This is one of the themes of What Happened, the new book Clinton released on Tuesday. Clinton’s story, however, has involved such things in decidedly disproportionate amounts. Each will rely on performances that a dubious and tenacious public will attempt to decode. Each will involve a strategic blend of fact and fiction. Hearing it, the Washington Post’s Marc Fisher reported-or, rather, mishearing it-“Clinton’s eyes filled with tears.” She asked the staffer, “It really says I had sex with a collie?”Įvery politician’s story will fuse the mundane and the mythic. Once, when Clinton was the first lady, a staffer read aloud from a magazine story that repeated one of the moment’s trendy rumors: that Hillary had had sex with a colleague. Clinton may be a vessel for this moment’s internet-fueled iteration of the paranoid style she feels them, though, those accusations flung in her direction. The trouble, for all involved, is that she is also a human, with the moral and emotional freight the designation implies. “I’m a Rorschach test,” Clinton said of herself, during the 2008 presidential primaries, and she was correct. Is her marriage a sham? Is she sick with a chronic disease? Did she kill Vince Foster? Is she, just under those perfectly pressed pantsuits, hiding the scales of a reptile? Whatever she might say, a significant portion of the populace will simply assume she is lying: Lady Macbeth, in the age of alternative facts. Whatever Hillary Clinton might do, a hefty chunk of people will assume its nefariousness. In her, the demands of American celebrity and the dynamics of American politics have mingled in an extremely targeted form of magical thinking. It was a Kinsley gaffe whose truth was revealed not by the politician, but about her: Many people will believe pretty much anything about the former first lady/senator/secretary of state/presidential candidate. She’d been gazing at Clinton, she explained, out of confusion. She noticed a woman staring at her-with more intensity than even Hillary Clinton is used to being stared at by members of the public. She was in Scranton, Pennsylvania, campaigning with Joe Biden in his swing-state-set hometown. There’s an anecdote Hillary Clinton tells about the frenzied run-up to the 2016 U.S.
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