Hillary Clinton gets her fight from her father


Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton has made a habit of working her mother's influence into her 2016 campaign, speaking often of her hard-working nature and resilience after being abandoned by both of her parents at a young age.
In an illuminating story, The New York Times delved into Clinton's relationship with the parent she doesn't speak as openly about — her late father, Hugh Rodham.
This sums up pretty well their often tense, troubled relationship:
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When she lagged behind in Miss Metzger’s fourth-grade math class, Mr. Rodham would wake his daughter at dawn to grill her on multiplication tables. When she brought home an A, he would sneer: "You must go to a pretty easy school." [The New York Times]
Rodham also reportedly harbored prejudices against people of other religions and races, to the point where his demeanor isolated the family from their neighbors.
The Times argues her father's toughness was as much of a factor as her mother's in Clinton's scrappiness as a politician. Read the full report here.
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Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.
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