Rebecca Traister: A Hot Mess for Hillary

[portlander23]

Rebecca Traister: A Hot Mess for Hillary

Elle
Rebecca Traister

A Hot Mess for Hillary
Why I'm always on her side, even when I can't stand her.

I was in Washington, DC, where I'd traveled, with my 10-week-old baby, to attend the thirtieth-anniversary convention of EMILY's List, the group dedicated to electing Democratic pro-choice women. It was a gathering of the most powerful and, in many cases, most thrilling women in American politics. The day ahead was to be packed with panels and interviews and would end with a speech by the woman everyone knew—had always known, it sometimes seems—was about to make another grab at history, Hillary Clinton.

But when I'd woken in the middle of the night to nurse, I'd blearily checked my phone and spotted a breaking story: As secretary of state, Clinton seemed to have flouted federal regulations by using her personal e-mail for work. Oh Jesus, that's so Hillary, I thought with something like the exasperated affection I feel for my obstreperous toddler. Except that Hillary is not my toddler.

She's a woman who's trying to do something that no woman has done in the history of the United States: get elected president. She was, in those pre-Bernie days, seemingly the only plausible Democratic front-runner. It is not an exaggeration to say that the future—of the Supreme Court, of voting rights, of reproductive health care—hinges on the outcome of her candidacy.

I woke the next morning with that stomachache, dreading a day spent in the company of impressive, inspiring women whose hopes were pinned once again on this imperfect vessel. But soon, the next wave of news had hit: The federal rule against using personal e-mail had been set after HRC left the State Department.

Now, instead of shaking an imaginary fist at Clinton, I was shaking one at the media's relentless kneecapping of the woman running for president, and this was before I knew that the email story would be flogged―​harder than any other actual aspect of her campaign for presidency―​for the next six months ... and counting. Why can't you hold her to the same standards you hold "regular" candidates to? I roared in my head. Or maybe I was roaring it out loud. A colleague was shushing me—a panel was about to start, and I was kind of yelling.

Welcome to Decision 2016, where the stakes are high, the Democratic front-runner is female, and those of us who care about women's representation, the country's future, and the candidate on whom it's all riding are stuck on the roller coaster from hell.

If there's no crying in baseball, then there's definitely not supposed to be crying in politics. Just ask Edmund Muskie, whose tearful speech (he blamed melting snow running down his face) in 1972 on behalf of his wife got him ejected from that year's presidential contest. Or Gloria Steinem, who furiously wept while speaking to reporter Nora Ephron during the 1972 Democratic convention, in reference to the men who led her party: "They won't take us seriously…. I'm just tired of being screwed, and being screwed by my friends."

In 2008, I started the election season as a critic of Hillary Clinton, a fan of Barack Obama, and a supporter of John Edwards. But by the end of Clinton's historic drive toward nomination, the gendered rhetoric used against her—as well as the way so many men in my own party diminished the value of electing a female president—had radicalized me. Like Steinem 36 years before, I'd grown tired of not being taken seriously, of being screwed over by my friends. I loved Obama and voted for him enthusiastically, but I took Clinton's defeat hard.

Hillary Clinton herself is also really important to me. Not just because I've written a book about her. But because, in her role as a cultural and political lightning rod—a figure who's served as a stand-in for the ways her generation of disruptive women changed the world for my generation—she has bookmarked my adult life.

Let me be honest: I've spent much time over the past seven years silently pleading with the gods of electoral politics, with the imaginary Elizabeth Warren in my head, and maybe also with whoever makes older people decide they'd like to retire and hang out with their grandkids, that Clinton would decide not to do this again.

But the truth is that it often seems that Hillary can't win for losing. Last spring and summer, when there was rampant speculation over the state secrets she might have imperiled, a tranche of her correspondence was made public, revealing that in fact she'd sent a lot of messages about trying to fix her fax machine as well as one asking for an iced tea. Instead of reporting relief that no security breaches were apparent, one New York Times writer sniffed that "the banality of some of the e-mails is striking given her stature as one of the world's most prominent figures."

Reading that bit of analysis over breakfast this summer while on vacation with my family, I realized that the words on the page were getting blurry. I felt like my head was going to pop off. Now she's too boring?! I was screaming inside my head.

For each of Hillary's shortcomings, there will be American shortcomings to match. There will be sexism, veiled and direct, from the right and the left. Democratic women will feel screwed by their friends all over again, as I did in August when I saw a poll showing Clinton ahead of her Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders by a mere 6 points with the party's men and 44 points with its women: a 38-percentage-point gender gap that seemed to speak volumes about how much men on the left care about women's leadership.

Anyway. Yes, there will be enormous animosity, directed at her and at those who support her. She'll make errors; we'll make errors. She will disappoint in ways that will make her adherents shake their heads sadly; then she'll be pilloried so harshly that even some of her critics will suck in their breath at the level of hostility.

And lots of us—including those who love her, those who hate her, and those like me who both love and hate her but mostly have spent far too much of our lives thinking about her—will feel all this acutely. Because we'll know that the reception she receives will not just be about her. It will be about us.