Clinton: What did her outburst reveal?

last updated 8 January 2015

It certainly wasn’t Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “best moment,” said Joan Vennochi in The Boston Globe. During a town hall meeting in the Democratic Republic of Congo last week, a male college student asked Clinton—in a query that was apparently mangled in translation—what her husband thought of China’s pursuit of Congolese natural resources. “Wait, you want me to tell you what my husband thinks?” she snapped. “My husband is not the secretary of state. I am.… I’m not going to be channeling my husband.” And thus began “the latest installment of an ongoing Clinton vs. Clinton narrative,” said Tracy Clark-Flory in Salon.com, as Hillary’s outburst became an instant sensation on YouTube and cable news. With Bill Clinton being lauded that same week for rescuing two journalists from North Korea, Hillary was widely “caricatured” as an “emotionally delicate” woman desperately competing for the limelight with her globe-trotting husband.

“It’s only human to unload now and again,” said Kathryn Jean Lopez in National Review Online. But it’s not sexist to point out that it was “unprofessional” for the nation’s top diplomat to “fall victim to pride” and bark at a young man whose question wasn’t all that unreasonable. The fact is, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, Hillary’s “raw, competitive response” did make her seem “unhinged.” Moreover, the incident served to underscore the fact that, despite this Democratic power couple’s many talents, Obama’s decision to employ the Clintons as a diplomatic “tandem team” is fraught with peril—if for no other reason than everyone is on the lookout for evidence of “conjugal psychodrama.”

That obsession says more about us than it does about Hillary, said Judith Warner, also in the Times. It bears noting that Clinton, “overruling the security fears of her aides,” had traveled to Congo to bring attention to the thousands of women who have been raped, tortured, and abused over the past decade in a brutal war. There, she met personally with many victims, including a “woman who was gang-raped while eight months pregnant.” Against that backdrop, perhaps it is understandable that she would chafe at the suggestion that she was merely her husband’s mouthpiece. Back home, meanwhile, all we heard about her trip was “clucking about her marriage, her temperament, even her hair.” As Clinton makes the “case for women’s empowerment” around the globe, this constant “tide of trivialization” proves just how difficult her job is.