Why Women Will Dump Hillary
By: Peggy Noonan
April, Vol. V, No. 3
Illustration by Gary Smith

Hillary is courting the critical swing votes of suburban women by saying she deeply understands their concerns, because she is like them. But the author says women know that's nonsense.

While she runs for a U.S. Senate seat, Hillary Clinton will promise to be a voice in Washington for women and their special concerns: I care about your problems and understand them, and those Republicans in Congress, those unfeeling men in gray suits, those macho men with comb-overs, do not.

Will women respond? Mrs. Clinton sees them, of course, as part of her natural constituency, but even though she does well with black women, she has been disturbed to find out that white women are not supporting her in the polls to the extent she'd hoped. Mrs. Clinton's urgent message to these women will be this: Even though I come from another state, even though I've never lived here, even though I seem to be a product of the glamour and power of worlds far away, even though I have experienced dramas and circumstance in my life that seem frankly outsized and strange to you, and even though I'm the first lady-for all that, I'm a lot like you. And because I'm like you, I'll know how to speak for you. Will women believe it?

In the heart of New York's Nassau County, along the string of suburbs from Levittown to Babylon, is a town called Massapequa. Conductors on the Long Island Railroad call it out in a rolling bass: "Masssss PEE Kwuh, Massssspeekwuh PARK." I remember that a decade ago a magazine called Massapequa "the new Peoria"-a town whose ethnic and demographic mix and whose particular voting patterns made it comparable to Peoria, Illinois, in the 1960s: If it'll play there, it will play anywhere.

I grew up in Massapequa, and I return in the summers to visit my friends. I will be with them again this summer, on the beach at Tobay. All around us there will be a bustling assortment of people-guys who look like bikers and men who look like middle managers, young fathers with three kids under eight, grandfathers showing the kids how to catch crabs off the pilings on the dock. Most of the women look like mothers and grandmothers because they are; they work in restaurants and real estate offices, and teach school; they own delicatessens, are nurses and stay-at-home moms.

I will sit on the beach with my friends and their friends, and already I'm talking to them in my head. I'm talking to one of them anyway, Christine, who was my best friend when we were 12 and who is one of my best friends today, and who is thinking about voting for Mrs. Clinton but isn't sure. I'm imagining her and her husband, Bobby, and the kids at the beach on Saturday, August 26, 2000. I'm thinking: Hey, missy, sitting on the beach and not going into the water because you don't think you look so great in a bathing suit anymore and because-well, you're a mother, and you don't jump and splash in the waves anymore, the cold of the ocean feels icy now, and rough. Bobby still goes in, but this is just one of the many wonders of life: A guy hits 49 and he still splashes. He jumps into the waves like a smooth seal, comes up in a burst, turns, and spits out surf. The kids laugh, and you smile.

You're slathering sunblock on your pale, freckled skin, and now Bobby is standing near you, arms crossed, looking at the waves and the kids and the lifeguards. Neither of you ever mentions this, but you know what he's doing. He is standing watch, claiming and maintaining his hundred square feet of beach, his blankets, his umbrella. He's making sure everyone's safe. He's looking to see if the lifeguards are paying attention, and if they're not, he'll go and chat with them, tell a joke, ask a question, get them focused.

Three blankets: one for the kids, one for you, and one for the coolers and whoever walks by. Your girls are on the blue-checkered cotton blanket, gossiping and laughing and reading magazines. The coolers are full. You packed them this morning: Snapple and Rolling Rock and Diet Coke; you got up and made ham and cheese on poppy-seed rolls, and turkey with mayo; potato chips, Cheetos, Fritos, two boxes of SnackWells. You packed more than you need because you don't know who will come by and say hello, and you want to have enough. And they always come by, because between you and Bobby and the kids and the school and your parents, you feel like you know half the town.

It's 11 o'clock, and for the first time in five hours you can relax. Lunch won't be for an hour. You're sitting in the low green plastic chair and digging your toes into the sand. Bobby's talking with some kids near the water, the girls are rubbing on lotion.

And you pick up a magazine and she's on the cover. And you look at it. And you think what you always think when you see Hillary, which is that you don't really know what to think. If the piece is highly critical, a real slam, you'll suspect it's exaggerated and partisan and mean. But if it's complimentary, you'll think it's some puff piece, and you'll feel unsatisfied because you know, you can tell, there's something that's not so great there.

And you don't think you're an important person, but you are. Because what you're thinking as you look at the picture on the magazine at the beach at Tobay will determine the future of Clintonism in America. You know she's trying to win you over, you can see it on the news, she's saying it all the time: "Our generation of women has shared the same experiences," and "I share your concerns."

And you wonder if it's true.

And I want to say, "Oh, kid, it is so not true. She is nothing like you."

And I know because I grew up with you. You've made a good life. You have a lot to be proud of, and don't make a big deal of it. But you must know that with where you came from and where you got to, you've achieved something huge.

You're a teacher. Bobby was a teacher, too, but the money wasn't good, and the kids were coming, and he couldn't see a career path that was going to make it a lot better anytime soon. So you kept teaching, and he went to work for Con Edison. And you're doing good, you're doing fine. You own a house (there's a mortgage, but it's a house), and you have two cars and enough food, and you pay your bills on time. The kids will go to college. It will take help, scholarships and loans and grants, but you'll put all your savings toward it and take a second job and, one way or another, they'll get what they need.

And this, from the family you came from, is a triumph.

You are an American, Brooklyn-born. Your parents joined the great migration from the city to get their first house, right here on Long Island. Your parents were the Sinatra generation-your father looked like Frank in Some Came Running, and your mother had a pixie haircut like Shirley MacLaine. Now they're in their 70s and doing fine, but back when they were 25 and 30 and they moved out to Long Island, where everything was square and flat and kind of lonely-back then, they were overwhelmed. A house full of kids, and low pay and a dicey employment history for Dad-and there were fights, depressions, drama, and you kids barely made it through. But you did. You brought yourselves up. You went to Massapequa High and had part-time jobs and got good marks, and somehow, against the odds, didn't drop out at 17 and take a job in the city; you hung on and did your homework in a corner of the attic of your chaotic home.

And while you were there, Hillary Rodham was growing up with security in Park Ridge, Illinois, an affluent suburb of Chicago. She had the things all kids want and many don't have: a highly functional home, an orderly place where someone's in charge and someone makes dinner. Hillary at this point wasn't having anxiety attacks, the way you were. She was already used to telling people what to do. She was an old hand at running for office in school, a favored child marked for leadership, a Goldwater Girl (our families were for Johnson; we'd never even met a Goldwater Girl) with straight A's, a circle pin, and a ticket to the National Honor Society.

God, remember the Hillarys? The Hillarys would be nice to us, would look at us in the hall and say hello, only when they were running for senior council president. And then only because every vote counted. So a Hillary would actually talk to people like us then, and I wish I could say we told her to drop dead, but we didn't, did we? We were a little honored, because we knew what she knew: She was a superior person, she had a future and expectations.

You just didn't think of yourself that way.

In 1969, right before college, you were working a job at the A&P, bagging and tagging, and America was going crazy with the war and the riots. And you were starting to see something. You were developing a social conscience. You were starting to see the black kids from Amityville go to Vietnam, and you knew something. You knew that young kids with nothing were the ones going off to fight for America. And the other, luckier kids didn't have to go. And it wasn't fair. It wasn't right.

That year, 1969, was the year Bill Clinton, about to enter Yale, was dodging the draft. That's when he was writing his lying letters to the draft board, so he could avoid the war that the black kids from Amityville and the white kids from down the block were fighting. Maybe one of them took his place. It was also the year Hillary, his soon-to-be wife, was giving speeches at Wellesley-still an A student, still class president-and lecturing Edward Brooke, the only black man in the U.S. Senate, telling him that he was insensitive to the youth of our country. What we want, she said, is "more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of being." If you'd heard of that speech at the time, you would have stopped putting the Wonder Bread in the brown paper bag for a second and thought, Yeah? Maybe when you're not working at the A&P, maybe when you're not a black kid from Amityville, what you need is more ecstatic modes of being. I'd settle for a better job, or less work so I can study.

Even then, Hillary was on a higher plane-more abstract than you, more dazzled by big ideas. You were down-to-earth in your thoughts. It was easy for her, up in the thin air of high ideology, to shoot over from ideological right to ideological left. Her sense of right and wrong became and stayed abstract, situational; your sense of right and wrong stayed grounded and concrete.

You got into a school, the State University of New York in Plattsburgh, and got scholarships and grants, and worked as a waitress at night. And you did well and met Bobby and knew instantly. And when you got out of school, you took courses toward a master's at night, at C.W. Post, and got your first job, teaching a sixth-grade class back home in 'Pequa.

And you and Bobby got married, and rented half of a two-family on Nanny Goat Hill, and saved. He was teaching at St. Pius and working part-time at Holy Road Cemetery in Westbury. He dug graves and put down sod when they were closed. Sometimes he'd bring you plastic flowers, and you'd laugh as you took them from his callused hands.

You learned how to teach. You were so happy. Nothing anybody asked you to do was too much. Then the girls came, and you stayed home with them. Later, in the mid-'80s, when the girls were in school, you went back to teach. You could see something changing, and in time it got worse. When you were a kid, people honored education in and of itself, and honored learning. But now you were seeing a new attitude. Parents were starting to act like their kids weren't there for an education but as a step toward a degree: Gotta get the kid's ticket punched.

And you saw something else, something worse. Every year, they were loading more garbage onto teachers-more regulations, more programs, more rules about testing and tracking, more politically correct stuff, P.C. The teachers had more burdens and responsibilities but less personal authority. And it seemed as if the more burdens each level of government put on you, the lower the kids' scores dropped. People in the town finally decided they'd had it, and voted to cut back the school budget.

Meantime, the teachers' union-your support system-wouldn't even allow schools to put in a dress code. Kids were showing up in cutoffs and undershirts. The girls in tenth grade were wearing little T-shirts-everyone was in their underwear! But the union did make sure that teachers could dress just as badly as kids, that they could show up for work in jeans and T-shirts, too. During one round of contract negotiations, a teacher wore a T-shirt that said f*** management. With the stars, but still. He wore it all day. No one said a thing.

So that's what you were doing, and learning, in the '70s and '80s.

And that's when Hillary was exercising her first real power. She was in education, too. Her husband, the governor of Arkansas, had appointed her to head the effort to reform Arkansas's public schools. It was a slow-moving debacle, the kind that was making your life miserable, because it was pushing and promulgating the kind of P.C. worldview that you were being forced to teach.

The worst part was Hillary's special baby-the governor's special school for gifted students. They were brought in to have a special summer semester together. According to notes one of the students took in 1980 (the writer Joyce Milton saw them later), part of the program included a speech by Hillary, "who told students that she would trust big government over big business anytime." (If you heard anybody say that, you'd say, "Yeah? Geez, I wouldn't trust either. But if you forced me to put my money down, I don't think I'd go with the bureaucrats.")

Another speaker, according to those notes, was "a physicist who said that science was the antithesis of religion, and no good scientist could be a religious believer." And yet another said that Christianity was anti-woman and anti-sexuality, and that the church was full of "fear and hatred of women." Even a decade later, in 1991, the school's speakers were assigning readings that called Christianity "a compost" and Christ's divinity "offensive."

But that isn't all Hillary was doing in the '70s and '80s. She was making a killing as an influential partner at the Rose Law Firm. And making a lot of money sitting on boards-more than $100,000 in stock options from Wal-Mart alone. She was a highly desirable board member-an "education specialist," a lawyer, and the wife of a governor.

She also invested in cattle futures in those days, putting up $1,000 one day and reaping $100,000 in profits. Friends who were doing business with the state of Arkansas helped to direct her trades. Later, when it became a scandal, she said she was just lucky. Then she said she'd figured out what to do by reading the Wall Street Journal.

And sometimes, when she wasn't making money, she was making speeches, as a public service. She often spoke against avaricious yuppies and the decade of greed.

Hillary was flying high while you and Bobby were getting clobbered by inflation and taxes and child care. You were scouring Newsday for the ads from Shop Rite, clipping coupons for the pork chops on sale. You didn't buy Tide or Cheerios unless they were on special, and going out to dinner meant snagging buffalo chicken wings during happy hour at the local bar, with friends.

And then it was 1992, and the Clintons were new to you, and they made a good impression, and you took a chance.

Why not? Bush seemed way out there in the ozone, like some sleepy old WASP who's detached from the world you live in. He seemed out of touch, goofy, and the economy was tanking.

And this Clinton, from nowhere-he was young, eager and hopeful, and he reminded you of something. He reminded you of 1960. He reminded you of when Jack Kennedy came down the Wantaugh Parkway in the motorcade on that cold October day, and suddenly your parents were interested in politics, and you all went to the parkway and stood there and waved. Your father had a gray coat, and he watched as the motorcade went by, and he didn't know how to show he was excited, so he just said "Hey, hey!" And you'll never forget it. And you realized, you absorbed for the first time, that you were part of something: You were part of America and politics; and your parents were part of it, too, and it was…it was wonderful.

Bill Clinton made you feel like that, too. And you heard the stories on talk radio-Slick Willy, the draft, the business scandal, and the girls-and you thought, Okay, he's not perfect, but he only made the kind of mistakes people make. And it's all in the past. Take a chance. Give him a chance.

And you did. And you know what they gave you. And it wasn't so great. Everyone's rich, that's good; he didn't do anything to mess up the economy; he kept Greenspan.

But the rest-the rest made you embarrassed in front of your kids. It made you feel like we should be embarrassed in front of the world. And in a funny way, every time you see Clinton now, you think of the teacher in the f*** management T-shirt.

And you feel like maybe you had your last political fling, and you'll probably never have one again, and that's too bad, but-well, maybe you're beyond flings now. And at least the economy's good. Turn the page.

But they won't let you turn the page.

Now Hillary Clinton wants to be your senator.

Now she wants to speak for Massapequa.

Now she says she's just like you, her concerns are yours, she's a survivor like you.

But she is not like you. she never had to do the things you did, and she is no feminist hero. The problem is not that she's a particular kind of candidate but that she is a particular kind of person.

It isn't a matter of what class you're in or what class you're from, it isn't a matter of your level of education or your political biases, it really doesn't matter if you are a woman who's always had an easy life or a hard one. What matters is that Mrs. Clinton's candidacy is aimed not at helping you but at helping her, not at advancing social justice but at keeping Hillary Clinton in power. That's the problem- not her politics but herself.

The young Clintons were part of an aristocracy of middle-class intellectuals, peopled by the heirs of genetic and financial privilege, who declared themselves king and queen of the future. Freed from concerns about getting killed in war or not having enough money or enough intellectual or emotional resources to get to college, freed from the worries that confronted their parents, freed from all that, they forgot to be grateful. They lacked the wisdom to see their luck as something to be humble about. Instead, it mutated within them into a sense of ongoing entitlement and superiority. They were going to educate people out of their old-fashioned, backward, racist, sexist, hopeless ways. That's what Hillary really meant when she said she wasn't some "little Tammy Wynette." She meant: I'm not some ignorant, big-hair girl working the counter at the Piggly Wiggly; I went to Yale Law.

Hillary may have graduated from Yale, but she never graduated from herself. She was lucky. And a funny thing about the long-term lucky is that they often come to think not that they were blessed, but that they deserve it because they're, well, better.

And when you think like that it hardens you. You can talk on and on about compassion and tolerance, but you look down on the girls with the big hair and the boys with big trucks. It gives you a sense that the world would be a little better ordered if you could tell other people how to organize their lives. And that is the one thing that people who know Hillary always say about her: that she thinks people have to be led and guided. Implicit, always unstated but always understood, is that they should be led and guided by her. And by her friends.

To say the problem with Hillary's candidacy is the carpetbagger issue is to miss the point, and to be unkind to carpets. Carpets are things that get walked on. But her boots are made for walking, and they'll walk all over you.

You wonder if she is like you. But she is not.

You were a boomer, and she was a boomer, but you went different ways. You didn't have a lot of options, but you tried to open every door; she had every option, but didn't walk through those doors herself. You wanted a decent life, she wanted power. You made a marriage, she made a deal. You became a contributing citizen, she became an operator who connives to tell the contributors what to do and how to do it. She portrays herself as a victim, but she's a victimizer. She says she is a survivor, but she's one of the people whom you had to survive.

She doesn't know your concerns, and she doesn't share them, either. She is not like you. She was never like you.

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