New York Times columnist David Brooks suggested this week that Hillary Clinton is unpopular with voters because she is too professional, and she doesn’t set aside enough time to have fun.
With a 57 percent disapproval rating, national polling shows Clinton is about as as unpopular with voters as Donald Trump.
A recent New York Times/CBS News poll also showed a majority of voters don’t think the former secretary of state shares their values, and an even larger number said they believe she is generally untrustworthy.
This is strange, Brooks suggested, considering that it wasn’t too long ago, when she served at the State Department, that Clinton polled pretty well.
The other confusing thing about Clinton’s numbers, he continued, is that they make no sense considering “she’s dedicated herself to public service.”
“But what exactly do so many have against her?” he asked. Brooks then offered an explanation for what’s happening.
“Can you tell me what Hillary Clinton does for fun? We know what Obama does for fun — golf, basketball, etc. We know, unfortunately, what Trump does for fun,” he wrote.
“But when people talk about Clinton, they tend to talk of her exclusively in professional terms. For example, on Nov. 16, 2015, Peter D. Hart conducted a focus group on Clinton. Nearly every assessment had to do with on-the-job performance. She was ‘multitask-oriented’ or ‘organized’ or ‘deceptive.'”
Clinton, he concluded, gives off the appearance that she’s married to her work.
“Her husband is her co-politician. Her daughter works at the Clinton Foundation. Her friendships appear to have been formed at networking gatherings reserved for the extremely successful,” he wrote. “People who work closely with her adore her and say she is warm and caring. But it’s hard from the outside to think of any non-career or pre-career aspect to her life. Except for a few grandma references, she presents herself as a resume and policy brief.”
Her unpopularity, then, is the unpopularity associated with being a “workaholic.”
There’s a lesson to be learned here, he noted: One cannot be all work and no play.
“Even a socially good vocation can swallow you up and make you lose a sense of your own voice. Maybe it’s doubly important that people with fulfilling vocations develop, and be seen to develop, sanctuaries outside them: in play, solitude, family, faith, hobbies and leisure,” Brooks concluded. “Even successful lives need these sanctuaries — in order to be a real person instead of just a productive one. It appears that we don’t really trust candidates who do not show us theirs.”
