‘I Get a Little Wonky’

In a nondescript classroom on the grounds of the Electrical Training Institute of IBEW Local 11, amid the stuff of a campaign-event holding room—bottles of water, tea, a Sharpie laid out next to a few placards and photos that need autographing for local supporters—Hillary Clinton sat down with NEWSWEEK's Jon Meacham for an interview that ranged from her childhood in suburban Park Ridge, Ill., to John Wesley, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King Jr. and, of course, Barack Obama. Edited excerpts:

MEACHAM: The line in your victory speech in New Hampshire that jumped out at me was "I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice." What did you mean?
CLINTON: Well, the election in New Hampshire was the most intense political and public experience I've ever had. It is four days where I had to do everything I could to make my case to the voters of New Hampshire. I was 13, 15 points down; Barack had done an excellent job of organizing in Iowa. What I realized is that the reason I do this, why I get up every day, why I believe in our country and the importance of leadership, was not getting across the way that I wanted it to. I get so focused on what I want to do as president that I get a little wonky. I get a little out there, with details, with five-point plans for this and 10-point plans for that, and I think that what I'm proposing really is both achievable and important, but it's not what gets me up, so why should it get voters excited?

It sounds almost overly simplistic, but I had enough time in the Senate race for people to see me as a human being, they could see me in all of my dimensions, and they could draw their own conclusions. They could discover that I really mean what I say, that I come from a family and a faith tradition where I do think it's about what you do and not what you say, and they could put all that together. But in the presidential campaign, I think I sort of pocketed too much of that. I thought, well, I've been in the public eye for so long now, and as a senator I first defied expectations to get elected and immediately went to work with Republicans, I did a lot to try to solve the problems we faced, so, obviously, people will [infer] that I'm doing it because I really care about the outcomes. I don't think that was a smart assumption for me to make, or for my campaign to make, very honestly. And so what I decided to do in New Hampshire was really to go back almost to those earliest days when I was running in New York, where people didn't really know what to think, or what to expect, and where I went out every day and did everything I could to show myself, explain myself. I was on a listening tour in 1999 and 2000, and that listening tour enabled me not just to be elected senator but to be re-elected with 67 percent of the vote. So I went back to listening, and to really engaging the voters, and just laid it all out there for them to make their judgments.

There is something counterintuitive about listening to find one's voice, and raises the old question of leadership about to what extent is a leader a maker or a mirror of the country.
In this environment, you have a greater chance of success of being a maker if people who now have multiple sources of information believe that you understand them, you are connected with them, you are fighting for them, you are in politics not for yourself but for them.

So your voice now, as you describe it, is telling people not only what you want to do, but who you are, and you are going to be telling that story more.
Exactly … Look, I am not great at talking about myself. That is not my personality, it's not how I was raised, I am more reserved than that, I am not someone who will bare my soul at the drop of a hat. But what I have realized is that in our political environment, for a lot of good reasons, people need to know, people need to understand. One of the most emotional events we had in Iowa was where my best friend from sixth grade who is still very dear to me, where a woman from Long Island whom I helped with a sick child, where another person I had helped in Katrina who was a conservative Republican investment banker, all came to Iowa and said, "We want to talk about you—you're doing a lousy job of it yourself" … and so I said, "Fine, you go do it." That was a beginning, but I have to use my voice to tell people who I am, where I come from, why this is important and what I will do.

My sense of your theological world view, to oversimplify, is that it is more in line with Lincoln and Niebuhr than with, say, more feel-good kinds of evangelism. Life is tragic, and all that.
Yes. Life is tragic, human beings are flawed, you can't take anything or anyone for granted, it may not be there tomorrow, and you have to rely on yourself—and hopefully, if you are a good person, you will also take care of other people on the way and try to give them the opportunities to also withstand the vagaries and vicissitudes of life.