House of Cards
Hillary Clinton's decision to stand as a candidate in America's next president election comes as no surprise, but plays out like an episode of 'House of Cards' as scheming politicians treat the voters like useful idiots in their battle to win power.
Both the Democrat and the Republican parties are like political dynasties these days as one member of the Clinton or Bush families jockey for position.
So if I had a vote in the forthcoming elections, I would definitely vote for ABHC or ABJB - Anyone But Hillary Clinton or Anyone But Jeb Bush.
Photo - Getty Images
By Janice Turner - The Times
It has begun. Within 24 hours of Hillary Clinton declaring she will run for president, I’ve seen her called a bitch. I’ve read that at 67 — the same age as Ronald Reagan, younger than John McCain — Hillary is too old and that Bill O’Reilly on Fox News believes “there’s got to be a downside to a woman president”.
When Hillary, as Secretary of State, met Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese dissident figurehead expressed her desire to be a “flesh and blood” politician. Hillary warned her that it is not for the faint-hearted. She should know. Her 2008 bid was a son et lumière of sexism: the college jocks heckling “make me a sandwich”, the novelty Clinton nut-crackers shaped like thighs, the South Park skit about a nuke in her vagina.
To a sector of America, Hillary wasn’t a Yale scholar and senator legitimately running for high office but a school ma’am, a shrew, every middle-aged man’s angry, litigious first wife.
Ten months ago, interviewing Clinton in New York, I wondered why she’d go through that hell again. She knew the battle ahead. “Anybody,” she told me, “who gets into the public arena these days knows full well that it’s a brutal, unforgiving environment.” Moreover, she believed criticism had worsened for women with a vile, online judgementalism. Growing up in the 1960s, “there wasn’t the constant holding up of a certain model of what a woman’s body is supposed to look like, and the veiled message that you don’t measure up, that you’re not good enough”.
Of her energy and appetite to campaign, I had no doubt. At that time Clinton was in a political holding pattern: launching her careful, dry memoir, Hard Choices, about her million-mile diplomatic mission, gathering strength, awaiting the birth of her grandchild. But the circus around her was already presidential: the secret service agents whispering into earpieces by the lift, the super-sharp, devoted West Wing-esq young aides, the roses on the table, chosen to match precisely the cerise of her jacket.
Unlike female TV anchors of the same vintage, Hillary has not chopped up her face or starved herself to please a youth-obsessed nation. She is a slightly-built, well-preserved, handsome woman. She looks her age, but without doubt is the fastest-thinking person I’ve interviewed. Neither Sheryl Sandberg, George Osborne nor Condi Rice can rival her synaptic snap, the infinitesimal space between my question ending and the fluent, perfect, nuanced paragraph of her reply.
When I suggested that the image of the president is youthful vibrancy, all that running up the steps of planes, she laughed. “Wear flat shoes, that’s my advice!” she said. “I think you can have individuals of all ages, all backgrounds, all attributes who exhibit energy and those that don’t . . . But I don’t think it’s so much age as how you conduct yourself.”
How should a woman presidential hopeful conduct herself? That has been Clinton’s dilemma. If a man speaks tough, he is strong; a woman is a ball-breaker or — yet again — a bitch. Clinton was “glacial” because she was too clever to suffer fools; a haughty blue stocking as First Lady for preferring health reform to baking cookies. Yet after the famous photo of Barack Obama’s cabinet witnessing the on-screen death of Osama bin Laden, a shocked Hillary, with her hand over her mouth, was judged womanishly weak.
In 2008 she downplayed her feminist credentials and based her run on her intellectual calibre and experience. This time Hillary is standing for women. Her daughter, Chelsea, has already said America is ready for a female president. And outside Hillary’s New York book signing, I met hundreds gagging for her to run. But she doesn’t only attract Manhattan liberals. In 2008, in small-town Ohio, I interviewed socially conservative women disinclined to vote Democrat but who would turn out for her, because Hillary’s appeal is summed up in the slogan on her unofficial merchandise: the Sisterhood of the Pantsuit.
Pantsuit Woman is not a glamour-puss. She is practical, grafting, selfless, no-nonsense: she works an extra job after a sticky divorce, takes a casserole round for a bereaved neighbour, puts her kids’ problems to rights. After decades playing second banana to Bill, enduring his affairs and saving her marriage, Hillary the survivor, is the Pantsuit queen.
Moreover, being Secretary of State, when she was finally given a job worthy of her talents, flying the world, free from her husband’s shadow, made Hillary cool. Bad-ass even. The photo of her in sunglasses on an army transport plane, unsmilingly checking her BlackBerry created the internet meme “Texts from Hillary”. Its message was that Hillary got the job done, told it like it is, didn’t give a damn.
Consequently she has been more playful with her image. Besides “Flotus” and “glass-ceiling cracker” her Twitter biog includes “hair icon”. Besides, the hard, impermeable, quasi-masculine façade is perhaps not her best election mode. In 2008, with her party’s nomination slipping away, exhausted, speaking in a New Hampshire coffee shop, she began to cry. You could hear the tyre screech as women in stationwagons headed for the polls: she won that primary, if not the race.
It is easy to forget, when you meet this burnished, expensively dressed, former First Lady that she was a draper’s daughter from Park Ridge, Illinois, a spectacled swot who won a scholarship. In her first memoir she recalls her awe at sophisticated Yale girls smoking cocktail cigarettes and talking of Europe: she never left the US until she met Bill.
Just before my interview she’d been attacked for saying that she took highly-paid speaking engagements because after they left the White House, she and Bill were “broke”. Can she understand what she calls in her campaign launch video “everyday Americans”?
“Of course, I know how hard life is,” she said fiercely. “Bill and I had student loans. Neither of us was born with some kind of . . . social standing and wealth. We were very fortunate because he was in public life for a long time, but the flip side of it is that we really had to hustle to put together the resources that we needed once we got outside the White House — we couldn’t go to some family estate or some beautiful home. We had to get out there and do it for ourselves.”
The word “hustle” is characteristically frank. Her critics say that she is no valiant outsider, but a tough machine politician, a dynast tainted by her husband’s scandals, Whitewater and Lewinsky, plus her own secret emails in office. They say the Clinton Foundation has links with unpleasant regimes, that far from wishing to constrain neoliberal capitalism she’s too cosy with Wall Street.
Maybe so, but her supporters will counter that no male politician is perfect either, that Hillary Clinton is the best shot at power that women have yet had. Whatever her tawdry wheeler-dealing, Hillary has never deserted her feminist principles. As Secretary of State she argued to leaders across the world who, she recalls, sat rolling their eyes, that girls’ education builds economic development, that women’s rights are human rights.
When we met, I asked her about the legal, and often violent, assaults upon American abortion clinics, and she answered boldly, without consideration for how her views will go down in swing states. “What we see in the US,” she said, “is the turning the clock back on women’s reproductive health and rights, even denying certain forms of contraception, by those minority but determined groups that will never stop doing everything they can to impose their beliefs and values on everybody else.”
Since 2008, feminism has been in the ascendant, yet I’ve just read a discussion about Hillary’s hormones, the likely temperament of the post-menopausal woman, as if oestrogen-depletion can be more dangerous than a surfeit of testosterone. When I asked her if America can elect a grandmother she said: “We’ve had so many grandfathers in the White House that I think for someone to say ‘Well in my mind you’re disqualified because you might be a grandmother’ is just so ridiculous.”
They will say it all the same, because a female president — perhaps more than a black one — threatens the status quo. Angry men will still shout “make me a sandwich” at Hillary Clinton in 2016. But the difference is women, not just in America, but all over the world, are ready to watch her back.
What they say
It has begun. Within 24 hours of Hillary Clinton declaring she will run for president, I’ve seen her called a bitch. I’ve read that at 67 — the same age as Ronald Reagan, younger than John McCain — Hillary is too old and that Bill O’Reilly on Fox News believes “there’s got to be a downside to a woman president”.
When Hillary, as Secretary of State, met Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese dissident figurehead expressed her desire to be a “flesh and blood” politician. Hillary warned her that it is not for the faint-hearted. She should know. Her 2008 bid was a son et lumière of sexism: the college jocks heckling “make me a sandwich”, the novelty Clinton nut-crackers shaped like thighs, the South Park skit about a nuke in her vagina.
To a sector of America, Hillary wasn’t a Yale scholar and senator legitimately running for high office but a school ma’am, a shrew, every middle-aged man’s angry, litigious first wife.
Ten months ago, interviewing Clinton in New York, I wondered why she’d go through that hell again. She knew the battle ahead. “Anybody,” she told me, “who gets into the public arena these days knows full well that it’s a brutal, unforgiving environment.” Moreover, she believed criticism had worsened for women with a vile, online judgementalism. Growing up in the 1960s, “there wasn’t the constant holding up of a certain model of what a woman’s body is supposed to look like, and the veiled message that you don’t measure up, that you’re not good enough”.
Of her energy and appetite to campaign, I had no doubt. At that time Clinton was in a political holding pattern: launching her careful, dry memoir, Hard Choices, about her million-mile diplomatic mission, gathering strength, awaiting the birth of her grandchild. But the circus around her was already presidential: the secret service agents whispering into earpieces by the lift, the super-sharp, devoted West Wing-esq young aides, the roses on the table, chosen to match precisely the cerise of her jacket.
Unlike female TV anchors of the same vintage, Hillary has not chopped up her face or starved herself to please a youth-obsessed nation. She is a slightly-built, well-preserved, handsome woman. She looks her age, but without doubt is the fastest-thinking person I’ve interviewed. Neither Sheryl Sandberg, George Osborne nor Condi Rice can rival her synaptic snap, the infinitesimal space between my question ending and the fluent, perfect, nuanced paragraph of her reply.
When I suggested that the image of the president is youthful vibrancy, all that running up the steps of planes, she laughed. “Wear flat shoes, that’s my advice!” she said. “I think you can have individuals of all ages, all backgrounds, all attributes who exhibit energy and those that don’t . . . But I don’t think it’s so much age as how you conduct yourself.”
How should a woman presidential hopeful conduct herself? That has been Clinton’s dilemma. If a man speaks tough, he is strong; a woman is a ball-breaker or — yet again — a bitch. Clinton was “glacial” because she was too clever to suffer fools; a haughty blue stocking as First Lady for preferring health reform to baking cookies. Yet after the famous photo of Barack Obama’s cabinet witnessing the on-screen death of Osama bin Laden, a shocked Hillary, with her hand over her mouth, was judged womanishly weak.
In 2008 she downplayed her feminist credentials and based her run on her intellectual calibre and experience. This time Hillary is standing for women. Her daughter, Chelsea, has already said America is ready for a female president. And outside Hillary’s New York book signing, I met hundreds gagging for her to run. But she doesn’t only attract Manhattan liberals. In 2008, in small-town Ohio, I interviewed socially conservative women disinclined to vote Democrat but who would turn out for her, because Hillary’s appeal is summed up in the slogan on her unofficial merchandise: the Sisterhood of the Pantsuit.
Pantsuit Woman is not a glamour-puss. She is practical, grafting, selfless, no-nonsense: she works an extra job after a sticky divorce, takes a casserole round for a bereaved neighbour, puts her kids’ problems to rights. After decades playing second banana to Bill, enduring his affairs and saving her marriage, Hillary the survivor, is the Pantsuit queen.
Moreover, being Secretary of State, when she was finally given a job worthy of her talents, flying the world, free from her husband’s shadow, made Hillary cool. Bad-ass even. The photo of her in sunglasses on an army transport plane, unsmilingly checking her BlackBerry created the internet meme “Texts from Hillary”. Its message was that Hillary got the job done, told it like it is, didn’t give a damn.
Consequently she has been more playful with her image. Besides “Flotus” and “glass-ceiling cracker” her Twitter biog includes “hair icon”. Besides, the hard, impermeable, quasi-masculine façade is perhaps not her best election mode. In 2008, with her party’s nomination slipping away, exhausted, speaking in a New Hampshire coffee shop, she began to cry. You could hear the tyre screech as women in stationwagons headed for the polls: she won that primary, if not the race.
It is easy to forget, when you meet this burnished, expensively dressed, former First Lady that she was a draper’s daughter from Park Ridge, Illinois, a spectacled swot who won a scholarship. In her first memoir she recalls her awe at sophisticated Yale girls smoking cocktail cigarettes and talking of Europe: she never left the US until she met Bill.
Just before my interview she’d been attacked for saying that she took highly-paid speaking engagements because after they left the White House, she and Bill were “broke”. Can she understand what she calls in her campaign launch video “everyday Americans”?
“Of course, I know how hard life is,” she said fiercely. “Bill and I had student loans. Neither of us was born with some kind of . . . social standing and wealth. We were very fortunate because he was in public life for a long time, but the flip side of it is that we really had to hustle to put together the resources that we needed once we got outside the White House — we couldn’t go to some family estate or some beautiful home. We had to get out there and do it for ourselves.”
The word “hustle” is characteristically frank. Her critics say that she is no valiant outsider, but a tough machine politician, a dynast tainted by her husband’s scandals, Whitewater and Lewinsky, plus her own secret emails in office. They say the Clinton Foundation has links with unpleasant regimes, that far from wishing to constrain neoliberal capitalism she’s too cosy with Wall Street.
Maybe so, but her supporters will counter that no male politician is perfect either, that Hillary Clinton is the best shot at power that women have yet had. Whatever her tawdry wheeler-dealing, Hillary has never deserted her feminist principles. As Secretary of State she argued to leaders across the world who, she recalls, sat rolling their eyes, that girls’ education builds economic development, that women’s rights are human rights.
When we met, I asked her about the legal, and often violent, assaults upon American abortion clinics, and she answered boldly, without consideration for how her views will go down in swing states. “What we see in the US,” she said, “is the turning the clock back on women’s reproductive health and rights, even denying certain forms of contraception, by those minority but determined groups that will never stop doing everything they can to impose their beliefs and values on everybody else.”
Since 2008, feminism has been in the ascendant, yet I’ve just read a discussion about Hillary’s hormones, the likely temperament of the post-menopausal woman, as if oestrogen-depletion can be more dangerous than a surfeit of testosterone. When I asked her if America can elect a grandmother she said: “We’ve had so many grandfathers in the White House that I think for someone to say ‘Well in my mind you’re disqualified because you might be a grandmother’ is just so ridiculous.”
They will say it all the same, because a female president — perhaps more than a black one — threatens the status quo. Angry men will still shout “make me a sandwich” at Hillary Clinton in 2016. But the difference is women, not just in America, but all over the world, are ready to watch her back.
What they say
“While I was working on those streets watching those folks see their jobs shift overseas, you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board at Wal-Mart.” Barack Obama, on his soon-to-be secretary of state, during the 2008 primary debates
“Mrs Clinton has never been too graceful in her statements . . . When people push boundaries too far, it’s not because they are strong but because they are weak. But maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a woman.” Vladimir Putin, in an interview with the French TV channel TF1, 2014
“I know Hillary Clinton. I served with Hillary Clinton. She does not have the right vision to lead America.” The Republican former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum reacts to her campaign launch on Sunday
“On her watch we have witnessed the rise of Russia, Iran, and Isis. We know that a Hillary Clinton administration would be no different than an Obama administration. Obamacare, amnesty, and the ongoing assault on our constitutional rights would continue.” Texas senator Ted Cruz, a Republican presidential candidate, on the campaign launch
“The more she tries to moderate her image, the more she . . . compounds her exposure as an opportunist.” David Axelrod, a former senior advisor to President Obama in a memo from 2006, revealed in his 2015 memoir
“Hillary Clinton has taken money from countries [where] rape victims are publicly lashed. I would expect Hillary Clinton, if she believes in women’s rights, she should be calling for a boycott of Saudi Arabia. Instead, she’s accepting tens of millions of dollars. It’s a grand hypocrisy.” Republican senator Rand Paul criticises the Clinton Foundation’s funding on NBC’s Meet The Press on Sunday
“Even Nixon didn’t destroy the tapes.” The Republican national committee chairman Reince Priebus criticises Clinton for wiping her server, deleting emails from her personal account, which she also used for official work as secretary of state, 2015
“Hillary’s assessment of the events in Benghazi . . . was undoubtedly shaped by the PTSD she had from escaping snipers in Tuzla, Bosnia.” The conservative blogger Jim Geraghty draws parallels between Clinton’s fictitious account of being fired upon when arriving at Tuzla airport in 1996 and her statements about the 2012 terrorist attack on the US compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2014
“I don’t vote with my vagina. If Elizabeth Warren [US Senator, Mass.] came up, I would go that way. She [Hillary Clinton] lost me when she voted for the war without looking. Look at her sources of funding, Monsanto is in there.” No sisterly love from the actress Susan Sarandon, 2015.
