New York Times just published an excellent full length piece and interview with Hillary Clinton. Highly, highly recommended reading.
Excerpts:
“It does feel much different,” she said. “If I were running against another Republican, we’d have our disagreements, don’t get me wrong, and I would be trying to make my case vigorously. But I wouldn’t go to bed at night with a knot in the pit of my stomach.” She enunciated her T’s (“knoT in the piT”) as if she were spitting out the words.
She knows the data as well as we do, and is confident of victory on Nov 8:
I clarified that I was talking about the prospect of her losing. She knew what I was talking about. “I’m not going to lose,” she said. She shot me a knowing grin. (Paragraph break) This is the standard politician’s answer when asked to contemplate defeat — even candidates who are down 30 points — but Clinton seemed to mean it.
On American society and what ails it:
“There are some difficult trends, which are not primarily political,” Clinton told me. “They are more cultural, psychological, and we just have to deal with them.” Earlier she had mentioned the 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” by Neal Postman, about how television has oriented politics more and more toward entertainment. She also cited the historian Christopher Lasch, the author of “The Culture of Narcissism.” The authors, she said, “were trying to come to grips, before the internet, trying to understand what was happening in our society, that we are experiencing a level of alienation, disconnectedness.”
She told me that her primary objective as president would be to encourage connectedness, to have actual conversations. Clinton has always preferred to build narratives from a granular level: start with details and allow a message to emerge more slowly… (she) said that the key to building connectedness lies in a leader’s ability to knit together a sense of common destiny from the ground up. “It requires real storytelling,” she said. “And I think as president, I can tell that story. It’s harder as a candidate.”
Clinton’s role in history right now, as a woman and as the opponent of Donald Trump:
“Don’t blow this” is what Clinton hears most often these days, she told me, or variations thereof. As it has turned out, Clinton, who began her campaign intent on breaking the last barrier — the glass ceiling — has found her most compelling rationale in her own role as a barrier, a bulwark against the impossible alternative. As I was leaving our interview, she smiled, looked me in the eyes and left me with a casual reminder. “As I’ve told people,” she said, “I’m the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse.”