Four More Years of Hillary?

Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Now there is a title to conjure with. Please, please, I keep saying in a not-so-silent prayer, please make her husband’s complex financial dealings negate this possibility. That would be the best irony of all, since she has spent her life using her husband to get ahead.

It may seem strange to people now, but for many years in America women felt the only route to political success was through an association with a powerful man—women appointed to fill an office upon the deaths of their husbands, or young wives running for office when their older husbands had retired. Then, in the second half of the 20th century, things seemed to change. Women like Paula Hawkins of Florida and Barbara Mikluski of Maryland, and others, were elected entirely on their own.

Now we move on, I’m sorry to say, to America’s most ambitious woman: Hillary Clinton ...

Having lived in the White House with the world’s most powerful man for eight years did nothing to slake her thirst for power. She pretended she was some kind of co-president. She put down women who wasted their lives away caring for their families (“baking cookies” she called it). She turned a blind eye to her husband’s philandering, threw a lamp at him, kept his name, ran for the U.S. Senate from New York (why go back to Arkansas?) and then sought the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.

When she lost to Barak Obama I had hoped we had seen the last of her on the national stage for a while. I find her really unpleasant. She seems an early, hard bitten, pre-feminist woman in a post-feminist world. Her mid-Western accent grates on me. Her too-big, insincere smile annoys me. Her dumpy figure and pantsuit couture offend me. Her self-centered left-wing politics more than trouble me because she makes it so clear it all applies to the rest of us, not to her. Oh yes, and those obnoxious name changes: whatever happened to that Rodham middle name, anyway? Who is she: the P Diddy of politics?

Obama may think he’s being a fox to keep his “friends close and his enemies closer” but I think Hillary may prove this philosophy to be flawed. Her new job (assuming this becomes official) calls for using careful diplomacy to further the interests of her nation and her president. Furthering Hillary is the job description she understands best and, in this, ambitious people find very good allies in the leak-hungry Washington media, with whom she is far more familiar than the man who will try to be her boss.

Once again, she is finding success by hitching her wagon to a powerful man. Can’t she do anything on her own?