Itās hard to remember these days, but just a few years ago, everybody loved Hillary Rodham Clinton. When she stepped down as US secretary of state in January 2013 after four years in office, her approval rating stood at what the Wall Street Journal described as an āeye-poppingā 69%. That made her not only the most popular politician in the country, but the second-most popular secretary of state since 1948.
The 2012 āTexts from Hillaryā meme, which featured a sunglasses-clad Clinton scrolling through her Blackberry aboard a military flight to Libya, had given rise to a flood of think pieces hailing her ābadass cool.ā The Washington Post wanted president Barack Obama to give vice president Joe Biden the boot andreplace him with Clinton. Taking stock of Clintonās approval ratings, Nate Silver noted in a 2012 piece for the New York Times that she currently held āremarkably high numbers for a politician in an era when many public officials are distrusted or disliked.ā
How times have changed. āThe FBI And 67 Percent of Americans Distrust Hillary Clinton,ā booms a recent headline in the Huffington Post. Clintonās favorability ratings currently hoveraround 40.8%. Bob Woodward complains that āthere is something unrelaxed about the way she is communicating.ā āHillaryās personality repels me,ā Walker Bragman writes in Salon.
How can we reconcile the āunlikableā Democratic presidential candidate of today with the adored politician of recent history? Itās simple: Public opinion of Clinton has followed a fixed pattern throughout her career. Her public approval plummets whenever she applies for a new position. Then it soars when she gets the job. The wild difference between the way we talk about Clinton when she campaigns and the way we talk about her when sheās in office canāt be explained as ordinary political mud-slinging. Rather, the predictable swings of public opinion reveal Americansā continued prejudice against women caught in the act of asking for power.
We beg Clinton to run, and then accuse her of feeling āentitledā to win. Several feminist writers have analyzed the Clinton yo-yo. Melissa McEwan sees a deliberate pattern of humiliation, which involves ābuilding [Clinton] up and pressuring her to take on increasingly prominent public challenges, only to immediately turn on her and unleash breathtaking misogyny against her when she steps up to the plate.ā
If you find this hypothesis unlikely, thereās Ann Friedmanās explanation: Clinton makes people uncomfortable by succeeding too visibly. Clinton is trapped in āthe catch-22 of female ambition,ā Friedman writes: āTo succeed, she needs to be liked, but to be liked, she needs to temper her success.ā
Yet it seems odd that even when Clinton ascends to ever-greater positions of powerāfrom first lady to senator, from senator to secretary of stateāwe start liking her again once sheās landed the job. Itās not her success that seems to arouse ire, but the act of campaigning itself.
This issue is not specific to Clinton. As Slate writer Jamelle Bouie has pointed out on Twitter, even progressive demigod Elizabeth Warren was seen as āunlikableā when she ran for the Massachusetts senate seat. Local outlets published op-eds about how women were being āturned offā by Warrenās āknow-it-all styleāāa framing thatās indistinguishable from 2016 Clinton coverage. āIām asking her to be more authentic,ā a Democratic analyst for Boston radio station WBUR said of Warren. āI want her to just sound like a human being, not read the script that makes her sound like some angry, hectoring school marm.ā
āSady Doyle:Ā America loves women like Hillary Clintonāas long as theyāre not asking for a promotion
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