http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/hillary-clinton-candidacy.html

She is warm, present, engaged, but not sappy. For Clinton, the highest act of emotional respect is perhaps to find something to do, not just something to say. “I’m going to do everything I can,” she tells Wheeler. “Everything I can.”

She had good reason to be scared. By 1999, even without having pursued her own political path, Clinton had learned what it might entail to be a woman who competed: She had taken her husband’s last name after his 1980 reelection defeat in Arkansas had been blamed on her independence; she’d done cookie-bake-off penance for her remarks about prioritizing career over domesticity; everything from her friend Vince Foster’s death to the wandering attentions of her husband had been tied to her purported ruthlessness. When I asked her why she thinks women’s ambition is regarded as dangerous, she posited that it was about “a fear that ambition will crowd out everything else — relationships, marriage, children, family, homemaking, all the other parts [of life] that are important to me and important to most women I know.” She also mentioned the unappealing stereotyping: “We’re so accustomed to think of women’s ambition being made manifest in ways that we don’t approve of, or that we find off-putting.” She also edged toward something uglier, harder to talk about. “I think it’s the competition,” she said. “Like, if you do this, there won’t be room for some of us, and that’s not fair.” I pushed her: Did she mean men’s fears that ambitious women would take up space that used to belong exclusively to them? “One hundred percent,” she said, nodding forcefully. She told a story about the time she and a friend from Wellesley sat for the LSAT at Harvard. “We were in this huge, cavernous room,” she said. “And hundreds of people were taking this test, and there weren’t many women there. This friend and I were waiting for the test to begin, and the young men around us were like, ‘What do you think [you’re] doing? How dare you take a spot from one of us?’ It was just a relentless harangue.” Clinton and her friend were stunned. They’d spent four safe years at a women’s college, where these kinds of gender dynamics didn’t apply. “I remember one young man said, ‘If you get into law school and I don’t, and I have to go to Vietnam and get killed, it’s your fault.’ ” “So yeah,” Clinton continued. “That level of visceral … fear, anxiety, insecurity plays a role” in how America regards ambitious women. The sexism is less virulent now than it was in 2008, she said, but still she encounters people on rope lines who tell her, “ ‘I really admire you, I really like you, I just don’t know if I can vote for a woman to be president.’ I mean, they come to my events and then they say that to me.” But, she maintains, “Unpacking this, understanding it, is for writers like you. I’m just trying to cope with it. Deal with it. Live through it.” Here, Clinton laughed, as if living through it were a hilarious punch line.

Clinton self-identifies as a worker more than as a speechmaker. When I told her during one of our conversations that the comedian Samantha Bee had described her to me as “a working dog; you’ve got to give Hillary a job,” her eyes lit up. “When I got to the Senate, I said I was not a show horse!” she reminded me. It seems the thing Clinton is proudest of in the world.
Years ago, her former speechwriter Lissa Muscatine told me of an argument they often had back when Clinton was First Lady: “I used to tell her, ‘You’re not using the symbolic power of your position,’ ” to which Clinton would reply, “That’s not going to effect systemic change or make a lasting impact.” Muscatine’s counterargument was that “sometimes you effect the change through the symbolic act.”

So you can see why she would be anxious to get out of the primary morass and do direct battle with Trump. “When you get to a two-person race, it’s not you against the almighty and perfection that is hoped for,” says Clinton. “It’s you against somebody else.”

Whether she chooses Warren or not, this is an election that may require Clinton to take some uncharacteristic risks. What the nomination of Trump, the enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders, and the nomination of Clinton — who is very clearly running as a successor to Barack Obama — tell us is that this election is a kind of civil war. It’s a referendum on the country’s feelings about inclusion, about women, people of color, and their increasing influence, and how it edges out the white men who have long had an exclusive grip on power.

Ironically, this could give Clinton the thing she has had such a hard time mustering on her own: righteous symbolism. She doesn’t have to talk about herself, she just needs to be herself, in order to make the point that she represents inclusion, equality, progress. In Trump, she finds her foil: America’s repressive past.

On the night of the West Virginia primary, which her campaign knew she would lose to Sanders, Clinton arrived at Louisville Slugger Field in advance of a rally that was scheduled there. It’s rare for Clinton to arrive early anywhere, and she was enjoying a moment to herself in one of the stadium’s luxury boxes, looking out over the beautiful, empty minor-league baseball field, smiling. “I really love baseball,” she said, seemingly to herself.

Watching her, I wondered if it’s possible, after all these years, once she has slipped the bonds of constrained primary combat, that she could emerge as a better and freer performer. In some ways, it seems necessary — not just to win but to govern. After all, the presidency is a public, performative job. She can’t just suffer through the indignity of campaigning and then hole up with her policy papers. It’s not enough to have a plan; you have to sell it to the country, over and over again. Obama proved to be particularly adept at using the media to disseminate his administration’s messages to the audiences it was trying to reach, but he is a masterful orator. Bill Clinton, too. Even George W. Bush was charismatic in his way.

But if, as in this election, a man who spews hate and vulgarity, with no comprehension of how government works, can become presidentially plausible because he is magnetic while a capable, workaholic woman who knows policy inside and out struggles because she is not magnetic, perhaps we should reevaluate magnetism’s importance. It’s worth asking to what degree charisma, as we have defined it, is a masculine trait. Can a woman appeal to the country in the same way we are used to men doing it? Though those on both the right and the left moan about “woman cards,” it would be impossible, and dishonest, to not recognize gender as a central, defining, complicated, and often invisible force in this election. It is one of the factors that shaped Hillary Clinton, and it is one of the factors that shapes how we respond to her. Whatever your feelings about Clinton herself, this election raises important questions about how we define leadership in this country, how we feel about women who try to claim it, flawed though they may be. Can we broaden our idea of presidential charisma beyond great men giving great speeches? Ed Rendell, former governor of Pennsylvania, made the case to me that Clinton should try to design the job — as much as she can, anyway — around her.