DOES HILLARY CLINTON STILL BELIEVE?

Personal history is an instrument for everyone, but for politicians most of all, and so the part of Hillary Clinton’s past that she has emphasized in the primaries, to repel the threat of Bernie Sanders from her left, has been her years as a young idealist. The image of Clinton put forward by her campaign has been that of the woman who turned down high-paying corporate jobs to work in the public interest, who conducted undercover investigations in Alabama to see whether local schools were in violation of federal anti-segregation laws, and who, in 1969, delivered a magnificently ambitious Wellesley Class Day address—taking as her subject the project of human living and saying, “The goal of it must be liberation.”

It isn’t only this character, the expansive and idealistic Clinton, whose absence you can feel in the present campaign. There is also the more mature person we saw during her husband’s political ascent, who was more certain than she seems now about where the country was headed and how people’s position could be improved. “Not long ago, on a trip to Arkansas,” Hillary Clinton wrote, in “It Takes a Village,” published in 1996, “I ran into a man whom Bill and I had known years earlier,” a man who had never graduated college and who did odd jobs for a living, and who had recently become a father. “He reminded me that he was quiet and shy by nature, not one to converse much with anybody, let alone an infant.” This story comes in the middle of a chapter dedicated to explaining the research on the early interactions between parents and children, on how much children’s possibilities can be expanded when their parents take some time with them. With these ideas in her head, Clinton gives the man some advice. “I suggested that he and his wife tell their daughter about their experiences during the day, or what they were watching on television, or even the trees, flowers, cars, and buses they could see as they walked down the street.” Running through this scene is the book’s basic feeling: an evangelism for personal betterment, for aspirational living. The man “looked a little uncertain,” Clinton reports,“but he promised to try.” For the full article click here 

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