NEW YORK, Nov 9, (APP/AFP) – She lost to Barack Obama in the
Democratic primaries in 2008. Now she has been humiliated in her second bid for the presidency by political novice and former TV reality show host Donald Trump.
Hillary Clinton will go down in history as a woman of frustrated ambitions.
In February, a journalist asked Clinton if she has always told the truth to
the American people.
“I’ve always tried to. Always. Always,” the failed Democratic candidate
answered.
Other, less cautious pols would have responded with an unequivocal ‘yes’.
But Clinton, a lawyer by training, weighs her words carefully so as not to
be caught out. Critics say she is dishonest.
And this apparent duplicity, despite her efforts for redemption and the
support of US Democrats led by a spirited Obama, cost the party the White House in a historic repudiation that has the world on edge as it waits to see what the future now holds with a Trump presidency.
Looking back, it is clear that Clinton’s defiant streak grew over the
course of three decades in public life.
Back in the 1970s, when her husband Bill was governor of Arkansas, Clinton
still used her maiden name, Rodham, and kept her job as a lawyer.
Local people found this odd, and questioned her love for her husband and
asked what the woman was up to.
Ultimately she took Clinton as her last name. But she had already come
across as too hip and too ambitious for conservative southern US society.
“I think that’s another one of the dangers about being in public life.
One cannot live one’s life based on what somebody else’s image of you might be,” she told Arkansas public TV in an interview in 1979.
– First Lady –
==============
When her husband ran for the White House, Clinton showed herself to be both
an asset and a liability.
She was the former when she defended her husband against allegations of
adultery in 1992.
And she hurt herself when she seemed to criticize stay-at-home mothers by
saying she would rather work than stay home and bake cookies.
When the couple came to Washington, Mrs. Clinton raised eyebrows again. She
was a key adviser to her husband, and set up an office in the West Wing of the White House, reserved for the president himself and his closest aides. Previous first ladies always worked out of the East Wing.
Mrs. Clinton dazzled official Washington when she undertook a reform of the
US health care system. She knew the material well, worked hard and impressed
Republican members of Congress.
But as the months wore on, the reform deadlocked, and critics of Clinton
dismissed her as inflexible and abrupt. It was her first major political defeat.
She was fiercely defensive of her private life, and journalists found this
behavior to be suspicious.
Americans considered Clinton to be smart and tough but the media asked ‘who
is the real Hillary?’
Clinton’s popularity peaked in late 1998 when she was humiliated with the
disclosure of her husband’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
It would be the last time that the American people sympathized with her.
– On her own –
==============
Clinton long wanted to get into politics on her own merits. In 1990, she
commissioned polls to explore the idea of succeeding her husband. The results were negative, and this hurt her.
She sought redemption in 2000 when Bill Clinton left the White House: she
won a seat in the Senate representing the state of New York. Clinton worked
hard and impressed people as diligent and well prepared.
But her unpopularity returned.
In 2002, Clinton voted in favor of the United States invading Iraq.
A young Senate colleague named Barack Obama saw his chance, running in the
Democratic primaries of 2008 with a message of change and relegating his
powerful rival to the ranks of establishment politicians.
So a woman who was too modern in the Arkansas of the 1980s became a vestige
of another time, a symbol of insider Washington.
In naming her secretary of state in 2009, Obama resurrected Clinton and
consolidated her image as a stateswoman. This completed the longest resume in the recent history of American politics.
But Clinton made a fatal mistake when she set about working at the State
Department: she avoided using the government email system and used her own
private server, ignoring rules on the handling of sensitive communications.
This mushroomed into a scandal, and although the FBI ultimately decided
that Clinton did not deserve to be charged, critics of Clinton insisted this
disqualified her from serving as president.
“I get it that some people just don’t know what to make of me,” Clinton
said in July in accepting the Democratic presidential nomination. “So let me
tell you.”
She proceeded to talk about her middle class upbringing, her commitments
and her lifelong battle to advocate for women and children.
Friends have vouched for Clinton’s honesty, and her campaign team produced
videos about her that were moving and funny.
But it was in vain as American voters on Tuesday closed the book on
Clinton.