Since I've been recuperating, I've been searching the internet, marinating my brain in primary politics. I read this recent New Yorker piece about Hillary, and discovered a Tom Junod profile from eight years ago that contained this nugget:
I tried to return my attention to the article about Hillary but couldn't. It was a long article, full of facts about Whitewater and cattle futures and Travelgate and health care, but now it seemed incomplete, as any article would that did not address what is to me the most salient and interesting and inexplicable fact about Hillary Clinton -- that so many men absolutely hate her and that their hatred is less political than it is sexual. Indeed, if George Bush was said to remind women of their first husbands, Hillary reminds men of...well, it's hard to say, exactly, for to ask men to contemplate the question of Hillary Clinton is to open oneself to an entire subterranean world of men, an underground encounter group where the gripes are various and specific and churlish and childish and reflexive and paltry and endless. Under the guise of political discontent, men say things about Hillary Clinton that they would never say about other women, much less their wives, although, if truth be told, what she seems to embody is nothing more and nothing less than their own resentment that they didn't marry a woman with better legs and bigger tits.
I think about Hillary a lot these days, and it's not necessarily because I'm a supporter. She's been a part of my consciousness since my seventh grade year, which coincided with her husband's first run for president. My mom pulled me and my younger sister out of school one day and marched us down to a convention center where she was speaking.
Of course I can't remember what she said. I do remember that her performance was overshadowed by a blistering intro by late, great Texas guv Ann Richards. She shared the stage with Chelsea, who would've been about my age at the time.
My two sisters and I were raised by my mom. Because we didn't live with any men, and because of the reigning hysteria about broken homes and latchkey kids, I think we developed something of an us-against-the-world attitude. Maybe my mom was trying to blunt that, or open up our conception of the possible (something she did a lot of).
Anyway. I wouldn't ever defend Hillary's Senate record or political positions, but when the discussion slides into the sort of ineffable gut hatred, I'm liable to lash out just as irrationally in defense of Hillary. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think that somewhere along the line, I related to Chelsea, and maybe that means that I think of Hillary as being somehow mom-like.
In New Hampshire, the pollsters noticed an interesting donut hole: Young and middle-aged women voted for Obama, and those in their 20s dropped ballots for Hillary. Maybe those women were like me, folks who associated Hillary's navigation of the first lady role with the way their mothers adapted to the changing professional landscape.
Sigh. Who knows. My mom doesn't need my protection (she's a black belt, btw) and Hillary probably doesn't either. It's 8 o'clock. The polls have closed in South Carolina. Now it's time to check on the returns.
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