Hillary Clinton

Last edited Sat Apr 23, 2016, 10:22 AM - Edit history (1)

Hillary Clinton wants to Talk with You About Love and Kindness

http://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/hillary-clinton-wants-to-talk-to-you-about-love-and-kindness#.fjYOmqKzK

Here is Hillary Clinton as seen by many: calculating, lacking principle, lacking conviction, driven by power and ambition. After eight years in the White House, two Senate races, and a term as secretary of state, she is followed by the popular image of a candidate willing to do whatever or be whoever, so long as the polls say she should.

Here is how Hillary Clinton sees herself: radically consistent, motivated by a core philosophy — voiced now through two words rarely associated with her. “Love and kindness.” If this sounds unlikely, she knows it. For 50 years, she’s struggled to explain the values that motivate her — in public life, as a candidate, as a person. The one time she really tried to, in the early 1990s, she was brutally mocked. In the view of some of her closest aides, Clinton never fully recovered from the critical backlash.

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She has been asked every day, for decades, what she thinks, but rarely why. And here, next to a dishwasher, Clinton slides right back into the subject. Her words are slow and deliberate and she takes the conversation to this discussion she’s been trying to talk about, to bring up on the trail, as she is again ensnared in a campaign that’s more difficult than expected, in an election dominated by the language of anger and fear.

“I am talking about love and kindness,” she says.

As Clinton sees it, she’s really talking about a “shorthand” for her personal and political beliefs, for all the impulses that shape what she does and how she does it. She is talking about the core of “what I believe and who I am.” Even if no one views her that way. Even if she’s never been quite able to explain it. Even if she still isn’t known for the vision she’s been trying to share for decades, going back to the beginning. Even if her earnest efforts to connect with people are hampered not just by her image, but by the actual barriers of public life. After so many years, how do you convince a nation full of people who think they know everything about you that they don’t?