Hillary Clinton has finally arrived at a long-sought historic moment — and she's brought America with her.
On Monday evening, approaching the end of a brutal primary slog, the Associated Press effectively declared Clinton the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. If she is formally nominated by the Democratic party next month, that would make her the first woman to ever run for the nation's highest office on the Republican or Democratic ticket.
SEE ALSO:Why some Clinton supporters may be hiding their enthusiasmClinton began to embrace that title as primaries closed in several states Tuesday evening. “Thanks to you, we’ve reached a milestone,” Clinton told a huge crowd at a speech in Brooklyn, New York. “Tonight’s victory is not about one person; it belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible.”
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She also acknowledged the "extraordinary campaign" of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has promised to take his quest for the presidency all the way to the Democratic convention in July.
For younger voters who didn't grow up watching Clinton fight nonstop sexism as their first lady, this moment may feel like less of a triumph. The AP's controversial call, meanwhile, has managed to stir even more resentment of Clinton. To her critics she is a pantsuit-clad villain so desirous of power that her soul is barren and black.
What those young voters may forget is that, to her supporters, she is a woman who is indestructible, despite a relentless, decades-long campaign designed to break her.
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If she's a hero in our nation's graphic novel, then cast her as the mutant who charges the battle line time and again, surviving only because of some freakish capacity to withstand public and personal pain.
It's not just that Clinton, 68, is on the cusp of becoming the first woman to secure a major presidential nomination — it's that she did so despite decades of personal attacks and ugly odds.
In 1993, when Bill and Hillary Clinton moved into the White House, she installed her office in the West Wing. A lawyer and longtime children's advocate, Clinton wanted a prominent role in shaping legislative solutions to the country's most pressing problems, including health care coverage.
Yet first ladies never sat alongside domestic policy advisers. They were instead expected to tend to social duties from the East Wing. And so it began in earnest for Clinton: years of being called arrogant and power-mongering.
"From almost the beginning of the transition to the White House, people thought she’d overstepped her boundaries."
"From almost the beginning of the transition to the White House, people thought she’d overstepped her boundaries," says Farida Jalalzai, an associate professor of political science at Oklahoma State University who studies gender in politics.
The media and public often tried to remind Clinton of a wife and mother's appropriate role, and she famously bristled at those cues. For those born in the late 1980s and beyond, who didn't watch her high-wire act in real time with both excitement and dread, Clinton must seem like the epitome of the status quo.
These younger voters have, for example, no firsthand memory of how her thick headbands were just as central a topic as her advocacy to expand public health insurance for lower income children.
The landmark speech she delivered in 1995 in Beijing, in which she declared "woman's rights are human rights," is just a footnote among headlines about Benghazi and Goldman Sachs speeches.
People forget that Clinton was a standard bearer of feminism — however imperfect — at a time when critics tossed the term "feminazi" around with alarming frequency. The public couldn't freely challenge the powerful to get woke with the click of a mouse. Gender equality didn't have popular ambassadors like Emma Watson, Lena Dunham and Beyoncé.
"She’s had to build the road as she’s traveled it," says Marie Wilson, a Clinton supporter and founder of the now-defunct White House Project, a nonprofit organization that trained women to participate in public life.
That many people find Clinton untrustworthy is no coincidence. Some voters have strong, legitimate policy disagreements with her, but others cite deep-seated suspicion of her character. That might, in fact, be how we are trained to respond to a woman who defies our attempts to contain her.
"She’s had to build the road as she’s traveled it."
Jalalzai says that her students are reluctant to believe gender could influence their lives in an important way. They see equality in their lives and view feminism as outdated. The irony is that Clinton played an important role in creating the luxury of that perspective.
Some may have wanted a less complicated or flawed woman to make this particular history — a woman who didn't vote for the Iraq war, didn't use a private email server, didn't sit on the board of Walmart, didn't accept cash from Wall Street firms to give speeches. Those things, however, are equally the work of influential men who do not suffer comparable scrutiny and condemnation.
It's hard to predict, for example, how liberals would square President Obama's "audacity of hope" with drone strikes, the failure to close Guantanamo Bay and the rise of ISIS had those possibilities seemed inevitable in 2008. If we could go back in time, we might be more honest about the fact that men who make their own history are also only human.
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Clinton's path to the presidency remains unique because of her marriage. She benefited politically from her husband, but Jalalzai's research shows that's no coincidence either. In countries around the world where women have ascended to national leadership, they are often the daughters or wives of successful politicians who are accomplished and qualified in their own right.
Clinton's marriage, though, is not the same thing as her will or vision. She chose this moment, insisting on it even after 25 years of vitriol and criticism. This time she happened to earn 3 million more votes than her primary opponent; the people chose her, too.
Of course, historic moments are far messier than we tend to recall. When Barack Obama finally won the Democratic nomination in 2008, it was Clinton who stood briefly in his way.
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Instead of conceding immediately to the first African American to become a presidential nominee, she waited until a few days after his decisive primary victories and took a moment to acknowledge her own history-making campaign.
"Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it, and the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time," Clinton said.
That next time is now, and though Clinton would have likely preferred an easier road, her victory demands — from those capable of the gesture — that we recognize what it took for a woman, and this particular woman, to end more than two centuries of a regrettable tradition.
"You can be anything you want to be in this country, including President of the United States.”
Wilson, who attended the Beijing conference with Clinton in 1995, has waited a lifetime for this moment.
"To see a woman who has done so much and is so qualified, be at this place where she is the party nominee," she says, "it’s like standing in a moment of great triumph and feeling, if there is any way that history watches us, that so many women we missed in the past are standing with her and thinking finally, finally."
When asked about the momentous occasion on Monday, Clinton described the weight of it as "really emotional."
Then she said something worth repeating in the coming months: “I do think it will make a very big difference for a father or a mother to be able to look at their daughter, just like they can look at their son and say, ‘You can be anything you want to be in this country, including President of the United States.’”
This story has been updated.
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TopicsGenderElectionsHillary ClintonPolitics
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