With the exception of 2014, when Hillary Clinton was already plotting her second presidential campaign, at least one of the Clintons, Bill or Hillary, has been on a ballot or in public office on every November Election Day since 1974. Twenty-one elections, over 42 years, one of the longest dynastic runs in American politics.
Last Tuesday, the voters decided that the man from Hope, and the woman from Park Ridge, Fayetteville, Little Rock, and Chappaqua who followed him, had stayed too long at the fair. At ages 69 and 70, it’s a safe bet that neither will ever again stand for elective office, or at the center of the national stage. So it’s worth pausing to ponder the meaning of the fall of the house of Clinton for the country they jointly served, inspired, and bedeviled for so long.
More precisely, it’s worth asking how a family name that once personified skill, adroitness, empathy, and effectiveness—and, yes, slipperiness and a legalistic tendency toward evasiveness—in modern politics came to embody the opposite of all the good qualities while amplifying and exaggerating the bad ones. What did he have that she (and they) lost track of? The short answer: a lot.
Twenty-five years ago, when he set out to run for president in a time of deep anxiety and economic dislocation for working-class Americans, Bill Clinton knew exactly how to talk to them, because he saw himself as one of them, and always had. Indeed, as one longtime Democratic pollster told me the other day, Clinton was “born a ‘deplorable,’” one of the people in flyover country whom Hillary Clinton might have looked down on if she hadn’t happened to meet him, learn how smart he was, and fall in love.
Bill Clinton had a comfortable middle-class childhood, but as governor of Arkansas he never earned a salary of more than $35,000 year. No consultant ever had to tell him how to talk to ordinary people, or make himself “relatable.” Well into his presidency, he’d happily play cards into the wee hours with friends with whom he’d gone to high school. In Rudyard Kipling’s poetic formulation, he could “walk with kings, nor lose the common touch.”
Hillary Rodham was not born to the purple either. Her father ran a small business that printed silk-screen patterns on drapery fabrics, and was an infamous tightwad. But for more than 25 years, she has lived in a world of cars and drivers, borrowed jets, round-the-clock Secret Service security, and aides catering to her every need (except, to her everlasting detriment, by not helping her hold two Blackberries). So when Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon mocked Clinton’s description of her hardworking dad—“laborers like my own human father who made, uh, I guess drapes, or printed drapes, or sold drapes, or somethin’ with drapes”—the send-up rang uncomfortably true.
In the 1950s, when Mary Martin was a reigning star on Broadway, with a chauffeured Rolls-Royce and a wardrobe full of Mainbocher gowns, her friends and co-stars would marvel that she could still channel the little girl from Weatherford, Texas, she once had been to convincingly play hometown heroines like Ensign Nellie Forbush in South Pacific. She did it by summoning something deep inside her. Hillary never mastered the trick.
And unlike Bill Clinton, whose Arkansas roots were always as plain as the plangent southern twang the world came to know, Hillary’s core was never so clear to begin with. Was she a liberal or a pragmatist? A free trader or a newly minted protectionist? A Cubs fan or a Mets fan? Who could say? Certainly not she.
Since leaving the White House 16 years ago, Bill Clinton himself has palled around mostly with millionaires and billionaires (some less savory than others). He blended dubious personal business interests with the worthy charitable endeavors of his foundation (work that, paradoxically, will now be easier for him to continue than if he had been First Laddie). Together with his wife, he earned as much as $230 million in speaking and consulting fees and other income. He may also have lost a step or two with age.
Yet he was in touch enough with his roots and his old mojo to press his wife’s campaign team this year to reach out to the disaffected white rural and working-class voters who were flocking to her opponent, Donald Trump, in droves. The aides variously dismissed that idea as ineffective, unnecessary, or impossible, and she lost Pennsylvania by a single percentage point.
There were other problems, many of them of Hillary Clinton’s own making: for instance, her decision as secretary of state to set up a private e-mail server, and her persistent tendency to shade the truth about why she had done so. Or her lucrative speeches to Goldman Sachs. Or her limitations as a candidate on the stump.
Some factors were beyond Clinton’s control, including an economy with stubbornly slow growth in jobs and income; rising health-insurance premiums; and the still-powerful sexism that has made it hard to elect female chief executives around the world in countries without parliamentary systems, in which leaders are chosen by their peers, not the voters at large.
But the overriding problem was Clinton’s lack of any message as clear and disciplined as her husband’s was in 1992, when James Carville’s scrawled whiteboard mantra at campaign headquarters in Little Rock read, “Change vs. more or the same; The economy, stupid; Don’t forget health care.” When I asked a long-serving Clinton aide this week if there was anything she could have done to keep from losing, he replied without missing a beat, “Sure: give people a reason to vote for her.”
It is a mark of Clinton’s failure as a candidate that she lost to the only Republican—Donald Trump—that even most Democrats thought she had a strong chance of beating. The depth of her grief and regret must be profound. It was certainly etched on the ashen faces of her loyal aides and supporters in the Wyndham New Yorker Hotel ballroom where she made her concession speech on Wednesday.
Clinton can blame the media for blowing her flaws out of proportion (and it did). She can blame advisers whose reliance on big data proved flawed (and it was). She can blame F.B.I. irector James Comey, whose puzzling 11th-hour stink bomb about her e-mails broke all decorum, bled wavering supporters away from her, and was only topped by his midnight “Never mind!” She can blame fearful voters (and we now know there were tens of millions of them) who saw in Trump’s easy promises and simple slogan the reassurance they craved.
But she would be wise to save some blame for herself. Timing is everything in politics—something Bill Clinton once knew better than anyone. In 1991, when the biggest fish in the Democratic Party chose not to challenge George H.W. Bush, flush from his quick triumph in the Persian Gulf war, Clinton saw an opening in the sluggish domestic economy that Bush was accused of ignoring—and he pounced, winning the nomination and the presidency to boot.
Hillary Clinton left office, after a successful tenure as secretary of state, as one of the most admired women in the world. Her future as a global ambassador for the issues she cared most about was assured, and her influence on public debate all but unlimited. By running this year, she damaged her own reputation, at least temporarily, overshadowing years of selfless and effective labor on behalf of women, children, and the disadvantaged of every stripe. She dredged up painful old doubts about her husband’s character, delayed the development of the next crop of national Democratic leaders, and left the party to which she’s devoted her entire adult life in shambles. To turn the columnist Murray Kempton’s famous epigram about Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York upside down, she was tired and everyone else was fresh.
When Luis Herrera Campins was running for president of Venezuela against the ruling party in 1978, his American consultant David Garth devised a two word slogan that hit home: “Ya Basta!” (or, as a real New Yorker would put it, “Enough Already!”). This was never going to be her year, and Hillary Clinton should have had the special kind of political courage and personal self-awareness to know it: Her time had passed.
Now it has.
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