Growing up as the politically faithful daughter of a staunch Republican, Hillary was nonetheless drawn to the ideas of a liberal youth minister at her Methodist church, Don Jones. She went with him on field trips to a community center on Chicago's South Side to meet with teens in inner-city gangs, and to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak.
Choosing an Identity
In college, to further her personal goals and stand out among the many gifted students at Wellesley, Hillary realized she needed to define herself. Sheehy writes:...probably nobody in her class was more consistently serious about her aspirations than Hillary. Her first order of business was to choose an identity. That's right, choose. Over Christmas vacation in her sophomore year, by her own count, she went through no fewer than 'three-and-a-half metamorphoses.' Hillary Rodham was fully conscious of selecting her preferred personality from a 'smorgasboard' spread before her: 'educational and social reformer, alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie,' political leader, or 'compassionate misanthrope.' ...Hillary's identity crisis went on for four years. She frequently found the process of self-definition depressing. The fear beneath all her intellectualizing and organizing was that she might discover a void. Let's change the subject! Otherwise those damned inevitable questions kept rsurfacing: Why am I so afraid? Or why am I not afraid? Am I really not unique after all?
Political Chameleon
Because candidate Clinton was never sure who she was, she lacked the ability to project a consistent, likeable, authentic image throughout her campaign, and that bothered voters who saw her as deceptive, shifting like a political chameleon to fit the circumstances.
This may explain why Hillary, seemingly competent during Bill's moments of crisis, could not rally herself similarly to confront her own problems and come up with solutions. This may explain why on June 3, 2008 - the evening her opponent reached the necessary number of delegates for the Democratic nomination - she was able to stride onstage with a smile as campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe introduced her as "the next president of the United States of America" while the song "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" played in the background.
She had cauterized her emotions because that's what she always did.
"This Amazing Emotion"
In light of all this, our not knowing Hillary Clinton is no surprise. But it's a loss for us because had she found herself at some point during college, during her time in the White House, or even during the early part of her presidential campaign, we would have understood her better. We might have found her much more likeable and much more authentic. Much more her own person as Hillary Rodham and less a perpetrator of the many Clinton misdealings during her husband's presidency, or less a victim of his marital infidelities and later humiliation.
As Newsweek magazine reported in its June 16, 2008 issue:
In her last weeks on the campaign trail, "she had a lot more fun, in a weird way," recalls an advisor who did not wish to be named describing the candidate behind the scenes. "She found herself. She was true to herself: she had much more fun; people responded to that. Although she was getting crapped on in the media and everyone was writing her off, it emboldened her, it evoked this amazing emotion."
The emotion that her parents Hugh and Dorothy had warned her against. The emotion that her childhood had taught her "signalled weakness." If what the advisor confessed to Newsweek is true, it appears that in the end, she recognized that her impending loss gave her license not to worry about her identity and to relax her stranglehold on her sense of self.
