Well, well well. So now it can be told, way after the news had any salience. Hillary Clinton is not, and never was, a people person. That's the takeaway for me on reading about Amy Chozick's Chasing Hillary through two presidential campaigns.
Yeah, all the rubbish about Hillary Clinton being a great person in private seems to be rubbish. Hillary Clinton simply is not a people person, and she really does not like interacting with people. And "everybody" always knew it. Only they never told us.
Really Hillary Clinton. If you are not a people person, the sort that cannot exist for a moment without pressing the flesh and meeting people, then for God's sake don't run for political office.
I once asked a Seattle city bureaucrat about this, about how politicians can keep it up, day after day. He replied that in his experience, unlike ordinary people that find public events very draining, the real politician gets energy from being out in public and interacting with people.
And so now we finally get the unvarnished truth about Hillary Clinton. She absolutely hates being out in public. She even thought that the admiring fan club of female journalists would be hard on her. Really.
So is it sexism that Hillary Clinton did not get elected president? Who knows? But all the girls on the bus were all invested in America's First Woman President. I imagine because that is what they were taught in school and in college. And women tend to believe what they are taught, much more than men who, like me, tend to think that teachers are full of it.
Is that sexism, or one of the Universal Truths of Life? You decide.
The funny thing is that all this fainting and hugging and "you go girl" and "breaking glass ceilings" stuff is silly mean-girl high-school stuff. And it is sexist to assume that any proportion of any particular profession of executive suite should be female. Or black, or Asian, or anything else.
And it is stupid. For instance, the political leader of a country preeminently needs to be a person that will protect the people from existential perils. Sexism or no sexism, women have a steeper hill to climb on this than men. In fact, women aspiring to executive political office practically have to re-invent themselves as men: see Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir. Yeah, it didn't hurt Margaret Thatcher that she led the UK into the Falklands War.
But nobody ever suggested that politics and feminism and intersectionalism and the whole culture of the left is anything other than really dumb and stupid. Really dumb and stupid because it has spent the best part of 150 years railing against the very thing that has brought the majority of humans out of the indigent poverty and utter subjection of the ages. How dumb do you have to be not to see what is right in front of your eyes?
OK, I know. Really, nearly all of us all of the time and all of us nearly all of the time are still pre-modern tribesmen and women. So we, like all humans, don't even notice what is right in front of our eyes.
This present era is a remarkable one for women: the energy revolution and the health revolution have liberated women from lives shortened by death from childbirth, and their children saved by the radical improvement in life expectancy. It means that women can do things other than get pregnant and struggle mightily to have one or two children survive into adulthood.
But this freedom means that women now have the opportunity to make complete fools of themselves. This is the meaning of freedom: the freedom to make mistakes, and beyond that, courtesy of the left, forcing the rest of us into saying nothing while they insist on making complete fools of themselves.
I was talking to a lefty friend about lesbianism, and said that he and I were both People of the Creative Self. We believe in being creative. Lesbianism, I said, amounts to women getting creative with sex.
But, I said, what we forget to remember is that the creative life is incredibly hard. Chances are that if you try to live a creative life you will fail miserably, because you don't have the talent or your don't have the luck, or you don't have the grit, or something. Most of us are better advised just to go with the flow and be good sensible People of the Responsible Self.
So, girls. Don't forget that your "you go girl" culture is bound to be a total failure for most of the women that try it. And the reason for the failure is the fact that going against nature, going against instinct, going against your strongest abilities, and just trying something new is almost sure to be a disappointment.
Now I think that in a hundred years women will have discovered new and better ways of living in the era of abundance, when women don't die in childbirth, when women can control their fertility, when women can be whatever they want to be. But first women -- and the rest of us -- are going to have to go through what a sci-fi author a called the Great Ravine.
And one of the bodies in the Great Ravine is Hillary Clinton.
Yeah, all the rubbish about Hillary Clinton being a great person in private seems to be rubbish. Hillary Clinton simply is not a people person, and she really does not like interacting with people. And "everybody" always knew it. Only they never told us.
Really Hillary Clinton. If you are not a people person, the sort that cannot exist for a moment without pressing the flesh and meeting people, then for God's sake don't run for political office.
I once asked a Seattle city bureaucrat about this, about how politicians can keep it up, day after day. He replied that in his experience, unlike ordinary people that find public events very draining, the real politician gets energy from being out in public and interacting with people.
And so now we finally get the unvarnished truth about Hillary Clinton. She absolutely hates being out in public. She even thought that the admiring fan club of female journalists would be hard on her. Really.
Chozick and the other reporters covering Clinton in 2015–16 were pulling for her. You could hear it in the questions they asked. Chozick makes it obvious in her new book. Yet Clinton was convinced this gaggle of liberal women was somehow out to take her down, and she barricaded herself off from them.
“She told aides she knew women reporters would be harder on her. We’d be jealous and catty and more spiteful than men. We’d be impervious to her flirting.”Oh please. In fact writes Amy,
“I still felt some kind of feminine bond with Hillary then,” she writes of her early months on the beat, and later describes her coverage as “neutral to positive, with plenty of wet kisses thrown in.”I think that Rule One of life is that you really do not want to go into a field for which you are signally unsuited. It will make you compensate with excessive amounts of Chardonnay.
So is it sexism that Hillary Clinton did not get elected president? Who knows? But all the girls on the bus were all invested in America's First Woman President. I imagine because that is what they were taught in school and in college. And women tend to believe what they are taught, much more than men who, like me, tend to think that teachers are full of it.
Is that sexism, or one of the Universal Truths of Life? You decide.
The funny thing is that all this fainting and hugging and "you go girl" and "breaking glass ceilings" stuff is silly mean-girl high-school stuff. And it is sexist to assume that any proportion of any particular profession of executive suite should be female. Or black, or Asian, or anything else.
And it is stupid. For instance, the political leader of a country preeminently needs to be a person that will protect the people from existential perils. Sexism or no sexism, women have a steeper hill to climb on this than men. In fact, women aspiring to executive political office practically have to re-invent themselves as men: see Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir. Yeah, it didn't hurt Margaret Thatcher that she led the UK into the Falklands War.
But nobody ever suggested that politics and feminism and intersectionalism and the whole culture of the left is anything other than really dumb and stupid. Really dumb and stupid because it has spent the best part of 150 years railing against the very thing that has brought the majority of humans out of the indigent poverty and utter subjection of the ages. How dumb do you have to be not to see what is right in front of your eyes?
OK, I know. Really, nearly all of us all of the time and all of us nearly all of the time are still pre-modern tribesmen and women. So we, like all humans, don't even notice what is right in front of our eyes.
This present era is a remarkable one for women: the energy revolution and the health revolution have liberated women from lives shortened by death from childbirth, and their children saved by the radical improvement in life expectancy. It means that women can do things other than get pregnant and struggle mightily to have one or two children survive into adulthood.
But this freedom means that women now have the opportunity to make complete fools of themselves. This is the meaning of freedom: the freedom to make mistakes, and beyond that, courtesy of the left, forcing the rest of us into saying nothing while they insist on making complete fools of themselves.
I was talking to a lefty friend about lesbianism, and said that he and I were both People of the Creative Self. We believe in being creative. Lesbianism, I said, amounts to women getting creative with sex.
But, I said, what we forget to remember is that the creative life is incredibly hard. Chances are that if you try to live a creative life you will fail miserably, because you don't have the talent or your don't have the luck, or you don't have the grit, or something. Most of us are better advised just to go with the flow and be good sensible People of the Responsible Self.
So, girls. Don't forget that your "you go girl" culture is bound to be a total failure for most of the women that try it. And the reason for the failure is the fact that going against nature, going against instinct, going against your strongest abilities, and just trying something new is almost sure to be a disappointment.
Now I think that in a hundred years women will have discovered new and better ways of living in the era of abundance, when women don't die in childbirth, when women can control their fertility, when women can be whatever they want to be. But first women -- and the rest of us -- are going to have to go through what a sci-fi author a called the Great Ravine.
And one of the bodies in the Great Ravine is Hillary Clinton.
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