When Everything Changed (53 page)

As the company attempted to get back out of the city, it came under heavy mortar fire. Piestewa—carrying Dowdy, Lynch, and two other soldiers she had picked up along the way—skillfully and calmly steered her Humvee around the roadblocks until the truck immediately ahead of her jackknifed, and her front wheel was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade as she tried to weave around. The damaged Humvee, out of control and going about forty-five miles per hour, smashed into the truck. Lori Piestewa was fatally injured.

She left behind her parents, a 5-year-old son, and a 3-year-old daughter. Jessica Lynch, who returned home to a huge reception in West Virginia, thanked everyone who had helped her, then concluded, “Most of all, I miss Lori.”

15. Hillary and Sarah… and Tahita

“I’
M NOT GOING TO TELL MY DAUGHTER
—O
H
, I
QUIT
.”

H
illary Clinton’s life had been unlike that of any other woman in American history, yet she was also very typical of that whole generation of postwar feminists who had intended to both change everything and have it all. In the ’60s, she was a superachiever at an all-female college, where she worried endlessly about the meaning of life and chose boyfriends who were prepared to worry with her. As class-graduation speaker at Wellesley, she shared the stage with Edward Brooke, the first African-American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction, who Hillary bravely and impolitely dismissed as a typical politician, caring only about what was possible, not what was
right.
In the ’70s, she went to law school and cohabited with her boyfriend, who loved the fact that she was so smart. (On the campaign trail in 2008, Bill Clinton would say that when they were at Yale together, he had told Hillary that he knew all the best people of their generation, “and you have the finest mind.” While it seemed a little over the top for a law school student to feel he already knew every baby boomer in the nation worth knowing, the audiences liked the show of husbandly pride.)

Hillary intended to take the world by storm but wound up putting her ambitions behind those of her husband. For all that she achieved, for nearly twenty years after her marriage, she was known mainly as Bill’s wife. (George McGovern remembers that when he was running for president in 1972, an aide told him that a very bright young lawyer from Arkansas was going to be the campaign’s organizer in Texas and that he wanted to “bring his girlfriend,” too.) Arkansas was not exactly where the action was for ambitious young legal crusaders, but Hillary moved there because her husband-to-be intended to run for office in his home state. She waited until she was in her thirties to get pregnant, and there were fertility issues, followed by work-family issues. Later, in her campaigns, she would talk about the time when she had to be in court, and Chelsea was sick and the babysitter called in sick, too. “And it was just that gut-wrenching feeling, and I was lucky enough to have a friend who could come over and watch Chelsea while I ran to court, then ran back home.” But that was one bad day. Child care was actually less a problem than the fact that she was responsible for making money while Bill ran for office and served as governor of a state that barely paid its highest elected official minimum wage. She had never envisioned herself as a corporate lawyer, but there she was.

During Bill’s presidency, she became the most active first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, and like her famous predecessor, she created a wide network of supporters dedicated to social issues such as child welfare and women’s rights. She visited more than eighty countries and addressed a United Nations conference on women in Beijing, “
speaking more forcefully
on human rights than any American dignitary has done on Chinese soil,” the
New York Times
reported. But she also failed spectacularly in her attempt to reform the nation’s health-care system. And, of course, there was the humiliation of her husband’s infidelity in what was probably the most public case of adultery since Henry VIII. Ironically, voters seemed to like her better as the betrayed wife than they did when she demonstrated what a marriage of equals might look like in the White House.

Then it was her turn. Before her first lady stint was even over, Clinton started running for the U.S. Senate in New York, a state where she had never lived until she established residency for her campaign. Nevertheless, she won handily and became a very good senator, tending the nuts-and-bolts needs of her constituents while pursuing the big-picture programs like the policy wonk she had always been. She was surprisingly eager to work with Republicans; unsurprisingly interested in the arcane details of complicated legislation.

Women were always her special constituents. Sometimes they saw something of themselves in her. Many of those who had grown up in her era had struggled to balance jobs and family, and wound up putting family first—with no regrets but still with a feeling that their dual burdens had made them miss the chance to do something really big, really wonderful, in the outside world. When Clinton became a senator, they thought about second chances; that even if you were 40 or 50—maybe even 60?—it was still not too late to go for it. And elderly women would always come up to her, saying that they wanted to see a woman in the White House before they died. Some had been born before women could vote, and she could remember all their faces and their stories.

No one knows exactly when she first thought about running for president, but it must have been very early in the game. (Male politicians, after all, tend to start fantasizing with their first election to the board of aldermen or the state legislature.) When Hillary finally announced she was a candidate, the old NOW veterans were thrilled. “I put everything away just to work with Hillary. It was my most devoted time,” said Himilce Novas, a Cuban-American writer and college professor. Having a woman elected president would carry a huge symbolic value. “That was a question people would always ask me—when would there be a woman in the White House?” said Muriel Fox. The women’s rights leaders had always believed they would live to see the day. But as the years went on, there had perhaps begun to be a little doubt.

In 2007 they were certain again. Clinton seemed like the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee, even to the people who hated her. She had all the money, all the support, and in the early Democratic debates, she cleaned the floor with her opposition, letting the country see that she had the stature, the
gravitas,
for the job. Then, suddenly, Barack Obama caught fire. No one expected it. He was only 46 and less than three years out of the Illinois state senate. He was supposed to be the presidential candidate
later,
after the Hillary Clinton administration had run its course.

Obama had been born in 1961, to a woman who was a rebel in ways Hillary Rodham would not have dared to try. Ann Dunham, too, was the daughter of an adoring but difficult father—hers had wanted a boy so much he’d named her Stanley, after himself. (She never used the name.) Ann’s Kansas working-class parents had a tendency to keep moving west, and she wound up in college in Hawaii, where she married a Kenyan exchange student and had a son when she was still 18. Her husband went off to Harvard, then back to Africa, and the marriage was over. She struggled—as Obama would remind audiences who worried that he seemed “elitist”—as a single mother, sometimes on food stamps. She married an Indonesian businessman and returned with him to Asia, became an anthropologist, and later specialized in microfinancing businesses for women in the developing world. She divorced her second husband but retained her love for his country and its culture. She died of ovarian cancer at 54.

Her early death taught her son to seize the moment. Obama told the public that he had no time to waste becoming more “seasoned” in the Washington ways of doing business; those old ways were the problem, a culture of corruption that was wearing the country down. And it was Hillary—who had always seen herself most of all as an agent of change—who he identified as the emblem of the old. Now he was the one who wanted to do more than just pursue the possible, and his candidacy was as much a history-making event as hers.

Her supporters were outraged, sure Clinton was the victim of a male political establishment that had never really wanted a woman to begin with. Robin Morgan rewrote her famous diatribe “Goodbye to All That”: “Goodbye to the toxic viciousness…. Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs…. Goodbye to the most intimately violent T-shirts in election history, including one with the murderous slogan ‘If only Hillary had married O.J. instead!’
Shame.
Goodbye to Comedy Central’s
South Park
featuring a story line in which terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC’s vagina….”
Gloria Steinem asked, in the
New York Times
,
whether a black woman with Obama’s qualifications would be taken seriously as a candidate, and answered in the negative: “Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House,” she wrote. But some other women—even women politicians—were uncomfortable with the complaints about sexism.
In March 2008, at a Women
in Leadership Conference, Alaska governor Sarah Palin told
Newsweek,
“Fair or unfair, I think she does herself a disservice to even mention it, really.”

Clinton’s staying power was remarkable. Every time she appeared to be hopelessly down, she popped back up. In New Hampshire, when a sympathetic voter asked how she was holding up, Clinton’s eyes got moist; many women flashed back to high school and saw the smart girl being bullied by the more popular guys. (She would get misty a few more times during the campaign, always when people were unexpectedly nice to her.) She stunned everyone by taking New Hampshire—the first woman ever to win a primary for the presidential nomination. Then she lost, then she won. But she was not good at organizing in the caucus states, where intensity of devotion mattered more than general popularity, and there were a lot of caucus states. By spring, the party leaders were beginning to mumble—and the TV talking heads beginning to shout—that it was time for her to throw in the towel.

He wants to force me into a corner where I will say, Okay, fine, I give up, I’m the girl, I give up. I’m the nice person, I don’t want to have a fight. I’ll go home. Well, I’m not going to do it,
she’d tell her aides. In private, she slammed her fist on the table and fumed.
I’m sick of being pushed around in this campaign. I’m not going to give up. I’m not going to tell my daughter—Oh, I quit, because I’m the girl and they’re all being mean to me. I’m not going to do it.
Then she went out and did yet another rally, yet another question-and-answer session, yet another interview for local TV in Puerto Rico or Indiana or Montana. Her campaign was far from perfect, but as a candidate, she got better and better as she rolled along, seeming to grow more comfortable in her role at every stop. She began winning the white male vote in working-class states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, a shift many observers attributed to racism against Obama.
Susan Faludi suggested
that it might be something more positive: a rethinking by men about the way they viewed women candidates. For most of American political history, she wrote, men had regarded female politicians as versions of “the prissy hall monitor.” But there was not any of that in the late-season Hillary, who strode into a bar and traded shots with Pennsylvania workmen, danced the night away in her last-ditch Puerto Rico primary campaign, and joked with reporters in the back of her press plane at the end of the day while nursing a cocktail.

Thanks to the enthusiasm of Democratic voters, who turned out in record numbers, Clinton won eighteen million votes—more votes than any candidate for a presidential nomination had won before 2008. But it was not enough. Obama played by the rules, outorganized the Clinton machine, and won the most delegates. Hillary Clinton was not going to be the Democratic nominee, and 2008 was not going to be the year that the United States of America elected a woman president. But for the first time, a woman had come close, and throughout the rancorous, emotion-laden, endless primary fight, the one question that no one ever felt the need to pose was whether she was strong enough, tough enough, to be commander in chief. By the time the final primaries rolled around, the nation had gotten used to the idea of a woman as a presidential candidate—of a woman as president. And if that was not the White House, it was still a lot.

“W
OMEN IN
A
MERICA AREN’T FINISHED YET
.”

Clinton’s defeat left many of her supporters feeling both sad and, in some cases, angry enough to ignore her pleas to rally around Obama. “I thought I would vote for McCain,” said Himilce Novas. “I wanted to show a lesson to the Democratic Party for not having chosen Hillary. This was her time.”

Until 2008 men had always been the stars of presidential elections, and it seemed as if women were going to fall back into their familiar roles as undecided voters—the soccer moms and Wal-Mart moms and waitress moms who figured so prominently in the projections of political consultants. Then, on the day after the Democratic convention ended, John McCain suddenly announced that his vice presidential pick was Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old Alaska governor.

“It turns out that women in America aren’t finished yet!” Palin told the cheering crowd at her acceptance speech.

Very few people had ever heard of Palin. She had been in office for less than two years, and Alaska—with a population of only 670,000—was a remote territory to most Americans in the Lower 48. Even McCain had met her only once, briefly, before he invited her to his home in Arizona to discuss being on the ticket. The initial reaction among the pundits, politicians, and journalists who make up the nation’s chattering class was a kind of stunned silence, followed by predictions of disaster. McCain surrogates such as Senator Lindsey Graham raced around the Republican convention in Minneapolis, assuring everyone that voters would love Sarah because they would feel she was just like them.