Who Made Hillary?
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A recent topic of conversation in the TAC office has been the strange career of Hillary Clinton, who went from being a president’s wife to becoming a U.S. senator, a serious contender for president, and now secretary of state. Does anybody think Laura Bush or Rosalynn Carter could have a career like that?
Actually, maybe they could. When Rep. Sonny Bono died in a skiing accident, his wife replaced him. Jean Carnahan, wife of the Missouri governor who died in a plane crash in 2000, was appointed to the senate seat Governor Carnahan posthumously won. U.S. politics is dynastic enough that being married to an officeholder apparently is qualification enough for holding office oneself.
But widows are a different matter than Hillary, who in any case has gone much further than most political consorts. She’s not stupid, but then, she’s not conventionally qualified for most of the office she’s held, either. What gives?
She’s a monster of the conservative movement’s creation. Throughout the ’90s, the movement’s mouthpieces put about the idea that Hillary was the power behind the throne — she was, after all, less popular and further to the Left than her husband. This backfired spectacularly: after all, if Hillary could be co-president, doesn’t that make her eminently qualified for the senate, to be president again, or to be the nation’s top diplomat?
And having done at least as much as her feminist fans on the Left to build up the myth of omnicompetent Hillary, what is the Right doing now? Lying down for her: “even firebrand South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint,” Time’s Massimo Calabresi writes, “said he was ‘optimistic and hopeful about [Sen. Clinton's] role as secretary of State.’” If there is a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, it’s evidently the best friend Hillary Clinton could hope to have.
Filed under: Politics
HRC’s political career being built on that of her husband is in a long-standing US tradition. The first 3 female US state governors – Nellie Ross (Wyoming 1925), Ma Ferguson (Texas 1925) and Lurleen Wallace (Alabama 1967) – all came to power on their husband’s coat-tails, They stood for office because their husbands had died, reached term limits or been impeached and convicted.
I think this might be a bit of unrealistic and unnecessary movement bashing. While it would be an apt critique to say that the movement had a good opportunity to stop Hillary by simply utilizing effective tactics and instead 70 year old men ran the exact same political playbook against her repeatedly, this is a bit too… causal and a convenient ‘blowback’ type theory. Several have noted that Hillary wanted to be the VP choice in 92, even supposedly going so far as to throw furniture at Bill when she found out that Gore was to be the nominee. And in 92 they ran as virtual co-presidents, with the argument that you were getting two for the price of one. Hillary’s had plenty of ambition in her own right, and is hardly a simple creation of the conservative movement and its direct mail – but in an ongoing and perpetual critique of the movement is an interesting argument to construct. It’s just not well supported by fact.
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