What ails the strange, stilted campaigning of Hillary Clinton, so different in kind from other contenders’, so odd, so remote, so contrived?
“Mrs. Clinton isn’t grilled…she gets the glide,” observed Peggy Noonan. “She waves at the crowds and the press and glides by. No one pushes. No one shouts the rude question….She is treated like the queen of England, who also isn’t subjected to impertinent questions as she glides into and out of venues. But she is the queen. We are not supposed to have queens.”
But this isn’t quite accurate: We are, and we do. We have virtual queens, who are known as First Ladies. And one of the problems with Hillary Clinton is that she became known to us first in the ceremonial role of First Lady. It is not the best training for running for president, which she is discovering now.
In the 1780s, the founders faced the task of building a system of government based upon royalty that was somehow not royal, with a royal family that was royal but different — it was temporary, empowered not by divine right but the will of the people, and (except in two cases) wasn’t passed down from fathers to sons. The presidential couple itself was supposed to be above politics, but by 1800 the presidency itself had become quite unexpectedly partisan and hotly contested.
With the president as both head of state and leader of his party, he would be controversial — willing and able to give and take blows. Thus, the First Lady remains our last functioning relic of royalty, with rank but not power, and cushioned by deference. Our first president’s wife was called “Lady Washington.” America’s Queen was the title of Sarah Bradford’s book about Jacqueline Kennedy, and Barbara Bush was often compared to Britain’s iconic Queen Mother Elizabeth, who died a much-beloved legend at age 104.
Some first ladies have either very little influence, like Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower. Others have taken on initiatives viewed as non-partisan and beneficial, like planting flowers (Lady Bird Johnson), filling the White House with beautiful furniture (Jacqueline Kennedy) or encouraging reading, like Laura and Barbara Bush.
The exception to this had been Eleanor Roosevelt, who had been a tough no-holds-barred pol before reaching the White House. But Theodore’s niece understood opposition was the price one paid to be in the arena. She never complained when attacks came her away.
Hillary, on the other hand, wished to attack while being treated with deference. Even at her most polarizing moments, she led a parallel life as the president’s hostess, greeting foreign visitors, appearing at funerals and other state functions, attending state dinners in beautiful dresses and enjoying the numerous bounties of head-of-state privilege — the limousines and the planes, the doors always held open, the hovering presence of staff.
When she ran for the Senate, she ran as the First Lady, still cocooned in the perks that go with that office. Her re-election was a formality. The Bush sons and the Kennedy brothers had visited their kin in the White House, but they had never actually gotten to live in the bubble.
This means Hillary Clinton has become the first person in history to try to fight her way back into the Executive Mansion after having lived there for eight years before and enjoyed its protections. Perhaps the new revelation is that she has been hampered by those protections, which may have rendered her helpless without them. She is not now, if she was ever, the queen of America. And she may never be Queen of the Hill.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
