I know, often Collins approaches things from the standpoint of snark. But that is not what you will encounter when you read Behind Hillary’s Mask, which has the subtitle “How is it possible that we still don’t really know the most famous woman in America?”
She begins by talking about a conversation she had with then Sen. Clinton shortly after the attacks on September 11, 2001:
The conversation was memorable not for the information but for her manner. For all her intensity about the city, Clinton was more relaxed than I’d ever seen her while chatting with a member of the press. She was operating in a new space — for the moment, no one really cared that she was a senator who’d gotten elected from a state she’d never lived in, the survivor of the best-known political sex scandal in American history, the former first lady who ran for office while her husband was still president. The country had temporarily lost interest in celebrities, and she seemed to find her relative insignificance liberating.
Already, you can see the seriousness and depth of this column.
And as she reminds us,
In America, she’s been part of the backdrop of our lives for nearly a quarter of a century. We’re watching a very familiar face making a brand-new mark on history.
Collins writes in depth about Clinton’s Senate campaign, and the famous “listening tour” with which she began that campaign.
There is one paragraph in the section which explains something, and which I want to share and then comment upon:
The thing I remember most about those trips from Oneonta to Cooperstown to Horseheads — besides the tedium — was the intense reaction she got from middle-aged women, who yelled and waved and begged for autographs. They were the ones who remembered what it was like when the newspapers had separate “help wanted” columns for men and women, who needed a male co-signer when they got their first car loans. I suspected that a lot of them, like me, still had credit cards in their husbands’ names because that was just the way things worked when they first began to charge stuff at Macy’s or use American Express.
Collins continues by noting that for many women of a certain age, Clinton’s campaign for the Senate represented the possibility of a second chance, that there was still time for them to have an independent career or path.
Let me digress a bit.
I was born in 1946, making me a few months older than Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and few months younger than Jim Webb. I grew up in an environment where even the very gifted women who were the mothers of my schoolmates rarely had independent careers. My mother was something of an exception. Like many women, she did work with things like PTA, but by the time I was 8 had returned to part-time law practice in the family law form. Because she had become politically active locally, she eventually got a position as an Assistant Attorney General in 1959, a position she held through her death in 1963. But I would be hard put to think of any of the mothers of my friends with a similar high profile PAID position. The mother of one friend did make history as the first female to be President of a synagogue, in this case Larchmont Temple, in the Reform branch of Judaism.
Even years later, there were still problems. In the late 1960s I can remember young women I knew who had trouble renting an apartment if a male did not co-sign for them. And in 1971, on a train that broke down and those of us on it spent 7 hours together in the bar car, I became good friends with a young woman in her late 20s who had already established her own advertising agency at age 25, it was successful, but when she went to get a mortgage to buy a townhouse in Philadelphia was told by the same bank that had her business accounts that she needed a male to co-sign her mortgage. By the way, she pulled her business account and moved it to another bank.
Another thought, going forward. My wife is a very independent woman. She has kept her own name, which used to cause us problems with the IRS when we filed our taxes — one year it took until almost the end of June to get our refund because my Social did not match her last name. This even though we had filed in early February. Since I chose to become a teacher, which I was only able to do because of her changing her plans, she has been the primary (larger salary) breadwinner in our family, with which neither of us have a problem.
While Leaves was very much an early supporter of Obama in the 2008 cycle, she noted even then that for many women her age or older, there would be a great deal of appeal of a Clinton presidency. We saw thought, perhaps through a distorted lens, in the existence of the PUMAs. I think we see it in the fierce loyalty of older women to Clinton this cycle, even before the obvious misogyny of Donald Trump began to get more play.
In the 2008 cycle, Clinton rarely referred to her own ground-breaking status, except in the famous remarks about 18,000,000 cracks in the glass ceiling. This cycle, she has embraced it, to the point that Trump has tried to demean her with his “women’s card” remarks which of course gave Clinton the chance to respond back with her “Deal me in!”
There is a LOT more in this column, far longer than the usual op ed. There are two key paragraphs which lay out what we can expect as this campaign goes forward:
The Republican convention last week made it clear how vicious this campaign is going to be — the only real platform appeared to be the desirability of locking Hillary Clinton up, and she was blamed for everything from ISIS to the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls. Donald Trump painted a picture of a wrecked, emasculated America in a dystopian world created by Obama-Clinton malfeasance. We don’t know yet whether Clinton can counter forcefully with a sunnier vision. What we do know is that she won’t be cowed.
Whatever her defects, she is a candidate with a very long and event-filled history of toughing things out, who finds solace in stupendously hard work and in doing her homework. She’s one of the best-known people on the planet, but she can happily spend a day listening to complaints about watershed pollution or flying halfway around the world to sit through a conference on sustainable development.
As I am writing this, I have earphones in, with Morning Joe on. One of the things I heard is an extension of the remarks President Obama made about Hillary Clinton being the best prepared candidate for the Presidency in history. Someone, it may have been John Heilmann, said the combination of Clinton and Kaine, both of them, are the most qualified ticket based on experience of any set of running mates in history.
For what it is worth, both are known to listen to others. Both have faced defeats on some issues but picked up the pieces, moved forward, and achieved what they could, not giving up. Both have expressed and demonstrated willingness to work with opponents on issues where they could.
I think it fair that the obvious comfort Clinton has with Kaine, demonstrable both in the Miami rally and the joint appearance on 60 Minutes, is because they complement one another well, that he reinforces some of her best instincts.
I think the Collins column is very insightful.
There are other things in the news today well worth writing about, for example the front page story in today’s New York Times by David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth documenting the Russian hack of DNC emails. I will leave it to others to comment on that and other items.
I wanted to be sure that someone pointed clearly at the column by Gail Collins.
Make of it what you will.
Peace.