From a New York Times interview which I’ll never forget; the author recounts meeting with Hillary just a couple of weeks before the ill-fated election.
After a few minutes, another press aide, Nick Merrill, popped his head out of the conference room, faux-squinted in my direction and said the doctor would see me now. I had not talked to Clinton in person for more than a year. She was warm and animated, but her eyes hung heavy, and she appeared somewhat worn down, no doubt still feeling some lingering aftereffects of pneumonia. In the same way that presidents seem to age eight years for every four they spend in the White House, you can see the toll this campaign has taken — the surprising challenge of Bernie Sanders, the email story and F.B.I. investigation and Trump’s nothing-off-limits pelting. She sat down next to me at a conference table, slumped back in a swiveling desk chair. Her contempt for Trump was clear from the outset, far more intense than it appears even in speeches and debates. It went well beyond the competitive fervor with which one general-election candidate tends to speak about another. “It does feel much different,” she said. “If I were running against another Republican, we’d have our disagreements, don’t get me wrong, and I would be trying to make my case vigorously. But I wouldn’t go to bed at night with a knot in the pit of my stomach.” She enunciated her T’s (“knoT in the piT”) as if she were spitting out the words.
“I had the opportunity to meet a lot of presidents over the years,” Clinton said. “I’ve had my disagreements with them. But I never doubted for a nanosecond that they got up every morning trying to figure out what was the best path forward for the country.” At least, she added, “they were serious people.”
That sense of high moral purpose is evident throughout the campaign. Whenever I visited Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, the youthful energy and confidence of the staff was leavened by a detectably uneasy undercurrent. Either they are helping elect the first female president, assuring her place in history, or they will be the people who lost to Donald Trump. “There is a dread that people have about what it would actually mean if he were to actually be elected,” John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, told me. As much as Obama’s team and supporters wanted to see the president re-elected in 2012, Podesta said, “they didn’t feel that the country was going to fall into the abyss if Mitt Romney was president of the United States.”
The sense of high moral purpose. The dread — yes. Yes!
We all knew it, those of us at least who are awake, who’ve read history, whose hair stood on end when Trump ranted, when he flew over a stadium in his black and red plane; who said he alone can fix it as he emerged from a cloud of smoke.
They are back, said our ancestors. They are coming out of the shadows, they have risen from their graves. Everything that you love about America, about our progress toward a more perfect union; everything about the message of Stronger Together — the powerful women, the people of color, the immigrants, the artists, the inclusiveness, the feminine and steely leader in the pantsuit — they despise.
The love of science, the reverence for democracy and independent thinking and creativity is about to run into a buzz saw.
There is this dark side to America, a darkness rooted in slavery and genocide, and in the oppression of women and minorities, in antisemitism, in hatred and fear of “the other,” in the Confederate sense of white victimhood; and it was about to come roaring back.
She saw this. She tried to warn us. And people listened. She had the votes of the people, though not the vast love and outpouring for Barack Obama — there had been too many years of attack campaigns dating to her work helping prosecute Richard Nixon; her work to try and get universal health care; her refusal to sit in the kitchen and bake cookies. The GOP recognized her and Bill Clinton as a threat and set about to destroy them. And they did a lot of damage. Trump and Putin and James Comey and certain purists on the Left did more.
Still. We heard her. We saw her. We believed in her message, in democracy, in America, in America the beautiful, that is great because we are good.
The article details her campaign, her risky decision to focus on policies, positions which in the end nobody heard of because everybody was focused on emails. She wasn’t a great orator like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, but she was strong in smaller crowds, beginning the tradition of selfies and personal contact that Liz Warren has so brilliantly employed in her own inspirational campaign.
Above all she saw, I think, the horrible alternative future.
Clinton envisions a model more suited to her skills and comforts. It also could portend a very different style of president — without the sweeping themes of Barack Obama, the moral certainty of George W. Bush or the explanatory clarity of Bill Clinton. Can Hillary Clinton do a better job inspiring people from the White House than she has from the campaign stage? Would it become easier or harder to do without Trump around to embody everything she has ever opposed and scare the daylights out of her base? “Don’t blow this” is what Clinton hears most often these days, she told me, or variations thereof. As it has turned out, Clinton, who began her campaign intent on breaking the last barrier — the glass ceiling — has found her most compelling rationale in her own role as a barrier, a bulwark against the impossible alternative. As I was leaving our interview, she smiled, looked me in the eyes and left me with a casual reminder. “As I’ve told people,” she said, “I’m the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse.”
www.nytimes.com/...