That profile, I felt sure, could not win the White House. She was a brain, a girl, a teacher’s pet. Echoing the private assumption of every Dazed-and-Confused, Freaks-and-Geeks-attuned veteran of America’s secondary-school Breakfast Club I assumed Hillary just wasn’t popular enough to pull it off. Though I supported her presidential bids in 20, I never really thought she could win. She seemed pragmatic, conscientious and hard-working, and I figured everyone could count on her to want to do the right thing for the country. I didn’t like her Iraq War vote, and never longed to sip a Chardonnay with her, tête-à-tête, but I was relieved to see her thrive in public office - especially as Senator. Why hadn’t she known that traditionalists would be incensed by such assertion by a president’s wife? But when she became a politician in her own right, first as New York Senator, then as a 2008 presidential candidate, then as Secretary of State, then as a 2016 presidential candidate, I was delighted for her. Since we came from the same background, more or less, I wondered why she hadn’t intuited the folly of offending conventional women.īlinded by idealism, she put forth a healthcare reform plan and ditched the tacit First Lady program of unobtrusive Kinder– Kirche– Küche duties. When she entered the public eye in the 1990s, as Bill Clinton won the White House, I cringed when she made impolitic gaffes like joking about baking cookies. Since no campaign has ever been more personal than this one, please indulge the digression that follows.Īs an Illinois-born, blonde-bobbed Yalie who grew up in the Midwest and Southwest, and moved to New York in adulthood, I never understood why Hillary shouldn’t be my candidate, even though it was never “in” to endorse her unreservedly. This means a lot to me, on a personal level. And repeat to yourself: Hillary was more popular than Trump. Remember that Trump played the identity card by singling out group after group for derision or threat - Hispanics, African-Americans, Muslims, women, the media. Remember that Hillary drew voters in remarkable numbers, winning the popular vote by a larger margin than nearly any candidate in American history. For every voter in the aftermath of this stomach-churning upset who has blamed Clinton and her campaign for alienating the populace by focusing on unicorns instead of horses (identity politics, they call it), here is an urgent plea: Stop it. Instead, Trump - who is hostile to government and has zero experience of it - is aggressively using the mandate he did not win to undo half a century of social, environmental and diplomatic progress.
Yet this superabundance of preference does not count. Clinton defeated Donald Trump by nearly three million votes. Let’s think for a moment about the fact of Hillary Clinton’s two-percent majority, and the insult of its impotence. The week before the election, The New Yorker began its Comment section with the - in hindsight, crushingly over-optimistic - statement: “On November 8th, barring some astonishment, the people of the United States will, after two hundred and forty years, send a woman to the White House.” The astonishment happened.ĭonald Trump, a bullying, egomaniacal businessman with no impulse control, beat her, with the help of the opaque calculus of the Electoral College - that tilted, tainted, antiquated abacus, devised when our Union was in its infancy - and with the assistance of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine. That is she won the popular vote by some 2.9 million votes, perhaps more.
At this moment, unthinkable a year ago, it’s consoling, if in a bleak and bootless way, to reflect that Hillary Clinton, the most qualified and experienced candidate for the Presidency this country has ever seen, actually did win the race. On Friday, January 6th, eight weeks after our disastrous national election, Congress will meet for the official tally of electoral votes, and Vice President Biden will announce Donald Trump as our President-elect.
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