THE BIG READ: Hillary Clinton is steeling herself for presidential battle
Hillary Clinton is preparing to enter the US presidential race in a fanfare of publicity. It is a race she can win because of who she is or lose because of who she is.
This is someone who can at once appear charming or arrogant, at once disciplined or controlling, all of which might be acceptable, even laudable, to voters if she were male.
But when the female factor is thrown in this will be an uphill battle for Hillary Clinton unless two things happen—she crafts the right message and presents it with grace as well as guts.
It’s a big ask. But I have seen her do it before when she transitioned from first lady to senator, and then to secretary of state for the man who denied her the presidency last time round.
She is also taking the time to prepare the ground better this time and have a more focused team in place than in 2008. This is evidenced by the fact that while she had been expected to enter the fray in April she is now considering waiting until July, though she may announce an exploratory committee in the coming weeks.
Americans love to reinvent themselves and Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is no exception. She has been doing it most of her life. Indeed, she began her political life not as a Democrat but as a Republican, campaigning for Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater in 1964.
But four years later, at the age of 21, she attended an event in Chicago that would have a profound effect on the course of her political and personal life. That event was an impassioned speech by civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
Soon after hearing King she made two crucial decisions—she decided to focus on some form of public service and to become a Democrat.
One year later, in 1969, she graduated from Wellesley College and went on to Yale Law School, where she met the man who would become her husband within six years, Bill Clinton. She graduated with honours in 1973. By then Democratic politics had become a key part of her life and she worked for the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern.
In the spring of 1974, as the Watergate scandal was engulfing President Richard Nixon, Hillary Rodham made another decision, one that would forever sour her relations with some Resion, one that would forever sour her relations with some Republicans—she travelled to Washington to became a member of the presidential impeachment inquiry staff.
In August that year Nixon resigned in disgrace. Hillary Rodham also left town, travelling south to Bill Clinton’s home state to become a faculty member of the University Of Arkansas Law School in Fayetteville, where Bill Clinton was also teaching.
One year later, on October 11, 1975, two weeks before her 28th birthday, she married her long-time boyfriend. Five years later Bill and Hillary’s daughter, Chelsea Victoria, was born.
With Bill Clinton now governor of Arkansas, Hillary went on to be first lady of the state for a dozen years, from 1979 to 1981 and again from 1983 to 1992. During that time, tapping her legal background, she chaired the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee, co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, and served on the boards of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital, Legal Services and the Children’s Defense Fund.
She was a leading advocate for children’s rights during those years and was named one of the 100 most powerful lawyers in the United States.
In 1992, her husband was elected president and both Clintons set out for Washington for what would become eight turbulent years, during which their relationship teetered on the brink as the Lewinsky scandal embroiled her husband and threatened to derail his presidency—20 years after his wife had helped to derail that of Richard Nixon.
It was during these momentous years that I first met Hillary Clinton while working as a reporter with Reuters in Washington. Over subsequent meetings I discovered a side of her that belied her steely public image.
It was clear that she believed politics was a force for good and cared deeply about women’s rights around the world. “Politics is about trying to make people’s lives better, especially women’s lives,” she told me during her successful campaign in 2000 for the US senate.
That is the side of Clinton that will have to emerge again if she is to succeed in her expected presidential bid. This time there will be no Barack Obama waiting in the wings and she should have sufficient steel to handle the Republican machine. But what may be more difficult than demonstrating her steel to voters will be demonstrating her values.
She traces many of these values back to her mother, Dorothy Rodham. Hillary Rodham’s life began on October 26, 1947, and it could have very nearly ended two years later were it not for her uncle Russell.
Her father’s brother Russell was an unlikely hero. He had gone from being the “golden boy” of the family to a tragic figure.
He excelled in academics and athletics, Hillary says in her memoir Living History.
He became a doctor, served in the US Army, married and had a daughter. But then, in 1948, he fell into a debilitating depression.
She describes how tragedy struck: “My grandparents asked my father to come home to help Russell. Shortly after my dad arrived, Russell tried to kill himself.
My father found him hanging in the attic and cut him down. He brought Russell back to Chicago to live with us.” Hillary was about nine months old.
At this time, the Rodhams lived in a one-bedroom apartment, so Russell slept on a couch in the living room. During the day, he went for psychiatric help to the Veteran’s Administration Hospital. Hillary remembers him as a handsome man.
She also remembers that without Russell’s quick thinking and alert action she might have suffered serious injury or even died.
One day when she was about two, Hillary found a Coke bottle and raised it to her head. It had been left by workmen and was full of turpentine. The fumes overwhelmed her. She felt very drowsy and could have drifted quickly into a coma. But Russell found her and acted fast. He quickly induced vomiting and rushed her to the hospital emergency room. A short time later he gave up medicine and always joked that Hillary was his last patient.
About a dozen years later, in 1962, Russell died in Chicago in a fire caused by a burning cigarette. “I felt so sorry for my father, who had tried for years to keep Russell alive,” Hillary says.
Her father, Hugh Rodham, the son of Welsh immigrants, was gruff, tough and authoritarian. She describes him as “always strict”. But he was much harder on her two brothers than on her, she says, and “Grandpa Rodham often intervened on their behalf.”
But her father also instilled in her a powerful belief and one that she would steadfastly embrace throughout her life—that girls should have the same opportunities and chances to fulfil their ambitions as boys.
While her father was harsh and her mother nurturing, both parents played crucial roles in her life. “(They) imparted in their children,” wrote Carl Bernstein in A Woman in Charge, “a pervasive sense of family and love for one another that in Hillary’s case is of singular importance.”
But it was the story of her mother, Dorothy, which seems to have inspired Hillary most. “I’m still amazed at how my mother emerged from her lonely early life as such an affectionate and level-headed woman,” Hillary recalls in Living History.
Her mother was born in Chicago in 1919 and was effectively abandoned by her parents at the age of three or four. “My maternal grandparents were certainly not ready for parenthood,” Hillary says simply and relates how Dorothy was left “all day for days on end with a meal ticket to use at a restaurant.”
Dorothy’s sister, Isablle, was born in 1924. Three years later their parents divorced. Their father was given custody of the girls but he turned out to be unwilling or unable to look after them and sent them off unsupervised to fend for themselves on a four-day train journey across the United States to their paternal grandparents in California.
“On the four-day journey, eight-year-old Dorothy was in charge of her three- year-old sister,” Hillary recalls. Dorothy stayed in California for 10 years, never once seeing her mother and rarely seeing her father, while her grandmother, Emma, frequently meted out severe punishment.
“One Halloween when she caught my mother trick-or-treating with school friends, Emma decided to confine her to her room for an entire year except for the hours she was in school,” Hillary writes.
By the time Dorothy turned 14, she could no longer bear life in her grandmother’s house. She escaped and managed to find work as a mother’s helper in return for a room and board and three dollars a week. She also got through high school. After finishing high school, she moved back to Chicago, where some years afterwards she met and married Hugh Rodham in 1942. Five years later, Hillary was born.
Dorothy pushed her children to stand up for themselves, Hillary says. Once, when Hillary was four, she went home in tears after a neighbourhood girl had bullied her. “You have to face things and show them you’re not afraid,” her mother told her. If she was hit again, “hit her back,” her mother advised. And Hillary did.
Years later, as a young student at Wellesley College, Hillary called home to express doubts about her ability to stay on and compete. “You can’t quit,” Hillary quoted her mother as telling her. “You’ve got to see through what you’ve started.”
And that is just what Hillary Clinton looks set to do now as she prepares to do battle once more for the US presidency—but this time without her mother at her side as she was in 2008 when Hillary bowed out of the race. Dorothy Rodham died in November 1, 2011, at the age of 92, having seen her daughter become US first lady, US senator and US secretary of state.
And now Hillary Clinton will need much of the resilience and steel she has inherited from her mother as she prepares to enter the presidential fray. The Republicans may look divided now but once they choose their standard bearer, they will be united, disciplined and fired up behind their candidate.
But first there will be the primary battles for the presidential hopefuls in both parties. Clinton should emerge unscathed if challenged by Democrats like Maryland’s former governor, Irish-American Martin O’Malley, who told me in an interview for the Irish Examiner last year that he is considering a White House bid.
There is also talk of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren running, but insiders say that is unlikely. In fact, it seems to be Republicans who are pushing a Warren candidacy more than Democrats. They would relish a battle between Warren and Clinton that could damage Clinton and deplete her much needed election funds. One of those Republican presidential hopefuls talking up a Warren challenge to Clinton has been former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.
“Please give us Elizabeth Warren,” he has declared. “Please, God, let us have Elizabeth Warren.”
But if Hillary does end up facing a challenger in the Democratic primaries, it may be no bad thing. It would kill the notion of a coronation, toughen her up, hone her message and keep her team on their toes.
Her Republican foe will also emerge toughened up from a crowded field of challengers. Among them are likely to be Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. Of these, Jeb Bush is seen as possibly posing the greatest danger to Clinton.
With a father and brother as former presidents, he would have a formidable political and fundraising machine. He would also appeal to the crucial Latino bloc, so central to President Obama’s White House victories. His wife, Columba, is Mexican and Jeb speaks fluent Spanish. He is also seen as favouring immigration reform, though that won’t make him very popular with the Republican base and its Tea Party allies.
But in addition to facing an undoubtedly strong Republican candidate like Bush after their primaries, Hillary Clinton will have two other, even more powerful, foes to contend with. They are the Koch brothers with enough money, some suggest darkly, to try to buy the US presidency.
Similar accusations have surfaced before against other well-heeled Republican backers and Democratic backers like George Soros but none have quite the buying power of the multi-billionaire Kochs. If they were to row in behind Jeb Bush, for example, what may emerge might well be an unstoppable force in the battle for the White House.
Charles and David Koch, who are also big Tea Party supporters and may thus be initially cool towards Bush, are estimated to be worth over $40 billion each. It emerged recently that they have pledged to spend nearly one billion dollars on the 2016 presidential race. That’s close to the total amount of spending by Barack Obama ($1.123 billion) and Mitt Romney ($1,019 billion) in 2012 in what was then the most expensive ever US presidential race.
When told by Politico, the political news website, about the amount the Kochs are ready to spend on the 2016 campaign, Mark McKinnon, a Republican operative who has worked to reduce the role of money in politics, quipped: “For that kind of money, you could buy yourself a president. Oh, right. That’s the point.”
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) released an email to their supporters after news of the Koch billion-dollar spending plan emerged. “Let them know they can’t buy your commitment, they can’t buy your energy, they can’t buy your vote,” the email declared.
Some Democrats, however, are not so sure that a Koch-Republican alliance could deal a potentially fatal blow to Hillary Clinton.For one thing, they say, it could have the effect of firing up the Democratic base.
It could also help to fatten up the Democratic coffers. “I may be a dreamer,” says Stella O’Leary, President of the Irish-American Democrats lobby group and a long-time friend of Hillary Clinton, “but I believe that Hillary Clinton can outdo the Koch brothers in raising money.
“My hunch is that Hillary, including the Super Pacs [political action committees] that organise for her, will raise two billion dollars.” And she may be right, because O’Leary is certainly no dreamer—she was a prime mover behind Clinton’s successful New York senate bid in 2000.
Her comments on a possible Bush-Clinton match-up were also forthright. “I think the DNC would welcome a Bush candidacy since that would neutralise the age and elitist arguments against Hillary,” she told me. “I also think there’s frustration in the Republican Party that they do not have a candidate as qualified as Hillary.”
But another problem for Clinton that is harder to gauge is the effect of the gender factor. Like Obama (inset below) and race, she may think it best to play it down. But that won’t make it go away.
The depth of racism that has emerged against Obama has shocked many Americans, who believed his election and re-election had neutralised the race issue. But we know now that the country has a long road to travel before that happens, and likewise with sexism.
It would be naïve, therefore, to expect white males to flock to the Clinton camp, especially when the alternative may be a relatively moderate Republican who looks like themselves.
Alluding to the gender issue when she bowed out of the 2008 race, Clinton told her supporters: “You can be so proud that from now on it will be unremarkable for a woman to win primary state victories, unremarkable to have a woman in a close race to be our nominee, unremarkable to think that a woman can be the President of the United States. And that is truly remarkable.”
Perhaps, but winning the Democratic nomination is one thing. For a female candidate, however strong, to garner enough votes right across an essentially conservative country to win the White House is going to be a challenge of historical proportions.
Elections have also shown that it is very difficult for one party to secure three terms in-a-row in the White House. Republicans managed it back in 1988 when George Bush senior defeated a weak Democrat Michael Dukakis.
Against that, if Republicans, who now control both houses of Congress, are seen as being continually mired in their own ideological battles and stalling political progress, voters could see the need for a Democrat in the White House to keep Republicans in line. Indeed, if Obama can demonstrate this point he will greatly strengthen Hillary’s hand in the meantime.
But the Clinton-Obama nexus may be problematic in other ways for her because she will need to show voters that her policies would herald a change from those of an increasingly unpopular Obama. “Simple,” opines James Carville, who helped craft Bill Clinton’s presidential victories. “She’s not Obama. She can say, ‘Look, I ran against Barack in 2008.’ ” And perhaps that will work, but another weakness in her candidacy may be the fact she has been a senator because White House elections have also shown that it tends to be far easier for a governor to tout a message of change and get elected president than it is for a senator closely associated with the cesspool of Washington politics.
Still, I believe little of that will matter too much as long as Clinton gets her message watertight and stays on message.
Though she has yet to reveal a detailed policy agenda, she has already been stressing the urgent need to deal with wealth inequality. The US economy may be improving but, as with many families in Ireland, little of that improvement is being felt so far in the middle class.
So her message will have to centre around a clear plan to address this. Indeed, she might be well advised to tweak her husband’s winning presidential election slogan “It’s the economy, stupid!” and declare: “It’s the middle class, stupid!”
For his part, her possible opponent Jeb Bush may be hoping that voters will have long forgotten a different kind of slogan that grew out of his mother’s infamous comment about that political dynasty two years ago.
When asked whether Jeb might seek the presidency in 2016, Mrs Bush told NBC: “We’ve had enough Bushes.”
Then again, Hillary Clinton may also be hoping that voters won’t be harbouring similar sentiments about the Clintons.
The Possible Challengers
