Half hagiography, half attempt at humanizing Hillary Clinton, Hulu’s four-part eponymous documentary serves as a solid reminder that the former first lady and secretary of state was perhaps the only woman on the planet capable of losing in 2016 to political outsider Donald Trump.
Director Nanette Burnstein tried hard to get both Clintons and their cronies to open up for the camera. Their failure to do so turns Hillary into a festival of everything that made Clinton so uniquely unlikable to the voters who mattered most.
Burnstein juxtaposes Clinton’s 2016 run with the rest of her life up to that point, drawing clear parallels between such struggles as the failure of “Hillarycare” and her husband’s impeachment. All of this is couched in the question of whether a woman can ever be president. And the answer, of course, is that just about any other woman could — just not this one.
A quarter century after Bill Clinton’s election, Hillary and her entire coterie remain dumbfounded that voters didn’t enlist his wife to design a national healthcare overhaul. Two decades after Bill’s impeachment, Hillary and the gang only regret what little transparency and openness they allowed the press during the Whitewater and Lewinsky scandals. It was a strategic error, not a modicum of wholly justified accountability to the electorate.
And three years after it arguably cost her the election, Hillary and company cannot fathom why anyone saw a problem with her using an unprotected, private email server to transmit highly classified State Department documents and to hide her communications from Congress and the public.
Hillary’s political instincts, from start to finish, are simply bad. When the public elected her husband specifically for his moderation, she wanted to nationalize the healthcare system. When the media began to sniff around the Whitewater scandal, rather than welcoming exoneration by the press, she encouraged Bill to remain as secretive as possible, making the appointment of an independent counsel all but inevitable. When given the opportunity to leave her husband after becoming the Democratic hero of the 1998 election, she stayed, surrendering whatever feminist credentials she could have used to catapult herself to global stardom after her stellar “Women’s rights are human rights” speech.
Lots of politicians have awful instincts, and hers, such as the disdain for the press and public accountability, are nothing new. Yet the documentary expertly, if inadvertently, shows how Hillary specifically has spent a career leaning into her foibles to become a caricature of a corrupt politician. The weak spots left her defenseless to then-candidate Trump.
During the 2016 primary, Hillary rightly excoriated Bernie Sanders for failing to work with Republicans, let alone the Democrats with whom he claims to caucus. But Hillary’s notable alliances with Republicans such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham was not in the public’s memory in 2016 — rather, it was her huffing and puffing in front of Trey Gowdy about Benghazi. When she finally won the primary, a feat that even her advisers expressed open doubt about, Clinton made no attempt to understand either the generic Republican voter or Trump’s base in particular. Instead, she obsessed over Trump’s sexism, a move that proved fatal for one simple reason: she is not an ally to women, and women across the country knew it.
Hillary reveals in the documentary that although she chose to advocate for Bill during impeachment and Democrats during the 1998 election, she was still considering whether to leave her husband after the fact. If she had done so, especially in light of the resoundingly credible rape allegation by Juanita Broaddrick compounding his prior misconduct with women, she could probably have stood on her own merits. But Hillary chose to stand by a credibly accused rapist and proven predator. In our bones, women have always felt that her feminism was purely transactional, and later revelations, such as her protection of donor-cum-rapist Harvey Weinstein, only confirmed our suspicions.
Sure, you may believe that Trump is a corrupt authoritarian who disdains accountability from the press and treats women like objects. But for some 30-odd years, the public has known that Hillary is all of these things, even as the media has refused to admit it.
Trump didn’t win the White House because of some astounding policy sell over Hillary. He won after an aberration of a primary season and in a general election in which no one wanted to vote for either candidate. Hence, Hillary won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College thanks to the choices of 100,000 strategically located voters.
Hillary may give Republicans the usual sugar rush of reliving 2016, but it ought to serve as a serious reminder that Trump got really, really lucky last election. This one will be very different.
