Rodham
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“I don’t think it’s fair to say I sat on the story all this time and didn’t care about the woman,” I said. After a few seconds, I added, “And I’m sorry to say I don’t think it’s completely unfair either.”
* * *
—
The Harriet Tubman Leadership Academy was a charter school in North Philadelphia serving students between seventh and twelfth grades, almost all of them girls of color with an aptitude for science, technology, engineering, and math. It was in the school gym that, on a Tuesday morning, I was officially announcing my education platform, which included universal computer science classes, modernized school buildings, and reduced reliance on standardized tests.
The PE teacher’s office served as the greenroom. For social media, Ellie took pictures of me beside a framed poster of a basketball going through a hoop and the words WINNERS NEVER GIVE UP. First I posed smiling and with a thumbs-up, then again without a thumbs-up, raising my eyebrows to imply, I inferred, some knowing irony—perhaps, I thought but did not say to Ellie, the knowing irony of a sixty-seven-year-old burned by having used the phrase on fleek.
The school principal, a woman about ten years younger than I, led me into the gym proper, where the air was charged with the energy of four hundred girls in white polo shirts tucked into navy-blue slacks. The students were crowded onto rows and rows of bleachers, still talking to one another, a mass of adolescent exuberance and laughter, with teachers interspersed among them. The press corps stood to the side of the bleachers, and I passed them, just behind the principal and buffered by two security agents and Theresa, en route to a dais.
I stood beside the dais as the principal stepped to the podium, held her arms up, and snapped three times with both hands. Surprisingly quickly, the gym quieted, the students mimicking the snapping. The principal spoke slowly and clearly as she welcomed everyone and described the history and mission of the school. She introduced the student who would introduce me, a senior named Aisha Ilwaad, who was the president of the student body. A girl in a long-sleeved white polo shirt and a hijab walked from the front row of the bleachers up to the dais accompanied by avid applause from the other teenagers.
The girl was a few inches taller than the principal, and when she—Aisha—stood at the podium, she raised the microphone a little. In a very loud, very enthusiastic voice, she said, “Here at the Harriet Tubman Leadership Academy, we are all about learning to be strong women.” She turned her head to the side and looked directly at me. “Hillary Rodham, thank you for being a strong woman.” At this, the students erupted.
The cheering hadn’t completely dissipated when Aisha began speaking again. “My classmates plan to be doctors and lawyers, engineers and coders. As for myself, I plan to be mayor of Philadelphia.” The cheering started up again, and I happily participated. “To any boy or man who says that a girl can’t code or a girl can’t lead, this is what I say: ‘Watch me.’ ” By this point, we were all—all except of course the press—hooting and applauding ecstatically.
“I am seventeen years old,” Aisha said. “I was born on October second, 1998, which I know, Ms. Hillary Rodham, you also have an October birthday. I will turn eighteen one month before the 2016 election, and do you want to know who I’ll cast my first vote for?” The cheering ramped up even more, and Aisha nodded at the crowd, grinning and unflappable; in addition to being a better speaker than her principal, she was a better speaker than I was. She said, “Hillary Rodham, I am going to vote for you.”
Four hundred girls rose to their feet and cheered their hearts out, and it was an extraordinary sight to behold, these rows and rows of students in their matching polo shirts and slacks. They were thin and heavy and short and tall, dark-skinned and light-skinned, with hair in scarves and ponytails and cornrows, and they were so excited and so full of promise. They were, I thought, not much younger than I’d been when I’d delivered the commencement address at Wellesley.
On the campaign trail, I didn’t always feel it, but I felt it on this day—how close we were to the barrier that was often referred to as a glass ceiling but that I instinctively pictured as a large grassy field that, through some combination of fate and ambition, I was the likeliest person to get across first. And I thought I could do it, but I wasn’t sure; there was no guarantee, nothing I alone could force. At moments like this, both the closeness and the urgency were palpable. There were so many of us who wanted this, and we wanted it so badly. I’d been asked countless times why I was running for president, and I’d answered countless times, seemingly never to anyone’s satisfaction. I think the problem was that journalists and voters were asking an individual question that had a collective answer. I did want to help people, and I wanted to help as many people as possible. I did like the work of holding elected office, and I liked doing things I was good at, and I liked being recognized for doing things I was good at. But as much as I wanted to be president, I wanted a woman to be president—I wanted this because women and girls were half the population and we deserved, as a basic human right and a means of ensuring justice, to be equally represented in our government. Yet it was hard to explain because no man had ever run for president for this reason; even Barack, who’d surely run in part for the racial version of it, had never to my knowledge articulated it as such. Some presidents cared about improving the world, and all of them had egos; but none of them had run because they hoped to gain entry to the highest office of power on behalf of an entire gender. Yes, I was me, Hillary, but I also was a vessel and a proxy.
I walked up the three steps to the dais and embraced Aisha, and after I was at the podium and she was back in the bleachers, the audience cheered for a bit longer, which gave me time to collect myself. Briefly, I pressed one fingertip below my right eye and then below my left. This image would be widely reproduced, maybe because when I finally spoke, there was still the smallest catch in my voice; my sincerity would be widely debated.
“Thank you, Harriet Tubman Leadership Academy, and thank you, Aisha,” I said. “I think you’ll make a superb mayor, but if you ever decide to run for national office, I’d also love to vote for you.”
* * *
—
It happened for the first time at Bill’s rally in Youngstown, Ohio, which occurred two days later. All three of Bill’s previous rallies—in Oakland, then in Des Moines, then in Manchester—had aired live on multiple cable networks, thereby allowing the pundits to marvel at the increasing sizes: four thousand people in Des Moines, five thousand in Manchester, and seven thousand in Youngstown. Even more alarmingly, a new poll showed 31 percent of Iowa Democrats voting for Bill and 38 percent for me, in contrast to 43 percent voting for me just two weeks earlier, before he’d entered the race.
I didn’t watch the Youngstown rally live—I was back in Iowa visiting a dairy farm—but I watched part of it later in the day, as my team drove from Sioux City to Council Bluffs. Bill’s event was in a gym on the campus of Youngstown State University, and he stood onstage at a podium with a crest affixed to the front. Behind him, on risers, were people waving signs: BILL! in red against a blue background. The crowd was young—many of them looked like college students, in baseball caps and hoodies—and mostly white and male. They were fired up, grinning and nodding and clapping and hooting. Bill seemed to convey with his very presence that neither he nor his audience could possibly have anywhere better to be, and his confidence made it true. I couldn’t pretend not to understand, because hadn’t he once conveyed the same to me, and hadn’t I believed it?
He spoke in his Bill-ish way, expansive and smart but folksy, with ostensibly spontaneous off-script interjections that were as well worded and insightful as the rest of his speech. The gist was that places like Youngstown could be every bit as innovative, dynamic, and prosperous as Silicon Valley; that if you were a miner, a factory worker, or a student, you already had the intellectual tools to become a coder, and hell, maybe an entreprene
ur, too. Sure, you might need some training, but your work ethic and your intelligence were just waiting to be utilized. This was a message to which the residents of Youngstown were, apparently, highly receptive.
After wild cheering, he said, “Now, I’m not the only Democrat running. And I respect my opponents. But one in particular, she’s been in Washington for decades. And I think it’s time for some innovation, some disruption of politics as usual. If we stick to the same-old, same-old of lobbyists and special interests, we’ll get the same old results.”
There was intense booing.
He said, “I’m a self-made man, and I’m a free agent. I’m not beholden to anyone. I’m not in this race for me. I’m in it for you.”
I was watching on an iPad in the second row of the van, sitting next to Theresa. The implication that, in contrast to Bill, I was some sort of raving egomaniac made me snort.
From the row behind me, Diwata said, “Just wait.”
“All the good things that have happened in my career,” Bill said, “I want those things to happen to you, too. I want you to get your rightful share of the American dream. You’re going to hear a lot of talk from my opponents about the economy, a lot of fancy terms and complicated policies. But what does it all mean for you, the hardworking people who form the backbone of our country?”
It was at this point that someone in the audience shouted, “Hillary sucks!” It wasn’t audible in the video, but, according to the tweets and subsequent dispatches of reporters who’d been present, the person who yelled was a middle-aged man.
Bill shook his head. He said, “Now, now,” but even in those initial seconds (was this visible to people who knew him less well than I did?), he was smirking a little. He added, “You know why there’s no need for personal insults? Because we can beat her on the issues. You may wonder what she’s talking about when she mentions things like short-term capital gains or tax inversion. These complicated terms she throws around—”
The person who shouted out “Shut her up!” was not the same person who had shouted “Hillary sucks!” The second person was a younger man, and his outburst also was not audible on TV. Bill ignored the “Shut her up” and kept speaking. He said, “I pledge not only that I’ll talk to you plainly, but I’ll substitute action for talk and innovation for the status quo.” But more people were shouting, “Shut her up!” Others were booing again. Watching the footage, I wouldn’t necessarily have understood what they were saying if I hadn’t been told. All at once, the individual shouts coalesced into a chant, and for a solid ten seconds, a gym in Youngstown, Ohio, was chanting—about me—“Shut her up!” The expression on Bill’s face was nonplussed. When the cameras scanned the crowd, the chanters seemed upbeat, as if rooting for their team at a sports event. Who were these people? Were they Democrats? Republicans? Independents? Libertarians?
“All right, now,” Bill said. “All right, now.” He had to say it four more times before they quieted down. Theresa touched her fingertip to the screen, pausing the video.
“Wow,” I said.
Sarcastically, Clyde said, “It’s almost like the subtext is becoming text,” and I replied, “Yeah, almost.”
* * *
—
Presumably, I was not the only one frustrated by the media attention abruptly lavished on Bill. Though I’d been the first Democrat to announce my presidential bid, I’d actually been the third candidate—both Ted Cruz and Rand Paul had announced in the weeks before I did, and in the month after, they were followed by four other Republicans, including Marco Rubio and Carly Fiorina. “She’s drafting on your wind resistance,” Clyde said. I’d met Carly, who had extensive corporate experience and had never held elected office, a few times over the years and I didn’t care for her or her political platform—she was a virulently antichoice war hawk. Several media outlets, usually women’s magazines, floated the idea of Carly and me filling out the same questionnaire so our answers could run side by side, a request to which my communications director, Aaron, would say, “In Carly’s dreams.”
As for Ted, Rand, and Marco Rubio—all my colleagues in the Senate—Marco had a youthful energy, but something seemed a bit off, which is to say unelectable, about Ted and Rand. I found Ted smart and unappealing, and Rand egotistical and just plain weird. The opponents who posed the biggest threat were Marco, Mitt Romney, and Jeb Bush, the latter two of whom still hadn’t declared by mid-May. Mitt and Jeb both were men I could, in a parallel universe, imagine as the husbands of my friends. No matter how insidious their politics, they knew how to conduct themselves in public settings. But none of these men had the magnetism that Bill had. None of them were anywhere close.
* * *
—
It had been a few weeks since my text exchange with Misty LaPointe, and I reached out again: Misty, it’s Hillary Rodham. How are things going?
From her: I’m ok just had my 3rd chemo my hairs falling out:(
From her: But guess what I convinced one of nurses to vote for u!!!
From me: Oh my goodness, that’s above and beyond what I could ask of anyone. Thank you!
From me: Are you still able to work full-time?
From her: I went on disability after surgery when sick leave used up but disability 40% pay cut so…not doing that for now
From me: When I’m back in Iowa, would you be interested in introducing me before I speak at an event? No pressure if you don’t want to, but you have such a compelling story and great energy.
From her: OMG yes…I would so nervous…but yes!!
From her: Not sure how great energy is rn.
She added an emoji whose meaning I didn’t know, a sort of cringing face. I regretted my word choice.
From me: That makes sense. I hope things continue to go as well as possible for you and please keep me posted. Someone from my team will reach out about the introduction.
* * *
—
The second episode of the chanting happened while Bill was speaking in Nashua, New Hampshire; again, it started slowly and gathered force. Cameras panned the auditorium of the community college, where some members of the audience stood, pumped their arms, pointed their index fingers, and waved their BILL! signs. “Shut her up! Shut her up!”
It wasn’t that everyone seemed deranged or rabid; some people were looking at their phones, some stood with their mouths closed. Maybe half were chanting? And the ones that did seem deranged or rabid—if they’d been chanting something else, something where the her did not refer to me, would I simply have thought they seemed impassioned? What if they’d been chanting “No more coal!” or perhaps “Not the church! Not the state! Women must control our fate!” But, of course, they hadn’t been.
There was also the matter of the expression on Bill’s face—what was his expression? It was slightly self-conscious but also pleased. It was (could this be?) flirtatious. He was smiling the way a successful man might smile if an attractive woman told him he was the handsomest man in the world. He wasn’t sure it was true. He knew it probably wasn’t. But still, it was awfully nice to hear.
He said, “We don’t need to—you know what let’s do? Let’s beat her in the primary nine months from now. That’ll be here a lot sooner than you think.”
But much later, in the night, something occurred to me, though I waited until the morning to rewatch the rally footage and confirm it. When the chanting had begun, he had paused. He could have kept speaking, but he had paused to let it build.
* * *
—
I texted him that night, after eleven, from my hotel room in Denver. I did it impulsively, without consulting anyone on my staff. Can we have a quick and confidential conversation?
A few seconds later, he texted back, When?
I texted, Now.
My phone rang, and I said, “You need to make the chanting stop.”
H
e laughed. “I’m well, thank you. How are you?”
“It’s ugly,” I said. “And think of the message it sends to girls and young women interested in running for office.”
“That’s who you’re worried about? Girls and young women?” I said nothing, and he added, “Candidly, I don’t like it any better than you do. But I think the best thing is to ignore it instead of making a fuss and fanning the flames.”
“The woman who came up to me in Chouteau’s parking lot in 1974—” I paused. “I assume you know that people know her name.”
“Are you threatening me, Hillary?” He sounded halfway between amused and disgusted.
“I’m just amazed that you act like a person with nothing to hide,” I said. “That you’re so cavalier about everything.”
“I am a person with nothing to hide. Listen—” If we’d been in the same room, presumably this was when he’d have stuck his pointer finger at me. “You claim someone told you something damning about me forty years ago. Yet you continued to date me for months, you accepted my goddamn marriage proposal, and based on what happened in 2005, there’s pretty strong evidence you never stopped carrying a torch for me. For you to admit I’m a good guy when it’s fun but claim that I’m an affront to feminism when it serves your purposes—come on, Hillary. Have some self-respect.”
Presumably, I had known that calling him was misguided; I hadn’t consulted anyone on my staff because they’d have told me not to do it.
I said, “An affront to feminism is an interesting way to describe sexual assault.”