To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Hillary's First Speech: Historic 1969 Audio Reveals "Blueprint For Her Future"

Hi podcast listeners, it's Anne here with this weeks to the best of our knowledge extra. So the Democratic National Convention has been going on this week, and everyone's anticipating the main event, Hillary Clinton's speech accepting her party's nomination. But there's a different speech I want to talk about today, it's a speech Hillary gave a long time ago, it's the commencement address she gave in 1969 when she graduated from Wellesley College, she's just 21 years old, and the full audio of that speech has only just come to light. So we're going to hear the full speech, but I wanted to put it in some context first. So I called Rebecca Traster, she's been covering women and politics from a feminist perspective for more than a decade, she's a writer at large for New York magazine, and she has been at the Democratic Convention all week, where it has been unbelievably hot, it's unrelentingly hot, it's oppressively hot, it's monster hot, it's equatorially hot, I don't even know if that's the word. Well, it's been certainly been a very dramatic convention so far.

Yes, yes, it has been. So thank you for bearing with me, I really want to talk about this speech, and then try to put it in some context, I know you've heard it before, but it's new to me. It's such a remarkable document. There is the blueprint for Hillary Rodham Clinton's future in that speech that she gave in 1969, and it's interesting because the speech itself is pretty wackado in a lot of ways. Well, of course, she was only 21 years old and a senior graduating from college. I know you've read this speech hundreds of times, but the full audio has only been available for a month or so. What was it like for you to hear it for the first time to hear her voice? Oh, it was so startling. I played it. I saw that the audio became available, and it was just a day or two before she clinched the nomination, and I was in a room with my husband, and I said, oh, my God, what Wellesley found the audio of Hillary's speech. And I just sort of pressed play, and we both stopped in our tracks. I mean, I was sort of, if we were doing other things when I pressed play, and we both just stopped and sat down

and listened because it is, our voice is so different, but recognizable. It's the voice of a very young woman who is going to go on to be one of the most crucial figures of the 20th and 21st century, but here she is captured speaking these words in which you hear this blueprint for what's going to come after. It's an incredibly haunting audio because it is the combine you never heard her so young before. And you know that voice so well. I mean, you have heard that voice mocked on Saturday Night Live for two and a half decades, but to hear it as the voice of not a child, but a very, very young woman. She stumbles and pauses occasionally. And laughs. And it was one of the things that she's always had a hard time with as a national figure and a political figure is being humanized. I mean, for a million complicated reasons that people, including me, have written books about. But one of the things about that audio is that it's automatically humanizing

because you hear her youth. You can imagine her having friends and boyfriends and going to parties. It's the voice of an undergraduate, a college student, but that's not, that voice has not yet become so familiar to us that we can practically not even hear the human being issuing it, you know, and when you get, when you, it's jarring and it forces you to reckon with her as a human being to hear her at 21, saying these words. I'm very glad that Miss Adams made it clear that what I'm speaking for today is all of us, the 400 of us. And I find myself in a familiar position that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable element of criticizing and constructive protest. One of the very first things she says, we're not yet in positions of power and influence. It sounds like an agenda. I mean, there's something purposeful about it. Yes. I

think that this is a person who has always been ambitious and I use that as an incredibly positive word. I know ambition is not always associated positively with women. My read on her is that it's really the conviction that she's always had, I think, and I think it's not unfamiliar to a lot of smart women that they know how to fix something. I think Hillary Clinton is often, you know, if you look at her throughout her life, she is an extremely smart woman who I think believes she knows how to fix things, the lever stipple, the switch is to turn. And I think you can see in that we're not yet in positions of power. I think this is a young woman who was dying to be in a position of power, not, and I don't mean that. And I want to be really clear that I don't mean that in a critical way or that I'm suggesting that she is self -serving, I think she was dying to get in a position of power so she could be the one to implement all the ideas she had for how to fix things. Can you put the speech in some context, and what was going on

at the time nationally and in Hillary Rodham's life? Well, Hillary Rodham had come to Wellesley as a conservative. She had grown up in suburban Illinois and was a Republican, had grown up in a Republican family. Yeah, people don't remember that. She was a member of the Young Republicans Club. Yeah, she was a Goldwater girl. And so here this impressionable, very smart young woman arrives at Wellesley, a conservative young Republican. It is, it's the mid -60s. The height of the civil rights movement, protests against the Vietnam War, the early stirrings of the women's movement, she is a unique figure on the Wellesley campus. She was considered extraordinary even by her peers at that time as an undergraduate. Well, in this speech, this was the first time an undergraduate student gave a commencement speech and she was nominated by her fellow students. Yes, her classmates were so struck by her that they lobbied hard to make this exception to what had been a longstanding rule, which was that a student didn't speak at commencement. But Hillary Rodham, they decided

some number of her classmates was extraordinary enough that they wanted her to be the speaker. But one of the interesting things about how the speech came about, and Hillary has written about this in her memoirs, is that once she got this historic gig, she wasn't sure what she was going to say. Here was this woman, she'd been the leader of the student government. She had presided over the student government during a period in which there were a lot of conversations about bringing more racial diversity to the Wellesley campus in terms of both faculty and students. There were, during her tenure was the moment at which they got rid of the parietal rules, parietal rules used to dictate at women's colleges, you know, that there were certain hours that men couldn't be in the dorms, that doors had to be opened, that you, you know, women had to wear skirts, all these old -fashioned gender norms. During Hillary's presidency of the Wellesley student body, those parietals went out the door. There was enormous anger about the Vietnam War that had really struck the campuses that had had many campuses around the country. And so here was Hillary Rodham in this historic

role trying to bring together these four years in which she'd been at Wellesley and so much had changed about young people's relationship to the world, to their government, to their country, and she wasn't sure what she was going to say. To the point where the morning of the commencement, she was so scared because she hadn't written a speech. And then this remarkable thing happened that also is useful to think about in the context of what we're watching now, presidentially. Directly before her speech, Edward Brooke, who is the first African -American senator and a Republican, was a speaker at the ceremony. And he, somebody Hillary had campaigned for, worked for. Yes, yes, she had worked for him. I mean, volunteered. But he gave a speech in which he did not acknowledge all of the kind of political foment that had so marked the lives of these students. And his speech, I think, was very troubling

for many of the people who were listening because it seemed to sort of blot out the very change and very dramatic political and social realizations that so many of them had had. And so suddenly, Hillary Rodham had a foil. This brought her some clarity and she gave the speech. And it seems to be the first part of it seems to be completely off the cuff. And she sort of, it's all off the cuff. And she's sort of chastising him. And this has to be very quick because, you know, I do have a little speech to give. But part of the problem with just empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy, we've had lots of sympathy. But we feel that for too long, our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible. What does it mean to hear that? 13 .3 % of the people in this

country are below the poverty line. That's a percentage. We're not interested in social reconstruction. It's human reconstruction. How can we talk about percentages and trends? This was Hillary Rodham's first moment of national rundown. She is speaking back to him in a way, I mean, it got her national attention, the fact that she had gotten up on stage as this first student commencement speaker in Wellesley's history and rebuked the senator who had preceded her, made news. She was written about in Life magazine. It was sort of her coming out politically. Yes. And it's also, I mean, I should point this out, I've written a lot about the gendered realities of speaking publicly as a woman because especially in political contexts, we're so used to hearing men as the inspiring orators, as the ones who present the political poetry. And women who historically have played a much more pragmatic and practical role within politics as organizers, as workers, as the laborers, the people who make the copies and knock on the doors and stuff the envelopes, and who often are the ones crafting the policy but are not the ones who sell

it. It's very interesting. We do still hear women differently. And I think train them to speak differently. And one of the challenges that Hillary's up against is that sometimes it's hard to go up as a woman and sell yourself as a savior. We don't yet see women as our natural leaders. We also don't teach women to go out and sell themselves. There's a smaller version of that perhaps happening back when she's an undergraduate. Here she is in this historic role selected by her classmates to be this speaker, but there's a degree to which she can't be too self -celebratory in that moment. There are a few other things I kind of wanted to call out about that speech that just strike me about it when she's reacting to Senator Brooke. She says this remarkable thing, empathy doesn't do us anything, doesn't do anything for us. And then she goes on to say this thing about politics should be the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible. So what do you make of

that? This empathy doesn't do anything. That is some classic Hillary, Madame Clinton, right there. The funny thing is she's an empathetic person, she really listens, she talks. But when it comes to politics, when it comes to policy, Hillary Clinton is like an engine of action. She just wants to do things. She doesn't have a lot of time for saying the nice things. Even though she often does say the nice things, by the way, it makes her sound terribly cold when I say this. But I think that she's always been interested in, in really the pragmatism, exactly what she says, the art of taking what seems to be impossible and making it possible. How do we, a great, we can sit around and talk about why we're upset, about why these things are happening, about what the injustice feels like. We can talk about, you know, the symbolism and the emotion of it. But really, I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in how we fix it. And she ends with this poem that was written by one of her friends. And it's remarkable because it goes back to this theme

of this pragmatic view of politics, of making me impossible possible. The end of the poem is really quite beautiful. My entrance into the world of so -called social problems must be with quiet laughter or not at all. The hollow man of anger and bitterness, the bountiful ladies of righteous degradation, all must be left to a bygone age. And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle for all those myths and admins, which oddly we have acquired, and from which we would become unburdened to create a newer world to translate the future into the past. We have no need of false revolutions in a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds and hang our wills up on narrow pegs. It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives, and once those limits are understood to understand that limitations no longer exist. Earth could be fair, and you and I must be free. Not to save the world in a glorious crusade.

Not to kill ourselves with a nameless, gnawing pain, but to practice with all the skill of our being, the art of making possible. Thanks. To a certain extent, you have to put this in context. We're talking about this was 1969. This is the era of massive student protests, and here she's standing there and drawing a line between herself and those protesters. She is on the left and sympathetic to all their movements, and yet she is clearly saying no standing in the street and protesting may feel good, but it doesn't change anything. And that's, and that is another thing that has been consistent throughout her career. Even as a college student, her political and ideological sympathies were certainly with the protesters, with their ideas. But exactly as you point out, she wasn't, she wasn't ever the radical protestor herself. She was interested in their ideas and how to implement them. And I think that there was, I mean, if there was a knock on her in college, it is the same as it is now that she would

take some of the demands and the ideas of the protesters and negotiate with an administration that was kind of shutting out the protesters. And Hillary, Hillary's approach was, wait, both sides of this, we're not gonna get anywhere. Let's negotiate. That's so consistent throughout her career that that's why we now see her, not incorrectly, as somebody who's certainly willing to compromise, who's certainly willing to work with the opposition in order to make small steps rather than coming to the sort of deadlock of, of two sides that are neither of whom is gonna budge. There's another line in this 1969 speech that struck me as so characteristically, Hillary Radham even today. It's near the end and she says, fear is always with us. We just don't have time for it. That to me hints at what has, I think, become one of her signature character traits. This ability, not just to withstand criticism, but almost to ignore it, to brush it off in this sort of, with this hint of impatience almost.

Well, the lines that come before that were so moving to me the first time I read them. I wrote a book about her 2008 campaign. It was about women in the 2008 election cycle. So it was about Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama and Sarah Palin. But most of it was about Hillary Clinton. But I was so struck and sort of pullaxed by the lines that came before the one you just cited because they seemed so prophetic and so moving to me because thinking about generational change for women. So she sets that fear is always with us, idea up by noting. This is at the Wellesley commencement, when, of course, many classes, many previous classes of Wellesley have returned. And Wellesley was a place where in the mid 20th century, women were really trained to be wives. Nora Efron, who preceded her at Wellesley by about five years, has, you know, said at a Wellesley commencement years later that when she was at the college, she was taught, if you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect. If

you wanted to be a lawyer, you married a lawyer. Now, the irony is if Hillary Clinton wanted to be a president, she married a president. So in some ways, she was living the old Wellesley model that Efron had described. But in some ways, of course, again, she was doing it as this ground breaker who was different from everybody who's preceded her. But this was a huge shake up for Wellesley. So you had generations of Wellesley graduates who didn't understand the way that the women's women, the civil rights movement, was transforming the generation of undergraduates. So she must have bumped into one of these alumni at the commencement exercises and what she says in the speech is, one of the most tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to a woman who said she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid. Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it, not now. The idea that an older woman could look at young Hilary Rodham, look into her future and say, I wouldn't want to be you for anything in the world because it's scary and to look into

Hilary Rodham's future and see everything that was coming down the pipe toward her or rather that she was rushing toward or whatever. The prophecy of that interaction between a woman from a previous generation and Hilary Rodham, who of course has been this bridge figure born in 1947, now running for president to be the first woman president in 2016. The generational impact of that exchange has always resonated with me in a really powerful way. That is a really remarkable moment, you know, for all the reasons you said. And you know, I'm thinking that in many ways, that's how many people feel today looking ahead. We're at what feels like a sort of civilizational, if not planetary crisis moment, you know, we've got climate change, we've got terrorism. I mean, we all know the reasons that the future feels really scary right now. I don't know. It seems to me that Hilary

still approaches the future and all of that stuff with a little sense of impatience about the fear kind of like, yes, it's there, but can we please just get on with it? Exactly. Exactly. It's the end of that poem. No, it's not about a glorious crusade or wallowing and nameless, knowing pain. It's about doing something about it. No, it's, I mean, it's a, it's a very, I know people who are like this. I'm sure you do too. She perhaps is more like that than anyone we've ever met, but that sense of like, I don't have time to sit around and talk about this anymore. Let's just do it. Rebecca Traster has covered women and politics from a phone as perspective for more than a decade. She's a writer at large for New York magazine. She's the author of Big Girls Don't Cry, her book about women and the 2008 election, and most recently all the single ladies about the political power of unmarried women. And now let's hear that historic speech. And afterwards writer and journalist Michelle Goldberg is going to join us. She's been covering Hillary haters lately, but this is Hillary Rodden Clinton,

Hillary 1969. I'm very glad that Miss Adams made it clear that what I'm speaking for today is all of us, the 400 of us. And I find myself in a familiar position that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable element of criticizing and constructive protest. And I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooks said. And this has to be very quick because I do have a little speech to give. But part of the problem with just empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy, we've had lots of sympathy. But we feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible.

And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible. What does it mean to hear that? What does it mean to hear that 13 .3 % of the people in this country are below the poverty line? That's a percentage. We're not interested in social reconstruction. It's human reconstruction. How can we talk about percentages and trends? The complexities are not lost in our analyses, but perhaps they're just put into what we consider a more human and eventually a more progressive perspective. The question about possible and impossible was one that we brought with us to Wellesley four years ago. We arrived not yet knowing what was not possible. Consequently, we expected a lot. Our attitudes are easily understood. Having grown up, having come to consciousness in the first five years of this decade. Years

dominated by men with dreams, men in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the space program. So we arrived at Wellesley. And we found, as all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn't a discouraging gap and it didn't turn us into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18. It just inspired us to do something about that gap. What we did is often difficult for some people to understand. They ask us quite often, why if you're to satisfy do you stay in a place? Well, if you didn't care a lot about it, you wouldn't stay. It's almost as though my mother used to say, I'll always love you, but there are times when I certainly won't like you. Our love for this place, this particular place, Wellesley College, coupled with our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions underlying our education. Before the days of the media orchestrated demonstrations, we had our own gathering over in Founders

Parking Lab. We protested against the rigid academic distribution requirements. We worked for a pass -fail system. We worked for a say in some of the process of academic decision -making. And luckily, we were at a place where when we questioned the meaning of a liberal arts education, there were people with enough imagination to respond to that questioning. So we have made progress. We've achieved some of the things that we initially saw as lacking in that gap between expectation and reality. Our concerns were not, of course, solely academic as all of us know. We worried about inside Wellesley questions of admissions, the kind of people that were coming to Wellesley, the kind of people that should be coming to Wellesley, the process for getting them here. We questioned about what responsibility we should have, both for our lives as individuals and for our lives as members of a collective group. Coupled with our concerns for the Wellesley inside here in the community, we're our concerns for what happened beyond halfway house. We wanted to know what relationship Wellesley was going to have to the outer world. We were lucky that

Miss Adams, one of the first things she did, was set up the cross -registration with MIT, because everyone knows that education just can't have any parochial bounds anymore. The next thing, one of the other things that we did was the upward bound program. There are so many other things that we could talk about, so many attempts to kind of, at least the way we saw it, pull ourselves into the world outside. And I think we've succeeded. There will be an upward bound program just for one example on the campus this summer. Many of the issues that I've mentioned, those of sharing power and responsibility, those of assuming power and responsibility, have been general concerns on campuses throughout the world. But underlying those concerns, there is a theme, a theme which is so trite and so old because the words are so familiar. It talks about integrity and trust and respect. Words have a funny way of trapping our minds on the way to our tongues, but there are necessary means, even in this multimedia age, for attempting to come to

grasp with some of the inarticulate, maybe even inarticulable things that we're feeling. We are all of us exploring a world that none of us understands, and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feeling that are prevailing, a positive and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue. The questions about those institutions are familiar to all of us. We've seen them heralded across the newspapers. Senator Brook has suggested some of them this morning. But along with using these words integrity, trust, and respect, in regard to institutions and leaders, we're perhaps

harshest with them in regard to ourselves. Every protest, every dissent, whether it's an individual academic paper, founder's lot, parking demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age. That attempted forging for many of us over the past four years has meant coming to terms with our humanness within the context of a society that we perceive. Now we can talk about reality, and I'd like to talk about reality sometime, an authentic reality, an inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see. But our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men's needs. And there's a very strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of new left collegiate protest that I find very intriguing, because it harkens back to a lot of the old virtues, a lot of the fulfillment of original ideas. And it's also a very unique

American experience. It's such a great adventure. I mean, if the experiment in human living doesn't work in this country, in this age, it's not going to work anywhere. But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves. To be educated to freedom must be evidenced in action. And here again is where we ask ourselves, as we have asked our parents and our teachers, questions about integrity, trust, and respect. Those three words mean different things to all of us. Some of the things they can mean, for instance, is integrity the courage to be whole, trying to mold an entire person in this particular context, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives. So we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know. Integrity, a man like Paul St. Meyer. Trust. This is one

word that, when I asked the class at our rehearsal, what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said, talk about trust. Talk about the lack of trust. Both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust. What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who were distrusted? All we can do is keep trying again and again and again. I mean, there's that wonderful line in East Coker by Elliott about there's only the trying again and again and again to win again what we've lost before. And then respect. There's that mutuality of respect between people where you don't see people as percentage points, where you don't manipulate people, where you're not interested in social engineering for people. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. And the word consequences, of course, catapults us into the future. One of the most

tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to a woman who said she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid. Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it, not now. There are two people that I'd like to thank before concluding. That's Aldi Acheson, who is the spearhead for this. And also Nancy Scheibner, who wrote this poem, which is the last thing that I'd like to read. My entrance into the world of so -called social problems must be with quiet laughter or not at all. The hollow man of anger and bitterness, the bountiful ladies of righteous degradation, all must be left to a bygone age. And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle for all those myths and admins, which oddly we have acquired, and from which we would become unburdened to create a newer world to translate the

future into the past. We have no need of false revolutions in a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds and hang our wills up on narrow pegs. It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives, and once those limits are understood to understand that limitations no longer exist. Earth could be fair, and you and I must be free. Not to save the world in a glorious crusade. Not to kill ourselves with a nameless, gnawing pain, but to practice with all the skill of our being, the art of making possible. Thanks. Once again, that was Hillary Rodden Plinton, delivering the 1969 commencement address at Wellesley College. Thanks to Wellesley and to PRX for the audio and for more information, visit Wellesley .edu. So one of the interesting things about that speech is that it launched Hillary Rodden into public life,

and you could say it also initiated the very first round of Hillary hating. Michelle Goldberg is a writer and journalist. She's a senior political writer for the nation, a columnist for slate, and she has been investigating the current generation of Hillary haters. I asked her to give us a chronology of the phenomenon. Sure. Well, my investigation of Hillary hating really begins when she was the first lady of Arkansas. And she was repeatedly attacked for all of her proto -feminist qualities. So there's an old interview of her on Arkansas television, where she's being sort of badgered about why she hasn't changed her name, why she doesn't have children yet, whether she's an East Coast liberal, the fact that she went to Ivy League colleges. And she ended up, you know, eventually she did change her name because the fact that she was Hillary Rodden was blamed for Bill Clinton losing his gubernatorial reelection. And you sort of see this pattern with her that plays out throughout

her life, where she gets slammed for all of her pioneering qualities. And then she reacts to that by attacking more conservative, sometimes in a very clumsy way, which elicits a whole new sort of rage about her being calculating and inauthentic and selling out progressive principles. There's a bit of damned if you do, damned if you don't. So thinking way back to Bill's first campaign, I think, when she said something rather about, you know, well, I haven't been spending my time baking cookies. She wound up having to bake cookies on stage to bake up for that. It's like, how do you imagine a sort of more like humiliating and direct comeuppance for somebody who kind of got out of line and been too much to have an uppity woman? Yeah. She was attacked. Her work for Rose Lothar and was attacked by Jerry Brown. She said something snide about, you know, well, I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but instead I chose to

pursue my career. And this was taken to be a major insult to kind of like American domestic womanhood and American homemaking. The out, the outcry was so intense that yes, she had to atone for it by participating in a cookie bake off with Barbara Bush. And I do think it's important to put some of that in context because, you know, that was a period of time when there was already so much tension in America between women who chose to work and women who chose to stay home with their kids. And it wasn't the fault of any particular individual women, just there was a huge, roiling, unhappiness in our country around trying to figure out women's roles. And it's Hillary Clinton's fate to be a lightning rod for all of the roiling unhappiness in this country for so many of our debates about gender and identity and power. You know, a part of that is just because she's been, you know, out front and she's been kind of a pathbreaker. You know, I mean, the interesting, there's a lot of people

in public life that are hated. What's interesting about Hillary Clinton is how much she's hated for often diametrically opposed reasons. For instance, well, for instance, you know, in the 90s, Hillary Clinton was basically considered, you know, America's red queen, the right painted her as this raving left wing itty law. You know, they saw her as kind of, you know, basically, Madame Mao. And in, you know, she was blamed for the fact that Newt Gingrich came to power in the 1994 midterms. That was laid at her feet, even though she had kind of very little policymaking role after health care reform. In response to that, she dialed back her presence in the White House. She became a much more cautious and calculating politician. And, you know, you're sort of seeing the left wing reaction to that right now in the furious rejection of her by, you know, many left wing activists at the Democratic Convention. Right. So for this piece you wrote recently for Slate, you talked with a

lot of Hillary haters from the entire political spectrum, left, right, center. Did you find that Hillary hating fell into certain categories? I would say that there are three categories. There are people who hate her, who hate her policies. You know, who kind of reject what she stands for, who are offended by things that she's done. You know, one of the people that I spoke to said, yeah, it's not Hillary personally. It's, you know, her policies in the Middle East are important to me as Palestinian. There's that category. There's a category of people who believe every crazy right wing conspiracy theory and, you know, kind of will elaborate her connection to all sorts of, you know, broke murders and conspiracies. And then there's a category of people, which is kind of ideologically fairly diverse, who they recoil from her personally. And sometimes their hatred for her kind of changes with the times, you know. So one person I spoke to had

been a conservative in the 90s and hated her from the right. And now he's become more liberal and hates her from that position. And said at one point, you know, that I know that kind of not liking someone shouldn't matter, but it does. This is going to be somebody who's going to be in your life for four or eight years, you know, represented in the country. And he just has a visceral reaction to her personally. Okay. So take this guy as kind of every voter. I mean, a certain type. What is it he doesn't like about her? Um, he said that, you know, he said that he felt like she was inauthentic, um, entitled those are two, those are two words that came up over and over and over again. People don't trust her. They think again, and I think part of the enough, the in authenticity is that because every element of Hillary Clinton's persona has been so ruthlessly criticized. I mean, honestly, I could have written a 5 ,000 word article about a history of criticism of Hillary Clinton's hair dues. And so, you know, and she tried

for a long time and sometimes still tries to accommodate herself to these criticisms, to contort herself. Like, for example, to give you a very, um, to take a very shallow example, for a long time, she used to wear headbands. Do you remember that? Yes, I do. Yes. I kind of liked them because she just didn't want to deal with her hair, you know, and it was just like a pragmatic thing and she didn't want to deal with her hair. But this was, I mean, if you go back and look at some of the new stories, people were outraged by these headbands, you know, they took it as a personal affront, the fact that she wasn't kind of doing more work in the way that she presented herself. And so she responded to that and she changed her hair. And then there was a whole bunch of articles about how the fact that she keeps changing her hair suggests that Hillary Clinton, um, that she's kind of scheming and conniving and inauthentic. You know, she, she did the same thing politically, you know, she was just repudiated after her attempts at health care reform. And so she decided to become more conventional, more bipartisan,

more incrementalist, you know, which again now makes people think that she has no convictions, that she, you know, doesn't promise real change. I guess the big question for me is, how much are these criticisms specifically about Hillary, which is fair? And how much are they gender based? I feel like it's really difficult to disentangle the two. And by that, I don't mean that that people who are critical of Hillary or people who don't like Hillary are necessarily sexist. But I also think that so many of the things that she's done and so many of the ways that she's kind of contorted herself and presented herself, you kind of can't disentangle any of that from the repudiation she's received for sort of transgressing gender boundaries. You know, in as much as kind of Hillary is, there's a kind of Frankenstein element to her public persona. It was, you know, created in response to the vicious sexist reaction that

she faced during her first several decades in public life and continues to face. You know, I also think there's a fair amount of social science research that women who enter into traditional mouth fields are often described in some of the ways that Hillary Clinton is described. You know, they're often described as being selfish, dishonest, shrill, unlikable. Sure. Well, I think what you're saying is something any woman leader, any woman who has a crew to certain amount of power has to deal with the the blowback charge that she's not that likable. And you know, and it doesn't just come from men. A great deal of it comes from women too. Right. And so I guess we're, you know, where this is specific to Hillary is the specific way that she has responded to this in this sort of sometimes clumsy way that she has tried to kind of tack right or tack left in order to kind of placate public opinion or where she thought public opinion was. So if you had to predict

what reaction would be if Hillary Clinton wound up becoming president of the United States, what do you think we'd see? You know, there's part of me that just dreads it and thinks that you know, just as Barack Obama's presidency has brought this kind of see the current of racism of subterranean racism to the surface of American life, we're going to see something very similar with gender and with sexism and Hillary Clinton administration. At the same time, Hillary Clinton does tend to be viewed more favorably when she's in a position than when she's competing for power. And so, you know, my hope is that those two things kind of balance each other out. Michelle, thanks so much for joining us. Oh, thank you. Michelle Goldberg is a senior political writer for the nation, a regular columnist for slate. She's also the author of books, one about the global battle over reproductive rights, and most recently the goddess pose, a biography of the woman who brought yoga to the west. I'm Anne Strange -Amps and this is to the best of our knowledge.

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