HILLARY
A Biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton
Karen Blumenthal
Bloomsbury
433 pages; Rs 599
To her right, Donald Trump calls her "Crooked Hillary". To her left, Senator Bernie Sanders does everything to back up that characterisation but to use that exact phrase. Many - perhaps a majority - of the general public distrusts her; the radical wing of her own party claims that a Trump victory is barely different from her being in office; and most moderate Republicans are more willing to support Mr Trump even distrusting him completely, than to see her in the White House.
Yet Hillary Rodham Clinton soldiers on. In the press and on social media, the determination of a woman, nearly 70, to press on in spite of such opprobrium is seen not as creditable, but as another black mark - "ambition", which apparently only female presidential candidates are not supposed to have. Ms Clinton has been in the public eye so long, in fact, that few bother to even consider what may have shaped her. Few would be interested in knowing if there's anything more to her than the cliches - corrupt, ambitious, artificial, slippery, cold.
But if you do happen to be interested, you could do worse than pick up Karen Blumenthal's Hillary. Ms Blumenthal is a writer of young adult fiction, and this biography is written, I suspect, with younger readers in mind. To my mind that is, in fact, what makes it so powerful. Given that it has been written with the care for readability that marks young adult books, you can read the entire thing in a few hours. And that's crucial: because, then, two things really come through: the tiresome sameness to the attacks that have been launched at Ms Clinton for over 40 years, and the degree to which she has smoothened out her rough edges in response. If she comes across as "artificial" to history-despising, "authenticity"-seeking millennials, it's because few women could have survived in politics for 40 years without tutoring themselves towards inoffensiveness.
Is Ms Clinton "artificial", "inauthentic", changing in order to satisfy political ambition? Perhaps. But consider where and what that emerges from. When Bill Clinton was elected governor of Arksansas for the first time, in 1979 - America's youngest governor in two generations - the New York Times dismissed his wife as "an ardent feminist" and noted dryly that she would "keep her maiden name". The Hillary Rodham of those years is unrecognisable - unmade-up, with her natural frizzy hair over giant, thick glasses. Her "unsuitability" as First Lady became a political issue, Ms Blumenthal writes. Mr Clinton failed to be re-elected. Hillary Rodham's response? "It was more important for Bill to be governor again than for me to keep my maiden name". She became Hillary Clinton, dyed and straightened her hair, put on contacts and make-up. Artificial? Perhaps. But once you know where such artifice comes from, is it so easy to condemn?
Ms Clinton's entire career, as this book points out, has been rife with episodes of brutal criticism that have forced her to present a slightly different face than she had before. When, in Bill Clinton's first race for president, she got attacked for saying she "could have stayed home and baked cookies", there was no way she could defend her record as the bread-winner in the Clinton household. Instead, she had to enter a cookie bake-off with Barbara Bush in a women's magazine.
Again: When, a year or so into Mr Clinton's presidency - and shortly after her father died - she gave a series of speeches arguing for a kinder, more empathetic politics - "the politics of meaning" - Ms Blumenthal outlines the vicious response she received. Time magazine put her on the cover, and asked: "The politics of what?" The New York Times sarcastically called her "Saint Hillary". (One of the interesting things about this biography is it inadvertently reveals how the Times, which even today cannot write a single story about Ms Clinton without mentioning her e-mail problems, has been on her case for 40 years.) Naturally, a woman asking for a more introspective and kinder politics became the subject of mockery. If today she appears harder than her peers, should we be that surprised?
The accusations of corruption have followed her, too. She made "too much money" when playing the commodity markets in 1978-9, for example - no matter that the close friend who traded for her did well too, as did the broader market. That few corruption allegations stuck to Mr Clinton, in comparison, is not surprising. After all, for more than 30 of their 40-plus years together, she has been the principal bread-winner; and Ms Blumenthal brings out how very often she had to sacrifice her own preferences to the cause of keeping the family finances sorted. Today, when she is attacked for being overpaid for speeches at Goldman Sachs - has anyone asked how much other people were being paid for those speeches? - this history, too, seems relevant.
It is not surprising, perhaps, that Ms Clinton does worse with young people than those who lived through the 1990s. As Mr Blumenthal documents, many of the accusations she's dealing with still were dreamed up the Republican attack machine in that decade; those who aren't interested in seeing where they came from are more likely to believe them unthinkingly. She seemed to be a lightning-rod for the worst kind of open sexism, in and out of the media; and since today we live in a world that likes to think sexism is no longer a problem, we don't even see how it may have shaped her. Of course sexism is no longer a problem: Senator Sanders can shout every sentence, and not be called shrill or hysterical; Mr Trump can be unhinged and vacillating, and not called deranged or flighty.
Ms Clinton is a terrible politician. But if you think she's "unlikeable", or "artificial", or any such thing, you have a duty to yourself to pick up a book like Ms Blumenthal's, and find out why. And you might discover one more thing - that Ms Clinton's she's a terrible a politician in all ways but one: she keeps on going. That, to my mind, is a virtue that triumphs over most of the rest.
