Hillary Clinton's personality deficit disorder: Column
Windsor Mann
Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images
Hillary Clinton at a book event in 2014 in Washington, D.C.
Like her last book, Hillary Clinton’s political career has been long and tedious, with few, if any, stimulating parts. Because her recent past is uninspiring, Clinton is now showcasing her distant past — the era before anyone had heard of her.
“Americans don’t know the first 35 years of her life. And that’s not what happens with most candidates,” said Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s communications director. “They don’t emerge on the national scene without you understanding where they came from. So we thought it was important: Let’s go all the way back to what originally motivated her.”
Needless to say, if the best part of your political career occurred before your political career, there may be a problem with your political career. Such is the case with Clinton’s. According to a new Gallup poll, more voters view her unfavorably than favorably, giving Clinton her worst net favorable score since 2007.
The same woman who deletedthousands of “personal” emails is now going out of her way to share details about her life, for the simple reason that everything else she has attempted — listening tours, policy speeches, other kinds of speeches, hiding from the press, going to Chipotle, being a woman — has failed to galvanize prospective voters.
As in 2008, Clinton entered the 2016 presidential race hoping to win on account of her name or, failing that, her gender. Having failed to excite voters by simply existing, she now hopes to woo them with her personality, by telling them stuff they neither want nor need to hear.
A few weeks ago, at a rally in Hanover, N.H., Clinton mentioned that she once had a blind date at Dartmouth. “She is trying to give out more details like that,” according to The New York Times.
The details are far from sensational. When talking about climate change in Iowa, Clinton remarked, “I’m just a grandmother with two eyes and a brain.”
In a recent economic speech, she reminisced about “watching my father sweat over the printing table in his small fabric shop in Chicago.” I suppose Americans are better informed knowing that her father’s fabric shop was small and located in Chicago, although it would have been helpful to hear more about his sweating habits.
Many people think this personality-centric approach will work. According to the Los Angeles Times, “there is value in Clinton sharing more about her personal story.” Mo Elleithee, a Democratic strategist who served as a spokesman during Clinton’s first presidential campaign, said his former boss erred in 2008 by “not opening up and letting people see who she was.” If only she had talked more about her blind dates, her eyes and her father’s fabric shop, she might have won the primary.
This is wishful thinking. If Clinton’s personality is her chief asset, she’s in trouble. To a lot of people, she comes across as neither affable nor interesting nor honest.
She has reinforced this impression over the years, often when trying to combat it. As First Lady, she wrote a syndicated newspaper column called “Talking It Over.” Its purpose was to dispell her acrimonious image, to exhibit her thoughts and personality in the most anodyne and hence most appealing way possible. Its singular achievement is that it has been forgotten. In this respect, it was a roaring success.
Clinton the columnist expounded on such topics as Calvin Klein ads, family vacations, her inability to speak Mongolian and her breasts. “I remember lying in bed a few days after Chelsea’s birth,” she wrote in 1995, “when I was still getting accustomed to breast-feeding.”
When she didn’t bore readers, she tested their credulity. On the cusp of her 20th wedding anniversary, she wrote, “I know it sounds corny, but we love each other more now than when we married.”
If her personal emails included tidbits like these, she was right to delete them.
Even if Clinton were well liked, that would not solve her most fundamental problem, which is that she is well known. People get tired of even things they like. That is why popular TV shows get cancelled, why bands that used to fill auditoriums no longer do, and why more people would rather listen to Bernie Sanders and Vanilla Ice than to Hillary Clinton.
Windsor Mann is the editor of The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism.
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