Lock her up? Sadly, she locked herself up

I’ve been watching the Hillary Clinton documentary series on Sky. It’s a welcome diversion from the endless coverage of Trump and his cronies turning the White House into a stage set from some dystopian dictator movie.

It’s not for me to judge Hillary’s character. Certainly, the carefully choreographed interviews that formed the centrepiece of the series were never likely to tell the whole story of the person and her career.

Many people, my wife included, felt that her failing to win the presidency in 2016 was a tragedy. Over the past three years, perhaps many more people have reflected on what might have been, were it not for the 70,000 votes that denied her victory in the electoral college.

The striking aspect of Episode Two, which dealt with Bill Clinton’s election to the presidency, Whitewater, Gennifer Flowers, Vince Foster’s suicide and the failure of Hillary’s healthcare initiative, was its reminder that the viciousness of modern American politics didn’t start with Trump.

To an extent, it was always there, but before Bill Clinton, all of America’s post-war presidents, whatever was going on behind closed doors, gave the office a veneer of respectability and dignity. That ended with Bill, or perhaps more accurately, with Monica Lewinsky. The American public’s respect for their presidents took a dive when tales of semen stains made the headlines.

Thereafter, the president was fair game. Clinton was incapable of keeping his trousers zipped. Bush Junior was a man of limited intelligence with a self-satisfied smirk who conned the nation into going to war. Obama was the epitome of dignity, yet ended up like Gulliver, pinned down by Republican majorities in both houses of Congress who were determined to destroy him. And then Trump, con artist, pussy-grabber and trash-talker extraordinaire, is the ultimate anti-president.

During Bill Clinton’s reign, the conspiracy theorists, the dirty tricks artists and the grass roots extremists seemed to step up a gear. Did it all start with Clinton, or with Nixon? Nixon, for sure, was a more immoral president than any of them except Trump. But he maintained a veneer of dignity to the end. If he achieved nothing else, he proved that it was possible for a president to be taken down while in office.

Thereafter, every president became a target of opportunity, but during Clinton’s time the partisan divide, fanned by the likes of Newt Gingrich, seemed to intensify. And since he left office, it seemed as though Hillary’s principal role was as a partisan lightning rod – as a senator, as Obama’s Secretary of State and ultimately as a presidential candidate. And, of course, as a woman of power and influence. A convenient denizen of the swamp, if you will.

What was it and is it about Hillary that made half the country want to lock her up? Is she really, as one person commented, like every husband’s ex-mother-in-law? Is it the hard protective shell she built around herself that her detractors interpreted as lack of empathy? Was it her failure to divorce a man who consistently cheated on her, evidence in many people’s minds of her ruthless pragmatism and desire for power? Was it her speaking engagements with the Wall Street giants, evidence of her greed, or her emails, evidence that she didn’t think that government rules applied to her? Or was it her obvious contempt for the deplorables on the other side?

One person in the documentary pointed out that her rock-solid confidence in her own righteousness made it hard for her to understand why people were so keen to attack her. Perhaps Joe Klein did the damage early on when he portrayed his version of her in Primary Colors as a foul-mouthed Lady MacBeth figure as she berated Bill for his priapic indiscretions during his first campaign.

So here, for what it’s worth, is how I see Hillary.

She’s a person from an age when women like her, determined, intelligent and fiercely ambitious, didn’t feel the need to go to charm school. These women, inspired by the likes of Gloria Steinem, thought they could and should succeed by ability only. The compromises she needed to make in order to turn herself into an electable persona didn’t sit easily, either as a president’s wife or as a candidate in her own right.

Her self-control, which she built as a wall between her public persona and her private passions through bitter experience in the White House, has worked to her disadvantage. A degree of vulnerability, which she never felt able to show, can be an electoral asset. You could say, therefore, that she locked herself up.

If she had been elected president, she would have faced continuing hostility from those who didn’t vote for her. Her political opponents would have denigrated her, opposed her and fought her at every turn. The hostility that Obama attracted would have been small beer in comparison. This would have made it difficult, to put it mildly, for her to do her job. She would have had as many setbacks as achievements.

That said, she would still have been ten times more effective than Trump. Even if she had been defeated for a second term, she would, in the long term, have earned the same respect as other one-term presidents such as Carter and Bush senior.

She wouldn’t have left the United States a smoking, riot-torn ruin, and she would have paved the way for more women to reach the highest office.

There but for the lack of 70,000 votes. And by the way, I’m sure she’s a damned fine mother-in-law.