Hillary Rodham Clinton must have known that the attention given to her new book would centre not on her own development as a politician but on her relationship with her husband. That’s what everyone wanted to talk about; not details of the political views of a lawyer in a hairband, but details of the sex and the quarrels in the White House. The extracts that were published and the reviews that followed were most curious about those old conundrums — why did she stay with him, does she still love him?
Given how narrow the focus on her book has been, she must now be wondering if she has really done herself the best possible service by revisiting the days of Monica Lewinsky and Kenneth Starr. After all, this book has been touted as the first step in her preparations towards entering the presidential race in 2008. Although her proximity to Bill’s power and charisma may, in her eyes, be her most effective ticket to success, there is still the very real danger that she is simply never going to be able to crawl out from under his shadow.
When she makes her flying visit to the UK next week, she is likely to be gratified by the size of the crowds. But if they are only coming to see the woman who loved Bill, then she is not so much aggrandised as shrunk by association. And even if she tries to dismiss the focus on her marriage as personal stuff that will blow away once she joins the presidential race, she must understand that she is not only overshadowed by Bill’s sexual shenanigans.
The problem is also that she is so heavily implicated in all the other failures and disappointments of the Clinton administration. When she discusses the Whitewater affair in her book the story is so boring and the way she tells it so dull that it is hard for the reader to stay awake. But you do remain aware that she has not provided any particularly convincing explanation as to why crucial records remained hidden for ”a year or two”.
If it is hard for her to brush off the sleaze that has already, fairly or unfairly, accrued to her family, even more undermining is the sense of political compromise that runs throughout her book. As you read it you move from the failure of her ambitious healthcare reforms to her acceptance of Republican legislation that restricted welfare benefits, to her realisation that proposed gun law reform was doomed to fail. Some compromises are forced on her, some chosen,but you do really feel the loss of Hillary’s own political idealism, as she subsides from a spiky, independent-minded lawyer to a smooth-voiced, smooth-haired political wife.
The ability to compromise that she learned at Bill’s side has been put into operation again and again since she arrived in the Senate, where Hillary has disappointed her liberal supporters by refusing to challenge the case Bush made for war with Iraq, and by again deciding to support plans for welfare restrictions.
Given the fact that Hillary Clinton is so weighed down by her political past, is it possible to feel any sense of promise about her future? Up to a point, it is. After all, she would make the most compelling female candidate for the presidency that the United States has ever had. If — wild hope — she succeeded, even if she did so on the back of her marriage to a powerful man, she would send a signal of hope to many women. After all, even in the US, equality in the corridors of power still eludes women. Just as in the UK, this is down to the structures of work and care that militate against equality, but it is also down to the expectations that surround women. To see a woman reaching for such a position, one that most people still assume is out of bounds for women, would at the very least shatter prejudices and offer inspiration; it would be a grand symbolic breakthrough.
Feminists are often uneasy about celebrating the achievements of truly powerful women, dismissing them as individualists who cannot feel solidarity with the powerless. But it is interesting to see that even a power-hungry politician like Hillary Clinton believes that she can pay more than lipservice to the interests of other women. She insists that she will not let go of that straightforward feminist agenda that holds to basic rights such as women’s equality at work, their right to abortion and decent healthcare, their access to childcare and family leave.
So if Hillary Clinton were president she might well do more than offer women a symbolic advance. What’s more, her identification with women’s rights stretches beyond the boundaries of her own country. As Clinton rushed around on his foreign trips, she carved out her own agenda over the years, meeting not just the Queen Noors and Princess Dianas of the world but other women too: peace activists in Northern Ireland, textile workers in Bangladesh, politicians in Tanzania.
Because of this identification with women’s rights she would be, given the chance, a president more used to engagement than confrontation beyond American borders. We could only guess at the changes this would bring to American foreign policy. I’d like to hope that one day Hillary Rodham Clinton might be able to tell another interesting story, one in which the protagonist is not her husband, but herself. – Guardian Unlimited Â