Getting to Know Hillary Again

Mark Leibovich: “Hillary Clinton is private and guarded by nature, and three decades of being inspected like an exotic species has made her even more so. But right now, in the early days of what will be a 19-month campaign for the White House, she is trying to share and expound on her experi­ences, to project some greater measure of herself, big and small. Moose tales aside, this does not come easily. She has resided at the center of so many scandals, psychodramas and culture wars that it’s hard to even keep track of them all, let alone know what the person within that bubble of attention is actually like.”

“Clinton’s friends, all the thousands of them, have been saying for years that they wished people could see the Hillary They Knew, the person few get to see behind her public casing: the great boss, the chatty girlfriend, always the first to call when a parent dies or a baby is born. She possesses, they swear, that most cherished cachet among politicians — the sense of normalcy that David Foster Wallace famously described, quoting a fellow reporter in his 2000 profile of John McCain in Rolling Stone, as acting ‘somewhat in the ballpark of the way a real human being would act.’ Clinton imagines herself to be very much of this ballpark, if maybe confined to a private box and heavily guarded”