The Really Real Hillary

By JUDITH WARNER
The New York Times
March 14, 2007

Poor Hillary Clinton. Not only does she have to overcome the electability thing, the likability thing and — with some voters at least — the Bill thing. Now she’s got to live up to the whole woman thing — the promise that, as Ellen Malcolm, president and founder of the fund-raising group Emily’s List, recently proclaimed on behalf of all women nationwide, she will be “a president of the United States who is like us.”

In other words, to garner widespread support among the vast, inchoate, contentious, ever-evolving 54 percent of the electorate that her advisers project to be female in the next general election (and to hold the keys to victory), Hillary has to become someone every woman can relate to. She not only has to represent us, but also to mirror us, lift us up and move us, and know how we feel, what we want, and how we live. And, worst of all, she’s got to be real.

And that, pollsters, pundits and voters tend to agree, is a bit of a problem.

“I don’t feel the realness from her,” is how a young woman in Florida put it to Melinda Henneberger, whose book “If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear” will be published in May.

“You hear this over and over,” Henneberger told me.

You don’t have to go rereading Simone de Beauvoir, of course, to know that the perception of realness in a woman has very little to do with reality. It has nothing whatsoever to do with biology, only a little to do with the kinds of experiences that women tend to share and a great deal to do with expressive style: how many signifiers you can knock off in the space of a sound bite to get across to the greatest possible number of women that you are — really — one of them.

You can do this, as a freshman senator, Claire McCaskill, did at a celebratory Emily’s List luncheon in Washington last week, by sharing your insecurities: “I can’t believe I’m here. ... I can’t believe I’m in the room with these giants in our government,” she told the crowd, recalling the “pinch-me moments” she’d experienced upon arrival in Washington. (She also said she wanted to hug every person in the room.) You can shed a tear, or better yet, movingly suppress your tears while inspiring buckets more as the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, did, speaking tremolo-voiced of her encounters with Iraq soldiers.

What you probably shouldn’t do is talk policy, with a passion and warmth and profound sense of purpose that contrasts sharply with your rather flat delivery of lines like, “The fact is that being a woman — being a wife, a mother, having to work my way forward in the legal profession and politics — is part of who I am.”

But then, Hillary’s a real tear-stopper. She has a voice that is metallic and somewhat atonal. She has the sentence structure and cadences of a political science professor. I do not mean these things as insults; she is trying out, after all, for the job of president of the United States, not fairy godmother. Nor, for that matter, your best friend. Hillary’s friends say she is warm and certainly very real. But she clearly isn’t wired to project “realness” on the national stage. And frankly, for political figures, projection is what matters most.

It’s the mimicry of authenticity that carries or sinks them. It either rings true — in the case of women, by setting off lots of “just like me ... or my sister ... or my mother ... or my best friend” bells — or it falls flat.

Pelosi’s got her reality show down pat. She’s an Everymom, the strict taskmaster who will rip the throat out of anyone, including her own kids, who behaves badly. When she swells with pride — as she did the other day, twisting her shoulders in girlish excitement as she discussed Hillary’s run — you get all warm and happy inside. You can picture her shaking a finger in the face of major potentates, filling them with fears they didn’t know lay dormant in their psyches.

Her performance of femininity is so far superior to Clinton’s that it’s painful. That doesn’t mean she’s a better woman or more “real”; it’s just that she’s got the schmaltz factor all sewn up. Schmaltz — what my piano teacher, with some desperation, used to urge me to put into my playing — is something that Bill Clinton just oozes. But Hillary doesn’t.

We might wish her to gain it for the sake of winning the election. But that could just mean that in the quest for “authenticity,” she would lose a little piece of her soul.