The Inauthenticating of Hillary Clinton: Who’s a Phony?
By: Kevin Eagan
Tags: Essays, Bill Clinton, Book, Gender, Hillary Clinton

The Inauthenticating of Hillary Clinton: Who’s a Phony?

Discussed in this feature: Hillary Clinton in the News: Gender and Authenticity in American Politics by Shawn J. Parry-Giles. Forthcoming from University of Illinois Press, February 2014, 242 pages. Pre-order at U of Illinois P or Amazon.

We will hear a lot about Hillary Clinton in the next several years. The darling of upper-middle-class liberal female baby boomers, she is loathed by the right. Pundits, wonks, and political operatives make their livings in part by obsessing over whether she will run for president in 2016. Everyone else probably half admires her and is also sick of hearing about her.

What do scholars make of Clinton vis-à-vis media portrayals of her in the various roles she has played over the years: First Lady, U.S. Senator, Secretary of State? This book is not only a study of Clinton, it is also a test case of whether examining living politicians from the standpoint of gender studies offers much of value to voters or general readers. After all, do we examine Chris Christie as a study in masculinity or authenticity? Do we really care whether or not Hillary Clinton is “authentic” or not? What politician is?

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Hillary Clinton (Photo credit: Angela Radulescu | flickr)[/caption]

The Question of “Authenticity”

One of Clinton’s core constituencies is white female academics. In the forthcoming book Hillary Clinton in the News: Gender and Authenticity in American Politics by Shawn J. Parry-Giles, we have a scholarly study straight from the heart of Hillary Clinton country. Like many academic studies, it has a central theme. In this case, the question is that of “authenticity.” That is, is Hillary Clinton a “genuine” woman?

But do readers and voters really care about these questions anymore? Haven’t we moved on from all those “proper First Lady decorum” brouhahas of earlier decades? And is “authenticity” a useful framework for examining any politician of either gender? Surely effectiveness is the standard we should be employing. Think about it. When you vote for president, do you really ask yourself, “Is this person authentic?” Wouldn’t most of us think, “The guy may be a total phony, but hey, we’re in a recession and he seems to be best positioned to get us out of it…”

This book is quite dated in that it examines minutely how the mainstream media portrayed Hillary Clinton’s actions when she was First Lady. Ironically, Hillary Clinton herself has moved with the times more than Parry-Giles has. After all, Clinton tends not to dwell on her years as First Lady (which is probably just as well, given her missteps at the time on health care reform, which got her into trouble vis-à-vis doing too much behind closed doors) or even on her record as a senator. She has adapted to the age of Twitter and is probably even better known (certainly to younger voters) now as the former Secretary of State and celebrity speaker than she is even as the woman Obama beat out in 2008, or even as Bill Clinton’s wife. For younger voters, the Bill Clinton years might as well be the Reagan or Carter years.

Thus, the book’s focus — the question of “authenticity” — has a musty feel to it. In the age of Twitter, politicians who strive to present themselves as “authentic” risk coming across as merely uncool. Parry-Giles’ book is an examination of media portrayals (primarily TV news coverage) and commentary on Hillary Clinton in the period from Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 1992 up to the end of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008 (although treatment of that latter period is somewhat perfunctory). Those who are interested in media history and in American political and presidential history and campaigns are the primary audience for this book. Admirers of Hillary Clinton will want to read it, too.

The book is worth reading so as to be reminded how fortunate we are to live in a media landscape in which big media commentators matter far less than they once did. In many ways, shorter attention spans are a boon for social media-savvy politicians like Hillary Clinton. Who wants to read a New York Times column by David Brooks, for example, if you can read a tweet that links to a blog post about a funny tweet by Hillary Clinton? Again, Clinton seems to have adapted to the 21st century better than Parry-Giles has. The latter fights gender wars that Clinton herself has had the smarts to have left behind (at least in terms of not getting bogged down in them publicly). Today, Clinton is actually quite funny, whereas she often came across as aloof and humorless in the early 1990s.

One problem with the book is that Parry-Giles argues that the media during much of Hillary Clinton’s career was obsessed with authenticity and that this obsession supposedly negatively impacted Clinton in a way unique to her. But wasn’t there just as much criticism of the male Republican Mitt Romney for not standing for anything in particular? Parry-Giles never really makes clear what she means by “authentic” and what politicians of the late 20th and early 21st centuries she would consider authentic. She makes a very convoluted argument to the effect that establishment journalists during the Clinton years through Hillary Clinton’s primary battles in 2008 employed gendered notions of nationalism (which Parry-Giles detests) and that those notions shaped the discussion of Clinton’s supposed inauthenticity. This is a carefully researched and extremely unpersuasive argument. Politicians get called phony all the time — that’s just part of the deal. It really doesn’t have anything to do with a gendered nation. It has to do with the fact that politicians have to make deals as part of their job and say things they don’t mean in order to get things done that they think are important. That is just the way life is, and “nationalistic beliefs about the boundaries of authentic womanhood” ain’t got nothing to do with it.

Gendered Spaces and Other Dated Scholarly Conventions

Obviously, as an American woman who benefits from the rights won for me in large part by the dogged efforts of academic feminists, it ill becomes me to grouse about how weary I get about the rhetoric of feminist scholars in such fields as communication and media studies. I dutifully nod in agreement with much of what they say about sexism in the media and in the political sphere. And yet, sometimes I just want to scream, “This is all so whiny! Can’t we just move on and stop finding fault with the nation state, patriarchy, etc.? Can’t we just treat Hillary Clinton as a politician and not as a handy victim of everything that the feminist academic left loathes?”

And again, ironically, in focusing much of her book on Clinton’s years as First Lady, Parry-Giles gets mired in the First Lady bog. As a working, unmarried woman, I really don’t give a rap about First Ladies and what pundits like David Brooks write about them, and I really don’t see how the cause of women is advanced by the fact that scholars like Parry-Giles are so preoccupied by what male commentators think about First Ladies. I would rather read about what Hillary Clinton accomplished legislatively as a senator or how she rated as an administrator and diplomat as Secretary of State. Books such as this one that examine, from a feminist perspective, women in roles that most of us will never fill (it is not as though most American women will ever become First Ladies, for example) don’t really contribute much to concrete matters such as how to get women into office in 2013.

The book also tends to overstate the level of bile from sections of the media that Hillary Clinton inspired in her years as First Lady and in her run for the U.S. Senate in New York in 2000. Yes, Hillary Clinton was written about in the 1990s and is written about even now in appallingly sexist, even downright misogynistic ways. But so what? She has triumphed anyway. And it could be argued that the slams Clinton experienced nowhere near equal the battering in the media that Sarah Palin got. Palin, after all, was commonly portrayed as stupid, and there were insinuations that she was not the mother of her developmentally disabled son and that not aborting him was somehow weird, etc. And the nastiness of Clinton’s senate campaign probably had more to do with the no-holds-barred political culture of New York and the fact that her ties to the state were meager than with questions of gender norms.

Parry-Giles also argues that Clinton’s efforts as First Lady on behalf of health care reform were obstructed by Congress because of the inherent sexism of that institution and the masculinist character of the nation state. But much of the opposition to Hillary Clinton’s role in leading the health care initiative arose from the perfectly understandable position of members of Congress that they had been elected to Congress and that Hillary Clinton had not. That is not really an inherently sexist attitude. It is how American government works.

The “Disciplining” of Hillary Clinton

One rather odd aspect of the book is Parry-Giles’s argument that when Hillary Clinton overreached herself (such as in the health care reform debacle) the mainstream media “disciplined” her, and that this supposedly served as a warning to women that followed not to violate gender norms. But you need only look at the ever-increasing numbers of women seeking and holding political office (including, for example, Tammy Baldwin, the first openly gay U.S. Senator) to question that depressing argument.

And if you must focus on First Ladies, it is true that Laura Bush was a rather demure type, but it is not as though Michelle Obama is a shrinking violet. Indeed, in the matter of Clinton being “disciplined,” as First Lady that was actually probably a good thing in that it made clear that the First Lady position should not be the place for major political activity. Hillary Clinton learned that and ran for the US Senate and later ran for president. That is as it should be.

Moreover, do other female politicians really have that much to learn from Clinton? Many of her troubles arose from the fact that she is married to an exceedingly scandal-prone husband who lied a lot, not so much because evil sexist TV reporters were out to get her.

Parry-Giles’ use of the term “disciplining” demeans Clinton, suggesting that she simply acquiesced to her own relegation to the sidelines at various times during Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign and during his White House years. But isn’t it the case that Hillary Clinton, being the intelligent woman she is, simply realized that she had blown it by coming across as too shrill and that it was now time to reposition herself?

Over and over in the book, Parry-Giles portrays Hillary Clinton as beaten down and a victim of the traditional woman ethos that still reigned in the 1990s. Parry-Giles, though, does make the useful point that when Hillary Clinton did try repositioning, the media pounced all over again portraying her as a cynic and inauthentic as a traditional woman. The book is worth reading by anyone interested in the dilemmas female politicians face when trying to appeal to so many audiences: stay-at-home moms (and many young women are now choosing to leave the workforce and remain at home with their children), career women, disapproving male reporters, and so on. Parry-Giles also points out that it was not just the right that criticized Hillary Clinton. Many of her erstwhile feminist allies grumbled that she was caving in to sexist critics. The feminists seem to have their own issues with Clinton’s authenticity.

The use of the term “disciplining” is quite odd. A lot of what Parry-Giles labels as “disciplining” is just run-of-the-mill political reporting — and moreover is far less nasty than a lot of what we see now on Fox or in the right-wing blogosphere. The use throughout the book of “disciplinary,” and “disciplining,” is belittling of women in general, as if we are going to start crying in the face of a little criticism in the media.

Parry-Giles seems to think women are a childlike group that can be paralyzed into inaction after observing the kind of sexist rhetoric Clinton had to put up with. Some of the publicity material for this book says, “Once Clinton dared to cross those gender boundaries and vie for office in her own right, the news exuded a rhetoric of sexual violence. These portrayals served as a warning to other women who dared to enter the political arena and violate the protocols of authentic womanhood.” That whole argument is greatly overstated, and shows a lack of a historical long view. The suffragists faced far greater ridicule than Hillary Clinton ever did, and I don’t notice that the generations of women that followed them were scared away from political participation. Parry-Giles tries to draw lessons from Hillary Clinton’s unique troubles (an impeached husband whose sexual appetites resulted in big-time bimbo blowback) and apply them to all female politicians. It doesn’t really wash.

Parry-Giles quite interestingly points out that Hillary Clinton talked a lot and that her loquacity and love of the spotlight grated on the nerves of not only reporters (whose remit, after all, was to cover her husband, not Hillary Clinton) but of male campaign aides and voters of both genders. There is a lesson here for all of us: don’t talk too much.

The Surveillance Motif

The major flaw of this book is the melodramatic tone Parry-Giles employs throughout. For example, she argues that during Hillary Clinton’s days in her high-profile role as key point person in the Clinton’s administration’s health care reform debacle, the media kept her under “surveillance.” That’s silly hyperbole. Hillary Clinton had thrust herself into the limelight, and she was acting in a policymaking role highly unusual for First Ladies on a key issue affecting every American. Of course the media was interested, and naturally, reporters dogged her trail in the halls of Congress. No harassment here. Just journalism. Moreover, Clinton wanted power without responsibility in the health care reform initiative. She lobbied Congress aggressively, but later tried to avoid open meeting requirements by arguing she was a private citizen.

Likewise, Parry-Giles tends to over-analyze even the most banal sports or war/combat-related figures of speech employed by male reporters or commentators arguing that they reflect deep-seated sexism, and claims that fluffy news reports about Clinton’s interactions with male legislators were highly sexualized in tone, the intent of such language supposedly being to paint Clinton as a loose woman, and thereby neutralize her politically. Oh, please. A lot of this was standard network blather of the 1990s, not the result of some dark plot to keep women in their place. The gendered nation stuff is shopworn.

Parry-Giles discusses at length domestic violence imagery, boxing metaphors and the like in various periods of Clinton’s tenure as First Lady, and in her later years as senator and Secretary of State. Rhetoricians might find some of that useful, but Parry-Giles’ contention that such language is used in deliberate attempts to cow women and prevent them from running for office is grossly overblown. Yeah, there’s a lot of misogyny out there. Yes, male TV commentators can be sexist jerks, and women in the media are often the worst enemies of women in politics, but Hillary Clinton has managed to emerge pretty much intact and as politically viable as ever.

The question of authenticity might better be applied to Elizabeth Warren, who was the target of months-long sniping in conservative media and the right-wing precincts of Twitter over her claim of Native American ancestry, and was the target of accusations that she parlayed this claim into career advancement in a way that a person of integrity would not have done. But again, do questions of this sort really dog female politicians more than they do male ones? This book does not make a convincing case that they do.

Who Should Read This Book

If you want to revisit the Monica Lewinsky scandal and read an account of how it ended up improving Hillary Clinton’s public image (transforming her from vilified Whitewater-tarnished, power grabbing harpy to long-suffering, loyal, betrayed wife), this is the book for you. Political scientists, professors of journalism who need real-world examples of how to avoid sexist language in political reporting, political historians, working journalists who want to avoid making gaffes when reporting on female politicians, political news junkies, women considering running for office, and Hillary Clinton should read this book. So, probably, should Chris Christie and any other potential Republican candidates for the presidency in 2016. Come to think of it, if the Republican Party does not want to plummet into electoral inconsequentiality, its leaders should read this book to learn how times have changed for women in politics since the early 1990s — which the men of the GOP don’t seem to get at all.

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