her husband, who was facing questions about an extramarital affair with Gennifer Flowers. “I’m sitting here because I love him and I respect him.”
Tammy Wynette, the country music legend, was offended and Hillary apologized.
“I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies and had teas,” was another controversial Clinton quote from that campaign. She was responded to allegations from Jerry Brown that her legal career improperly benefited from her marriage to Bill. Today Brown is supporting her for president.
As first lady, Clinton oversaw a failed 1993 bid to overhaul the healthcare system, shaving points off her husband’s job approval rating and helping cost Democrats seats in Congress next year. She co-starred in many of the biggest scandals, such as Whitewater and cattle futures. An exception was the Monica Lewinsky incident, in which many viewed her as a sympathetic figure.
Clinton began to escape her husband’s shadow when she was elected to the Senate from New York, a state where she had never previously lived, in 2000. She was re-elected in 2006 and viewed as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, setting up a possible Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton succession in the White House.
Until a freshman senator from Illinois named Barack Obama beat her in the Iowa caucus. Suddenly faced with the realistic prospect of electing the first black president of the United States, a larger majority of African-American voters shifted from Clinton to Obama.
The vaunted Clinton machine went into overdrive, with Paul Begala ripping Obama’s coalition of white liberals and blacks by saying Democrats can’t win with just “eggheads and African Americans.” She battled back to win primaries in most big states, including California, New York, Texas and Pennsylvania while Obama beat her in the caucuses. Clinton received a razor-thin plurality of total votes cast, but Obama won more votes head-to-head in the states where they were both on the ballot.
“I understand that we all know this has been a tough fight, but the Democratic Party is a family,” Clinton said as she conceded defeat at the end of her first presidential run. “And now it’s time to restore the ties that bind us together and to come together around the ideals we share, the values we cherish, and the country we love.”
Clinton went on to endorse Obama and become secretary of state in his first term, enhancing her claim to be qualified for the presidency while also becoming ensnared in the two most recent scandals plaguing her, Benghazi and the email controversy.
Now Clinton is hoping that Sanders will also magnanimously end his campaign as she wraps up the Democratic nomination rather than engaging in a protracted fight at the convention. Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, gave her a much tougher race than anticipated. But he is not as close a runner-up as she was to Obama.
Clinton will likely end the night with a commanding lead in superdelegates, pledged delegates and the popular vote. Undone by supermajorities of the black vote in 2008, this time around African-American voters in the South were her “firewall.” Sanders’ path to the nomination by persuading superdelegates to switch their allegiance at the convention in Philadelphia this summer is remote.
As Clinton clinches, fissures are reappearing among Republicans as her likely general election rival Donald Trump is attacked for comments about the Mexican heritage of the judge presiding over a class-action suit involving his now-defunct online university. Republican leaders as high-ranking as House Speaker Paul Ryan have said that at least the comments were racist, if not Trump himself.
Clinton appeared to be blowing a sure thing again when Sanders went on an eight-state winning streak during the primaries. She began to fall behind in the national polls after Trump secured a majority of Republican delegates, but is inching ahead again as the nomination is within her grasp.
“Life is too short, time is too precious, and the stakes are too high to dwell on what might have been,” Clinton said in her 2008 concession. “We have to work together for what still can be.”
Surely, she hopes Sanders will listen. For her, the presidency still can be.
