New York Magazine has a longish piece on where Hillary Clinton is after her campaign. A fascinating read. Here's the NYTimes on that article.
These quick notes offer a taste.
Here's the link to the New York Magazine piece. nymag.com
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New York Magazine: What Clinton Won by Losing
By Katharine Q. Seelye
In the new issue of New York magazine, John Heilemann looks at what Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton achieved in her campaign “in spite of losing, and maybe even because of it.”
His view is that she has become “poignantly human” and a “feminist hero,” a role that he says was enhanced by her ill-treatment at the hands of a sexist media. With some relatively candid quotes from Mrs. Clinton, it provides the first serious reflection of how she would like the history of her candidacy to be written.
But first, the news: Mr. Heilemann refers a couple of times to the idea that Mrs. Clinton and her husband think Senator Barack Obama will not win in November.
“It would be hard to overstate the private pessimism that Hillary and Bill Clinton feel about Obama’s general-election prospects,” he writes, though there are no quotations attached.
And later, mulling her future, he writes: “For all the talk of her trying to muscle her way onto the ticket, one senses in her a genuine ambivalence about whether she wants the job. If Obama does offer it, however, she will have no choice but to take it. She is all too aware that if she turned it down and he lost this fall, she would be blamed even more loudly than she will be already, even though in her view his downfall is foreordained, and has nothing to do with her.”
Foreordained? Alas, no elaboration.
But moving right along, here’s the main thesis: “Hillary is today a more resonant, consequential, and potent figure than she has ever been before.”
And there are more tidbits about her husband’s role, including this from her last day on the trail in South Dakota, after Mr. Clinton went on a rant against an article about him in Vanity Fair:
“I ask how Hillary will handle it. ‘She used to get upset, but at this point, it’s been so bad for so long, I think her attitude is, like, Whatever’.”
Mrs. Clinton talks about her anger toward the media — and why she didn’t take up this cause more fully while she was a candidate:
“I didn’t think I was in a position to take it on because it would have looked like it was just about me. And I didn’t think it was just about me. So the only time we took it on was in the thing about Chelsea, which was so far beyond the bounds, I mean, what planet are we living on? But nobody said anything until I made it an issue. So I just want everybody to really think hard about the larger lesson here. I know you can’t take me out of the equation, because I’m in the center of the storm. But it’s much bigger than me. And women know that.”
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