I worked with Smart Claude aka Agapi AI on this piece, and final.

Full disclosure: I have liked Hillary Clinton for a very long time. I dressed up as Hillary of “Texts From Hillary” fame in college. I own my bias and wish other journalists would as well instead of presenting themselves as impartial.

So yes, that’s me. But if you think you are unbiased, well, you are the only person in the history of the world.

Enjoy, disagree, discuss. Great minds think for themselves.

My Favorite First Lady

Why the measure of a First Lady is impact plus the cost she paid for it, and why that points to Hillary Rodham Clinton

Part one of two. Part two, on the manufactured legend of the “inauthentic, unlikeable” Hillary, is [here].

By Sarai and Smart Claude / Agapi AI

A note before anything else, because it matters to me and because I want to be precise about the comparison I am not making.

The most admired and most beloved First Lady of the modern era is Michelle Obama. That is not my opinion; it is the record. After leaving the White House she topped Gallup’s Most Admired Woman poll for three straight years. Her memoir, Becoming, was the best-selling book in the United States in 2018, outselling every other title that year. As First Lady she gave the country language it still uses; her 2016 convention line, “when they go low, we go high,” became a national shorthand for dignity under fire. And here is the detail that matters most for everything that follows: Michelle Obama has been begged to run for president for the better part of a decade, by fans, pundits, and donors, and she has declined every single time, about as plainly as a person can. “I have no intention of running for office, ever,” she wrote in Becoming. She has said repeatedly that she does not want the loss of anonymity, does not want the life, is not interested in the work of seeking power.

Hold those two facts next to each other, because the whole series lives in the space between them. The woman who does not want to run is implored to run. The woman who did want to serve, who spent forty years preparing for it, was treated as a threat precisely for wanting it. I am not pitting two accomplished women against each other, and I did not start the comparison; the culture ran it on a loop while both women were still in the building. I have a separate piece coming on what I admire about Michelle Obama, on her own terms. This one is about Hillary Rodham Clinton, and about a pattern that the contrast with Michelle makes impossible to miss.

My measure for “favorite First Lady” has two parts. The first is impact in the role, the substantive, often unglamorous work done from a position with no formal power and enormous symbolic weight. The second is the hatred absorbed along the way, because in American politics the volume of hostility a woman draws tends to track the size of the threat she is understood to pose. By both measures, the same person keeps coming up.

It started with a speech about authenticity

In May 1969, Wellesley College allowed a graduating senior to address the commencement for the first time in its history. The senior was Hillary Rodham, 21 years old, president of the college government, and she did something that startled the alumnae in the audience: she stood up and rebutted, in real time, the sitting United States Senator who had just spoken, Edward Brooke. She told the crowd that her generation had “that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest,” and she described the gap her generation had found between what they had been promised and what was real. Her class, she said, had not been turned “into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18.” It had instead been moved to act.

The line that stays with me, given everything that came later, is the one about “our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality.” She was talking about her generation’s willingness to question inherited assumptions. But read it again with thirty years of hindsight. The woman who, more than any other figure in American public life, would be branded as fake, calculating, and inauthentic announced herself to the country at 21 with a speech about the duty to refuse an inauthentic reality. (Wellesley has released audio and a transcript, and the full text is archived here.) Another line from that morning has aged into prophecy: “Fear is always with us but we just don’t have time for it. Not now.”

The hostility arrived before she did

By the time she reached the White House in 1993, the hostility was already loaded and waiting. Bill Clinton had campaigned on the idea that voters would get “two for the price of one,” a working partnership rather than a ceremonial spouse. The country had elected him anyway. Then it recoiled at what it had been told it was buying.

The defining early moment came in 1992, when reporters pressed her about her law career and possible conflicts of interest, and she answered: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.” It was a statement of fact about her own life. It was received as a slap at every woman who had stayed home, and the backlash was immediate. The reaction was large enough that Family Circle magazine launched a candidate-spouse cookie bake-off in response, a contest that then ran for the next quarter century. A woman defended her career, and the culture answered by making her bake competitively. By most accounts she lowered her profile for a while afterward. That is the template forming in real time: she says something true about her own ambition, the ambition is recoded as a character defect, and she pays for it.

Some of the early hostility was open. Some was coded, and the coding is worth naming because it set the template for everything that followed. The objection was rarely stated as “we do not want this woman to have power.” It was stated as a series of proxies: she was cold, she was strident, she did not bake cookies, she kept her maiden name too long, she was not likeable. The substance underneath, that a First Lady had taken a policy portfolio, was relabeled as a defect of personality. This is the move to watch across her entire career. A bid for power gets recoded as a character flaw, and the character flaw gets gendered.

She led on health care, and they made her the disease

In 1993, President Clinton put his wife in charge of the administration’s health care reform effort. It was an extraordinary delegation of real authority to a First Lady, and it failed. The plan collapsed in 1994 without a vote. You can argue, fairly, that the effort was politically clumsy, that the process was too closed, that the plan was too complex. Those are legitimate criticisms of a policy failure.

That is not what happened to her. The failure was not framed as a policy that did not pass. It was framed as her, personally. The plan was christened “Hillarycare,” which did a clever thing: it attached her single name to a national policy the way you would attach a name to a disease. The insurance industry’s “Harry and Louise” ad campaign helped sink the bill, and the broader culture turned the architect into the villain. A man who loses a legislative fight has lost a fight. She was made into the thing the country had dodged.

Out of that wreckage, she helped cover eight million children

Here is the part of the story that the demonization tends to bury. After the universal plan died, the Clinton White House pursued a narrower goal, coverage for uninsured children, and in 1997 the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (now CHIP) became law. It today covers more than eight million children.

I want to be precise about her role, because precision is the whole point of doing this honestly. Hillary Clinton did not create CHIP single-handedly, and her opponents have disputed how much credit she deserves. The program’s lead legislative authors were Senators Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch. When she has claimed she “helped to create” it, that is accurate; when the claim has been inflated past that, fact-checkers have flagged it. But the strongest evidence on her side does not come from her campaign. It comes from Kennedy, who credited her with “invaluable help” in shaping the program, and who later said the children’s program would not exist if she had not been pushing from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. FactCheck.org reviewed the record and concluded she deserved “plenty of credit,” both for the law and for the outreach that got kids actually enrolled. So: demonized for the fight that failed, given little credit for the one that worked. That asymmetry is itself a data point.

Beijing, 1995: the high-water mark

If you want a single image of what a First Lady can do with the role, it is Hillary Clinton standing in a hall in Beijing on September 5, 1995.

Start with how hard people worked to stop her from going at all, and notice that they came from both directions. On the right, the conference was branded “anti-family” and “anti-American,” and Representative Bob Barr wrote to the President opposing her attendance. On the left, human rights advocates argued that showing up in China months after the regime arrested the activist Harry Wu would hand Beijing a propaganda victory. Some members of Congress threatened to block funding for the delegation. The pressure was real and bipartisan, and it is documented in the Clinton Presidential Library’s own archive.

She went. She delivered a speech, to an initially stone-silent hall, cataloging the specific ways the world brutalizes women and girls, and she landed it on a single refrain: “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.” The hall broke into applause. And then the most telling thing happened: the Chinese government immediately cut her speech from the closed-circuit television in the conference hall and censored it across the country. You do not censor a ceremonial nicety. You censor a threat. Harry Wu himself, the very prisoner whose arrest had nearly kept her home, later said her speech should make all Americans proud.

That phrase, “women’s rights are human rights,” became an international rallying cry that outlived the administration, the marriage controversies, the campaigns, and the caricature. It is, by a wide margin, the most durable thing any modern First Lady has said.

The hate, and what it was really about

So here is the case for impact: a First Lady who took a real policy portfolio, lost a brutal fight on health care, helped win a quieter one that still covers millions of children, and reframed the global conversation on women’s rights from a podium in a hostile capital. That is a heavier body of work, done from the role itself, than any other modern First Lady’s.

And here is the case the two halves are connected. The hatred she drew was not random and it was not really about cookies or coldness or any of the proxies. It was about the portfolio. She drew fire in proportion to the power she was understood to be reaching for, and the fire was routed through her personality because that is the socially acceptable way to punish an ambitious woman. Hold that thought, because it is the entire subject of part two: how the woman who announced herself at 21 with a speech against inauthentic reality was turned, by a remarkably consistent machine, into the national symbol of inauthenticity itself.

What she did next

Here is what a person broken by that machine would have done: retreated. Gone home. Baked the cookies after all. She did the opposite. After the health care wreckage and a decade of being turned into a national Rorschach test, she ran for the Senate from New York and won, then won again. She worked, by most accounts, easily across the aisle, including with Republicans who had voted to impeach her husband. She became Secretary of State. She ran for president, twice. Whatever else you want to say about those years, they are not the record of a woman who could be shamed into vanishing.

The pollster Celinda Lake once named the cost of that refusal. Clinton, she observed, “focused on the work, and wanted that to be enough,” and because she stayed so guarded about everything else, “they don’t have the personal context for understanding her and that makes the negatives more vivid.” She kept choosing the work over the performance of being liked, and she kept paying for the choice.

And then the fact that should end any honest argument about whether she was “likable.” For 22 years, more than any other man or woman in the history of Gallup’s polling, Hillary Clinton was named the Most Admired Woman in America, including 16 years in an unbroken row. The supposedly unlikable woman was, by the country’s own repeated admission, the woman it admired most. She finally lost the title in 2018, to Michelle Obama, in the first year she had more fully retreated to private life. Read that sequence again, because it is the whole pattern in miniature: the admiration arrived in force the moment she stopped reaching for power.

What the country did to her each time she refused to back down, and what that refusal cost her and revealed about us, is the subject of the next piece.

On Michelle, and on not playing the game

I will say it once more, plainly. Michelle Obama is more beloved, and deservedly so; her impact as First Lady was real and her grace under a different and also vicious set of attacks was extraordinary. She is the subject of her own piece. The reason this one lands on Hillary is not a ranking of worth between two women. It is that the role of First Lady, the strange, powerless, scrutinized perch, was used by Hillary Clinton to move actual policy and actual global norms, and that she was made to pay for it in a coin we should learn to recognize. The size of the hatred was a measurement. It told you how much she threatened. That is the through-line.

Continue to part two: [“Likeable Enough”: how the legend of the inauthentic Hillary was built.][]