Delusional, shirty, and pompous. Why Hillary is not qualified for high office

BARACK OBAMA made only one nasty crack at Hillary Clinton during their contest for the American Presidency.

She made a self-pitying comment about possibly not being likeable that annoyed him.

“You’re likeable enough, Hillary,” he said, terse contempt in his tone. It was the wrong thing to say at the time, was the view. In fact, it was the wrong thing to say at any time because it was and is untrue. Hillary Clinton was not likeable enough to win the nomination for the Presidential election first time around.

She hasn’t got any more likeable since, as proven by recent outings promoting her latest book. And that matters, at two levels.

Likeability is like a gateway drug. If you can’t get potential customers hooked on it, it’s unlikely they’ll work up to a lifelong commitment to what you deal in. The folks here and in the US who select political candidates for particular elections, necessarily start with likeability as a base qualification, reasoning that if they can hook voters on that early on, the voters will move up the chain to a full appreciation of the candidate’s policy genius.

Likeability is based on a bunch of traits, many of them inborn. Optimism is a likeable quality, for example, as is the instinct to find other people interesting.

Being funny without being cruel is likeable, and so to is the capacity to gauge and respond to the mood of a group. Self-deprecation is likeable, at least in the famous and successful. (To be self-deprecatory if you’re an under-achieving non-entity is kind of pointless.) Bill Clinton was likeable from the outset. Hillary Clinton was not.

The notable absence of likeability from her emotional palette was never addressed at that time, possibly because Bill was so obviously the one with electoral potential, but also, perhaps, because Hillary Clinton is impatient with what she regards as peripheral, trivial aspects of politics.

But what makes someone unlikeable, over the long term, are not trivialities, but rather, the outward and visible manifestations of serious character flaws. Such flaws are ineradicable by training or coaching. If a personal communications trainer had been applied to Hillary 30 or more years ago, for example, she would now score lower on unlikeability ratings (because it’s possible to reduce instances of irritating behaviours like failure to listen or watch someone when talking with them) but would be unlikely to have markedly improved in likeability, because the characteristics that make Hillary hard to love cannot be trained out of someone. And, interestingly, they are also the characteristics which should rule her out of consideration for the presidency.

The first of several traits making her unlikeable is that she doesn’t understand the truth. She refers to herself and her daughter landing in a warzone and running in a crouch through a hail of bullets. Didn’t happen. She refers in her first book to her visit to Dublin causing an event it didn’t cause. She says she and Bill were “dead broke” when they left the White House. They had a base income of $400,000 a year and the pretty sure prospects of millions of dollars in advances on books.

Making out to have been shot at when you weren’t, to have been causative when you weren’t, and broke when you weren’t doesn’t make you likeable and is neither peripheral nor trivial. The false claims matter and serve as disqualifiers for high office, not least because Ms Clinton wasn’t winging it when she articulated any one of the three. They weren’t examples of her taking a punt in the expectation that they wouldn’t be noticed. She genuinely believed all three claims. That’s a serious delusional issue for a prospective president. The delusion fits within a wider self-definition which is straight-up daft, but which is based on the belief that, since she’s not the kind of person who would tell lies, then what she says must be the truth and anybody raising a question about it must be evil and requires immediate extermination.

That projection of evil onto anybody who does not buy the totality of her self-presentation is inconsistent with her book’s lectures about the need for compromise. It’s also undesirable in an American president that her finger is always on the nuclear button. Anyone who looks crooked at her or Bill is part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. The woman her husband chose to have sex with when he was president is attacked as a “narcissistic looney tunes.” Even on a media tour to promote her latest book, she goes ballistic if even mildly crossed.

Take a likeable author into a TV studio and they glow like a lamp: Oh. My. God. They’re on a broadcasting network that takes books and writers seriously. Said likeable author, if asked about being paid $250,000 a pop for making speeches, will laugh and wonder aloud at their own luck. They will then, perhaps, mention a recurring theme in those speeches and start talking about something they believe in and want to make interesting to the viewers so they, too may believe in it. Last week, with ABC’s Diane Sawyer, Hillary Clinton did none of the above. Instead, she got shirty, defensive and pompous, claiming to have “struggled” financially after leaving the White House, trying to find the mortgages (plural) for houses (plural). Her perception of financial struggle, in that one paragraph, diverged in a crude and painful way from the perception of the overwhelming bulk of impoverished Americans. Apart from the multi-million dollar earnings Bill and she made from books and which would not be available to the ordinary people she prides herself on representing, she had the advantage of a loan, worth in excess of a million euro, from a rich friend, to facilitate one of the house purchases.

SO FAR, so bad. But within days, she had the opportunity to set it all right, in a soft interview on another network, conducted by a former Clinton Chief of Staff.

“That may not have been the most artful way of saying that Bill and I have gone through a lot of different phases in our lives,” Hillary said, in that second interview, about her earlier claim to have been “dead broke”. Despite advance preparation, the answer has nothing to do with either the original question or the original duff answer she is being given a chance to retrospectively fix. It uses the word “artful” which is not in common usage, to suggest, perhaps, that the most sophisticated political campaigner in recent history is artless. Instead of saying, as honest people do, “I made a complete mess of that,” she used a convoluted conditional clause (“may not have been the most artful”) which proves she can neither accept she was in the wrong or apologise for it.

A potential Commander in Chief who, in a moment of pleasant self-promotion, cannot find the right response to a simple past issue is unlikely, in a moment of acute pressure, to find the right response to a complex future crisis.