What if Hillary Clinton were a man? What if she were a 68-year-old man rather than a 68-year-old woman? Would we think differently of her? Her raised voice would be lower. She would be better at physically commanding the stage. Her indomitability might be seen as manly. If she were taller and bigger, might she have been able to get away with saying nothing about her email server — as Donald Trump has with his tax returns? As they say, I’m just askin’.

I am asking because the dislike of Hillary Clinton is so palpable that it has become akin to a prejudice. I understand the criticisms and don’t reject them out of hand. She has been slippery. She has fibbed. She’s used a private email server, which was wrong and careless. She has been the marital partner of a man who has taken other partners. She did not leave him, as many women wanted her to do. To them, she became the personification of the female doormat.

Still, it does not all add up. I know her a bit but I know others who know her quite well. In the corners of rooms dedicated to ugly gossip and whispered betrayals, what you hear from those who know her is not agreement with the general consensus, but puzzlement: She’s warm. She’s bright. She’s charming. She has a great sense of humor.

And yet, on the podium, these qualities are rarely in sight. Her voice escalates, the pitch rising, the emphasis misplaced. She is often rhetorically wrong-footed. Her smile seems fake, the wave is to no one, the laugh sounds manufactured. She is defensive. She fights for privacy, yet she has chosen politics played on the most expansive of all scales. If she wins, she will be a renter in a house owned by all of us. She will remain under continuous observation.

I met Hillary Clinton during her husband’s first campaign for the White House. It was 1992, New Hampshire, and both Clintons had stopped at a coffee shop to greet the folks and get something to eat. It was Bill’s campaign, so he took question after question, exhausting much of the county before finally sitting down at the counter. Hillary joined him. So did I. There was one more question to go. The waitress was a single mother. She wanted to go to college. Was there some sort of program that could help her?

Bill started to answer. There was this and there was that, all of them designated with some government number, and there was yet another — and here he stopped to put some eggs in his mouth — and Hillary finished the sentence for him. They weren’t a team. They were a machine. She was no ordinary political spouse, whatever that may mean or might have meant. This one was different. This was Hillary Clinton.

I would, to get right down to it, vote for Kim Kardashian over Donald Trump, so support of Hillary Clinton comes easy. Still I am vexed by her rampant unpopularity, especially among the young women who found Bernie Sanders so exciting. Sanders somewhere along the line had a child out of wedlock. Imagine if Hillary had done the same.

After Bill Clinton’s sex scandal broke, I never thought Hillary would accept Rep. Charlie Rangel’s suggestion and run for the Senate. I thought she’d seek privacy, a place to nurse her wounds. But she jumped into the race. She worked New York State hard, campaigning in every county, eschewing her usual outfits. Gail Collins reminds us in The New York Times that she wore nearly the same thing nearly every day. She won.

She will win this time, too. But it will be harder than it ought to be. It will be hard because she is a tone-deaf politician, because lots of people find her to be shrill and because she has an awesome ability to turn a political misdemeanor into a firestorm. But as Trump lazes through the campaign, relying on his unreliable instincts, she will work harder than he knows how. After all, as a woman, she’s always had to.

Richard Cohen is a columnist with The Washington Post. His email address is: cohenr@washpost.com.

Copy the Story Link