Hillary Revisited

For a good chunk of this presidential race I really wanted Hillary to just go away. As the Democratic establishment began worrying that their choice – Biden – wasn’t going to win, I started receiving countless emails asking me if I thought Hillary should get into the race. Sadly they didn’t give me a box to fully articulate just how much I did not want her to run again. Clicking on ‘No’ just didn’t suffice, and yet I’d voted for her in 2016. It’s that complicated history that still follows her around.

Currently there’s both a fictional novel imaging Hillary not marrying Bill Clinton and a four-part documentary that gained quite a bit of air-time earlier this year because of one comment she made about no one in the Senate liking Bernie Sanders. Initially I wasn’t interested in either piece. What more does anyone need to find out about Hillary by now?

I’m still not interested in reading the novel, feeling that I’ve wasted too much of my own brain energy over the years wondering what would have happened to me if I’d gone to a different college, moved to a different city, or not stayed at so many toxic jobs for way too long, and countless other bad decisions made over the years. Ultimately I decided it was a waste of time; all I could do was try to learn from my mistakes and do better. I definitely don’t have the time to spare thinking about Hillary without Bill.

Surprisingly I did end up watching the documentary series and feel changed by it. Even though I was in college when Bill first ran for president and Hillary became the lightning rod she still is I really hadn’t paid her that much attention then or thought about how she became who she is. At the time I appreciated that she and Bill were way younger than my parents, and the past two presidents, and I liked that she a job and an opinion on just about everything.

It was at the end of his first term and the countless drama and pseudo-scandals that had turned me off so much that I hadn’t bothered to register to vote after moving across the river from Northern Kentucky to Ohio. I didn’t want Dole as president, but I felt uncomfortable supporting the Clintons.

When Hillary ran for president in 2008, time had passed and I wanted to support her. I remember being a teenager in 1984 when Geraldine Ferraro was chosen as Walter Mondale’s running mate. My father, who’d never voted in his life or even registered to vote, did both – in order to vote against a woman as vice president. My mother had laughed about it and tried to make light of it in order to create an uneasy peace in the house. I knew it was a lousy thing for a man to do, especially one with four daughters, and it was one more thing I never forgave him for. That said, I just couldn’t support Hillary then.

At the time I was back in Kentucky, registered as an independent, so I didn’t vote in the primary. And obviously Obama ultimately won the nomination and presidency. In 2016, she resonated even less with me, but the fear of Trump was too great to ignore.

Perhaps it’s these three years under the Trump tyranny coupled with her being somewhat out of the public eye, or at least off my radar, which allowed me to take the documentary in more fully. I was still annoyed at her Bernie comment, but what really struck me was thinking about the kind of person she was in the times and locations she lived. She seemed to be clearly a person first ahead of her time, which caused her problems, and then perhaps over years of being told countless times that people didn't like her because of her views and her clothes and her looks, that she softened, which also caused her problems. It really does seem that no matter what she does she can never win. That I can relate to.

I think many of us feel that no matter what we do, or how we try to conform, that we’ll never fit in. It’s as if we are either here on Earth at the wrong time or in some parallel universe. Obviously Hillary was tougher and more disciplined than I was, managing to both survive and somehow thrive in impossible situations. I’m glad this year is not a Hillary-Trump rematch, but I do think she’s owed a lot, especially by women, for all she’s accomplished over the years, not just her personal achievements, but what she made possible for all of us who knew having a woman in the Oval Office was the right thing.