If you want to understand the woman who would be president, don't bother to read the latest avalanche of recycled biographies - just ask her interns.I will begin with two Hillary Clinton scoops of my own. Early last summer, I went to a party she was giving at her house - hidden away off Massachusetts Avenue, a stone's throw from the British embassy - and took the opportunity to introduce her to a teenage boy who I knew was going to intern for her later in the summer. She gave the kid about five seconds of her time, beaming at him before moving on to the next hand to shake.
Probably six weeks later, having not so much as set eyes on her since, the boy was walking down a Senate corridor when Hillary approached in the opposite direction. Meeting his eyes, she greeted him without hesitating: "Good to see you again, Pete." Then, three weeks after that, the same kid and zillions of other Hillary interns gathered in a small, overheated office to have their photographs taken with the senator. Suddenly, overcome by the heat, the boy collapsed almost literally into her arms. He came round a couple of seconds later, lying on his back and seeing the face of (possibly) America's 44th president peering anxiously down at him, proffering her bottle of water. "She was really kind, sort of motherly," he told me later.
OK, so these are hardly scoops. But they highlight two little-known facets of America's most famous woman - of which more later - and, above all, they are brand-new, in that they are Hillary anecdotes that have never seen print before. I have thus just about revealed more than the avalanche of Hillary Clinton books that is sweeping America.
So why all this unprecedented hysteria over an election that won't even be held until 4 November next year? The answer, I am convinced, is that the leading candidate so far is a woman who is trying to break a 218-year male stranglehold on the most powerful job in the world. That, in turn, has unleashed vast tides of subconscious sexism from America's political commentators, the vast majority of whom are male. A woman seeking the power and masculine majesty of the US presidency? How dare a petty little Machiavellian ogress like her have such audacity!
I started with my two little anecdotes, though, because I think they actually say two things about Hillary Clinton that are related to this. The first showed that she possesses, in spades, the phenomenal and enviable skill of a true politician in remembering names and faces. The second illustrates that, for a woman invariably dismissed as "hard" ("camouflaged", is the word Bernstein uses), she also has a gentle and caring (dare I say feminine?) side that has never been seen by the public. In fact, perhaps she has simply never risked letting it be seen; she is certainly the most extraordinarily self-disciplined politician I have ever watched in action.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200706180025
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