“The soft bigotry of low expectations” was George W. Bush’s take on the problems involved in asking too little of people, but it was left to Hillary Clinton, his predecessor’s wife and his would-be successor, to show us just how much harder the cost of hopes pitched too high can become.
From her early days as a sensation at Wellesley at the very dawn of the feminist era, she had been surrounded by people, usually women, who assured her that not only could she have a splendid career if she wanted, but that she could, and deserved to, reach ANY level she chose. Betsey Wright, Bill Clinton’s chief aide in Little Rock, saw her from the start as the more likely president, and many women appeared to agree.
Eventually, she got the idea that it was something she deserved and was owed to her, and Bill supported that view of her future ambitions. “She could go to any state and be elected to the Senate,” he said in 1974. “She could be president someday.” “Eight years of Hillary Clinton? Why not?” he said in 1992 to Gail Sheehy. “It doesn’t bother me for people to see her and get excited and say she should be president too.”
When the Clintons reached Washington, Hillary’s fever ran higher than Bill’s, which gave some people around them some pause. “There was too much mythology about Hillary that stretched the facts,” Donna Shalala would tell Carl Bernstein for his 2007 book about her, “A Woman in Charge.” Shalala, he said, “had always been made uncomfortable by hyperbolic statements from friends” who suggested at times that Bill had been holding back Hillary, who without him could have reached the House, the Senate or even the White House herself.
“They assume that being smart is enough … and it’s not enough,” Shalala had told him. “It’s judgment. It’s experience. It’s being strategic at the right points.” She also felt that the Hillary myth had grown larger than Hillary, a view also held by Doris Kearns Goodwin, who suggested that Hillary, as part of a generational movement of women, had been made by that to seem larger. “To the extent that she got to be the symbol of that … people did project on to her things that she hadn’t even deserved.”
An autopsy may show that Hillary Clinton has been loved to death, not merely by feminists but by her husband, who in private life betrayed her too often but in public life did much too much for her, giving her power before she had earned it, giving her visibility, putting the enormous power of the White House behind her first run for the Senate, which in itself was her compensation for having suffered through 1998 and her husband’s impeachment, not to mention his carryings-on.
She took this fluke of a win as the proof of political invincibility, and as a result the country was forced to suffer through sixteen years of her grim, joyless and failed attempts to be president. They suffered as she entered each race as the front runner with institutional support and a huge war chest behind her, and saw each turn into a hair-raising experience, in 2008 into a primary loss to Barack Obama; in 2016 into a grind-it-out primary win over Bernard Sanders, a 74-year-old Socialist from a very small state whom no one had seen as a serious candidate. Then, of course, there was 2016 when she suffered a gut-punching loss to an unlikely rival in which, in the space of only two hours, she saw all she had won slip away.
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.”
