Once long ago, in 1982, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill Clinton sat beside me on a little airplane in flight from the Mount Nebo Chicken Fry to an evening event in Texarkana.
He apparently thought that would be a good opportunity to discuss the fact that I did not seem to like his wife.
He said she was brilliant. He said she was principled. He said the problem was a cultural difference between the Southern male and the Midwestern and Ivy League female.
He said this chasm was understandable and natural, but that I needed to get over it.
I listened and said the conversation was uncomfortable and that I would consider his words.
But I was privately dismissing those words.
Was I not entitled to be rubbed the wrong way and have it treated as a purely personal matter, not something stereotyped to denote broader cultural significance?
Thirty-one years later, I still struggle to acknowledge fully what the future world statesman was saying.
When Bill wanted to play a couple of hands of hearts on an airplane ride, and when Hillary told him not to do it because he needed to rest or work on scripts for radio commercials, did my dislike of her as bossy and no-fun emerge without regard for her gender?
Or was my reaction innately based on gender?
Bossy? Would I deem it equally negative if a man was bossy? If the male campaign manager had made the same command?
When she emerged in 1982 as made-over from the Hillary Rodham of her husband’s ill-fated first term of 1979-80, I wrote that it was as if she’d been away at cheerleader camp. Was that gender-based derision or merely an effective description?
I never wrote that George W. Bush and Trent Lott behaved as if they’d been away at cheerleader camp, though, in their cases, it might actually have been so. Both were college cheerleaders, you see. Hillary wasn’t.
But like Barack Obama on gay issues—and Hillary Clinton, too, just the other day—I have evolved.
As recently as 2008, I did not want Clinton to be president. But today I find myself more than ready for her to become president in 2017.
I think it’s of great importance that it happen.
I am more than ready for a Hillary Clinton presidency to take the nation on its next and essential step toward the full equality of women.
And I am more than ready for her global leadership to take the world on its next and essential step to the rescue of women from bondage and inhumanity.
That’s not only in the Third World or areas halfway around the earth. A new study of female mortality rates shows that women’s lives actually are shortening in rural areas of America, especially along a poverty strip from West Virginia down through Kentucky and into Arkansas.
It has been enlightening to behold the anger and despair of many women in Arkansas over legislation that tries to take them back by decades. New and constitutionally dubious laws have made them prisoners of time travelers from the 1950s who harbor narrow religious views that women exist as reproductive receptacles without say over their own bodies.
I don’t feel their pain. I dare not say that.
But I recognize and regret it.
Only two developments could ease their anger and despair.
The first would be tactical and stop-gap. That would be to restore Democratic control of the committee structure of at least one of the chambers of the state Legislature.
The other would be global and transformational. It would be for Clinton’s election as president to revive and expedite the evolutionary process toward full and equal female empowerment.
My own evolution had an incrementally illuminating moment, then a fully defining one.
The increment occurred in 2008 when Clinton was engaged in a hostile Democratic primary battle with Obama, whom I preferred.
I fretted before every debate that she was going to destroy him. I lacked the willingness to admit what I knew to be so—that I was essentially deferring to her as stronger, yet opposing her anyway.
Then, in early 2009, Obama wanted Clinton to become his secretary of state. I found myself fearful she wouldn’t accept. A strong sense of comfort and confidence swept over me when she did.
I knew our international relations would be competently handled in the Obama administration. And they surely were.
It was time at last for me to concede that I admired and respected her more than a personal aversion had permitted me to admit.
Meanwhile, an extremely conservative woman was telling me the other day that she would vote in 2016 for Hillary Clinton for president. It’s a counterintuitive sentiment I suspect is widespread.
Was it because Hillary is a woman? No. It was because Clinton is that particular woman.
It’s because I trust her toughness, the conservative woman said.
Finally we have a Democrat who is no wuss, she said.
Yes. That’s it, precisely.
This is no Michael Dukakis in a funny helmet. It’s no John Kerry wind-surfing. It’s no Al Gore feeling a need to smother his wife with a kiss on national television.
This is gender stereotype turned inside out, then blown to shreds.
This is Margaret Thatcher, but bigger. It’s America, for one thing. And it’s more overtly about womanhood than the pioneering of one woman.
Clinton needn’t make the weak-seeming finesses that her husband made in Arkansas and nationally, and that befuddled Democrats made for a quarter-century after Reagan.
The country is different. It’s her country now, even with Arkansas, as always, conspicuously going the opposite direction.
It’s possible I’d still have a personal aversion if I had the direct interaction with Clinton that I had 30 years ago. So what? Clinton has come to represent something wildly transcendent of one man’s opinion or congeniality.
George W. was congenial. He probably got that way at cheerleader camp.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.