Finally it comes across my feeds! The kind of story about Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy that has been not-enough-told. Hillary the Happy. Grandma for President. Credit goes to the writer of the story, Jonathan Van Meter, for a rare glimpse into the Clinton Machine. And Hillary as its beating heart.
Van Meter describes the mad orbit of the campaign, and then, with a gaze that tells us just how much he adores her, places Hillary and her granddaughter, Charlotte, at the emotional center of it. It’s beautiful.
If the electorate is given more ways to see Hillary in this light, the caressing light of emotion, and not the demanding glare of the TV news cameras, she will be President for sure.
Something bothers me about the story, though. Namely: This story is in VOGUE. With its emotional tone set by the famously icy editor Anna Wintour, there’s a haughtiness about VOGUE’s storytelling, and Van Meter delivers on this. There’s condescension in the settings and scenarios he describes. He interviews the candidate in the boys locker room of a high school gym. You know, just hangin’ out. Him, Huma, Hillary. Who, given a choice, sits down for a chatter in a boys’ high school locker room? Near the showers, no less. A boys high school locker room is the Hollywood Boulevard of germs. The Fungus Walk of Fame. The candidate and her handlers are making a point here, and Van Meter plays along. One doesn’t get any deeper into the bowels of a dynasty, or grab a situation any more by the ‘nads, the article suggests, than hanging out over by the showers in a boys high school locker room.
He describes the candidate as eating a salad out of a—no!--plastic takeout box! Can you believe it, my Voguers? Would Anna Wintour ever been seen eating a salad out of a plastic box? This is how low a woman of style and taste must bend, the subtext of the story whispers to the Voguers, when that woman wants to be President. Box lunches! What’s next? Busses? Driving our own cars? It doesn’t get any more glam than letting yourself look un-glam in the world’s most glam magazine.
I have no qualms with the story itself. Van Meter did his job perfectly. I admire the craft. It is a fine story. It moved me. But it feels as if the Clinton campaign offered exclusive access to the wrong audience. Exclusivity already dogs the Clinton narrative. It feels as if the haughtiness Voguers love and expect from their magazine can only re-affirm with non-Voguers what already concerns them about a Another Clinton Presidency. Its exclusivity, and access, and insider status. It’s the club, silly.
In my favorite passage from the story, a woman at a rally in Iowa City addresses the candidate:
I want to say that when I listen to you, I feel that the political discourse is taken back to sanity...I really feel like with the Republicans . . . that there’s almost a collusion to all say things that aren’t . . .sane. So I want to really say thank you to you because you’re pleasant, you’re joyous, you’re happy. And your running for president is, I think, fundamentally an act of generosity.
What a deep and insightful and authentic statement that is! The kind of thing money can’t buy, that a candidate couldn’t craft nearly as well on her own behalf. It’s buoyancy that young voters, benumbed and burdened by a lifetime of war footing, the security state, and student debt, want to hear, want to be led by. Generosity of spirit is always a better choice than anger, which is every other candidate’s—of both Parties—footing. The Iowa City woman was, herself, expressing her own generosity and kindness by saying what she did.
In quoting her, however, Van Meter describes the woman as having “a thick midwestern accent” This is VOGUEspeak for a non-Voguer in a flyover state.
He did not bother to find out the woman’s name. This Iowa City woman with the voice of a poet remains an uncredited extra in the scene, who’s there to give the cue for the candidate’s and crowd’s response:
The crowd leaped to their feet, yelling and whistling for nearly a minute, as Clinton stood in the middle of the circle of adoration holding back tears. When she finally spoke, she was as invigorated as I’d ever seen her. “I know there aren’t too many Republicans in Iowa City,” she told the crowd, “but if you do run into one . . . I want you to tell them: I don’t have horns.
This woman, this prairie poet, spoke to you, Mrs. Clinton, and put into words what people need to know about you. And your response (per the story), is to hold back your tears (crying’s for losers) ignore her (not a donor) and try to score points with the crowd with an applause-getting line about yourself? Sometimes a simple thank-you is the best response to a gift like the one you were given.
Not every name worth remembering belongs to a leader of state. And not every narrative benefits from the VOGUE treatment.
Around the time Mrs. Clinton’s inside-the-locker room exclusive was breaking in VOGUE, Senator Sanders was in a gym, shooting (and making) baskets. A gym non-exclusive. Anyone standing around with a phone could shoot and post it online. Like people do with almost anything that happens outside the locker room. It got broad coverage across many media channels, as these things do. Context matters. The ability to contextualize matters even more. The voters Mrs. Clinton needs to connect with know the difference between a story in VOGUE and a viral video, and it matters.