Rebecca Traister was recently given unusually extended access to Hillary, interviewing her over a period of months this Spring and ending just this morning at Wellesley. This profile is set for the May 29 issue of New York Magazine. It’s a hefty weekend read. There might be tears. Just saying.
May 26, 2017 2:36 pmWhen I walk into the Chappaqua dining room in which Hillary Clinton is spending her days working on her new book, I am greeted by a vision from the past. Wearing no makeup and giant Coke-bottle glasses, dressed in a gray mock-turtleneck and black zip sweatshirt, Hillary looks less Clinton and more Rodham than I have ever seen her outside of college photographs. It’s the glasses, probably, that work to make her face look rounder, or maybe just the bareness of her skin. She looks not like the woman who’s familiar from television, from newspapers, from America of the past 25 years, but like the 69-year-old version of the young woman who came to the national stage with a wackadoodle Wellesley commencement speech in 1969. With no more races to run and no more voters to woo with fancy hair, Clinton appears now as she might have if she’d aged in nature and not in the crucible of American politics. Still, this is not Hillary of the woods. She is reemerging, giving speeches and interviews. It’s clear that she is making an active choice to remain a public figure.
It’s the day after Donald Trump has fired FBI director James Comey, the man who many — including Clinton — believe is responsible for the fact that she is spending this Wednesday in May working at a dining-room table in Chappaqua and not in the Oval Office. Clinton checks with her communications director, Nick Merrill, about what’s happened in the past hour — she’s been exercising — and listens to the barrage of updates, nodding like a person whose job requires her to be up-to-date on what’s happening, even though it does not.
“I am less surprised than I am worried,” she says of the Comey firing. “Not that he shouldn’t have been disciplined. And certainly the Trump campaign relished everything that was done to me in July and then particularly in October.” But “having said that, I think what’s going on now is an effort to derail and bury the Russia inquiry, and I think that’s terrible for our country.”
Voters in Montana literally said they would not vote for Quist because Sanders campaigned with him. Not a single know-it-all dude said BS must sit down and shut up because he is hurting the Dem party he is not even a member of. But Hillary gives a fiery, inspiring Commencement speech and a great interview to Rebecca Traister of New York magazine, and the keyboard jockies at New Republic and elsewhere are up in arms that she needs to go away. Next they will say if she must go out in public, she should wear a burka. But she lost, they cry! Funny I don’t remember any males who lost being told to disappear and certainly not Sanders who lost to HER and is doing damage to the party every damn day. And the irony is–she probably didn’t lose!
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We have become so accustomed to the doublespeak in the form of alt-facts that the BernieBros are doing it, too. Every day ever more shocking news. I went back on phase one of the South Beach diet for a few days to get myself back in whack, but yesterday decided the best way to cope was taking Hillary’s suggestion: wine.
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Thanks for posting both the interview and the Commencement address, Still. I love them both! Me and millions more!
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We have been waiting for her to speak her mind and she sure did at the commencement. I loved her speech and I know that she will continues to inspire all of us.
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The Traister article was very good, though it was tough to read, knowing what might have been (and would have been, if not for the Russians and the FBI). 😦
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[…] ICYMI, you can catch up with the New York Magazine interview from May here >>>> […]
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