Hillary Clinton’s Apr. 12, 2015 presidential campaign launch kicked the US presidential race for 2016 into higher gear. It’s also the first American campaign announcement to garner significant media attention in India. She is perhaps the most admired, most criticised, most over-analysed woman in US history. Hillary Clinton has been a public fixture for 37 years, and at 67 she is aiming once again to win over a skeptical America.
Who after all remains unfamiliar with the lives of Hillary and Bill Clinton?
Parts of first lady Clinton's archives have been made public, and candid papers of Hillary confidante Diane Blair, who died in 2000, are available at the University of Arkansas.
Bill Clinton's sexual proclivities were laid out in explicit detail. Hillary herself has recalled the rage she felt against her mentor-husband after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the threat of divorce, the marriage-counselling.
By 1993, People magazine offered a cover-story peek into "The Real Woman Hillary Clinton."
Twenty-two years later, following a US Senate stint and four years as the
international face of the Obama administration -- and her announcement on Sunday that she is again running for president -- she remains omni-present in the public eye.
Hillary Diane Rodham was born October 26, 1947 and raised in a middle-class household in Chicago suburb Park Ridge.
He imposed his work ethic on young Hillary, but also his frugality. She still puts uneaten olives back in the jar and is loath to waste anything, she wrote in her 2003 autobiography, "Living History." Clinton shared her father's Republican convictions in adolescence, as well as his thunderous laugh.
The family is Methodist, and to this day Hillary Clinton remains in the church.
From age 13, she took odd jobs to help finance her studies. Smart and ambitious, Hillary was admitted in 1965 to Wellesley, an elite women's college near Harvard where she was eventually elected president of her class.
With 1960s America in turmoil, Clinton's academic years opened her eyes to civil rights and gender-quality struggles, and the cultural divide over Vietnam.
After she was accepted in 1969 at the prestigious Yale Law School, she met Bill Clinton, the "Viking" from Arkansas who would change the course of her life.
After a period in Washington in 1974, when a commission hired her to help investigate the Watergate scandal, she gave in and joined Bill in Arkansas.
He was soon elected Arkansas governor and Hillary Rodham joined a prestigious law firm, eventually becoming its first female partner.
She soon dropped her maiden name and became Hillary Clinton, first lady of Arkansas and then the nation after her husband's White House election victory in 1992.
Her style contrasted with her predecessors'. She played an active political role, symbolized by the location of her office in the West Wing. Her relations with lawmakers and journalists quickly soured. Republicans branded her a radical feminist.
She suffered intense humiliation during her husband's presidential affair with intern Monica Lewinsky in 1998. But her popularity has never been higher than the 67% approval rating she enjoyed in December 1998, according to a Gallup poll at the time.
Pressured by friends and associates in Hillaryland, the first lady launched herself into politics, winning an election in 2000 to be the new US senator from New York.
She laid low during the 2004 presidential race, but four years later she entered the fray to challenge fellow senator Barack Obama, who savaged her vote supporting the Iraq war.
Clinton chose to run on her experience, refusing to campaign on gender. But Americans opted instead on the 40-something political neophyte Obama, bringing hope of change after eight years of George W. Bush.
After finding detente with his party rival, Obama appointed Clinton secretary of state.
Due to her long history with India—as first lady, a senator, and secretary of state—Clinton is a known quantity in the region and has a clearly articulated policy record on South Asia, unlike other presidential candidates. One Indian paper covered her campaign launch with the headline, “Hillary hearts India.” That background makes it easier to assess how a possible Clinton administration might approach ties with India.
First and foremost, she sees India as a crucial part of US strategy in a world increasingly centered on Asia, where, in her words, “the future of politics will be decided.” As secretary of state, her focus on rebalancing US foreign policy toward Asia contained a strong emphasis on expanding ties with India, one of the emerging Asian powers highlighted in her Foreign Policy essay of 2011. This was the essay that referred to “actively support[ing] India’s ‘Look East’ effort” and talked of India as a “linchpin” of an “economically integrated and politically stable South and Central Asia.”
During her July 2011 visit to India, she delivered an important speech in Chennai—India’s maritime gateway to Southeast Asia—that reinforced US interest in working with India to steward the Asia-Pacific waters. It was that speech which, while noting American support for India’s “Look East” policy, also urged India “not just to look East, but to engage East and act East as well.” (Three years later, in Nov. 2014, India formally announced it would revise its “Look East” policy to an “Act East” policy.)
The Chennai speech marked the public introduction of a US “New Silk Road” vision for promoting regional economic integration to connect Afghanistan more deeply to markets, communication networks, and energy links within the region, particularly as the international troop presence shrinks. It’s no accident that Clinton rolled out this strategy publicly in India, home of South Asia’s largest economy by orders of magnitude. (Full disclosure: I worked in the Clinton state department as deputy assistant secretary for South Asia from 2010 to 2013.)
As secretary of state, Clinton placed a high priority as well on economic statecraft to advance trade and investment ties around the world. Here, too, India received important focus, although on this count a Clinton presidency would likely differ little from other administrations, given the heft of India’s economy.
Another area a Clinton administration would likely prioritize with India would be women’s empowerment. During her travels to India as secretary of state, she often met women’s organizations and women leaders, such as her Mumbai meeting with the Self-Employed Women’s Association in 2009; her Chennai interaction with the Working Women’s Forum in 2011; and her discussion with women at the Indian Council for Cultural Relations in Kolkata in 2012.
It’s perhaps as important to note that Clinton’s willingness to speak bluntly and publicly to Pakistan about the problems of terrorism in their country won her plaudits in India. Articles in the Indian press covering her campaign announcement mentioned her “tough messages” to Pakistan with approval.
Her critics argue she can claim no major diplomatic successes, but her four globe-trotting years in the post cemented her image as a powerful stateswoman.
In 2007, in his definitive Clinton biography, journalist Carl Bernstein cited his subject's dominant characteristic as "passion," exuded in her "enthusiasm, humor, tempestuousness, inner strength," and her "lethal (almost) powers of retribution."
A Machiavellian image, one painted by her many enemies, clings to Clinton, especially in the eyes of voters who remember the turmoil of the 1990s.
Only voters born after 1980 have a majority opinion of her as "honest and trustworthy," according to a CNN poll. Republicans continue to describe her as living in a self-centered bubble.
Fuelling that perception, Clinton said in 2014 that she and Bill were "dead broke" when they left the White House, largely due to her husband's legal fees, even though the couple owned two million-dollar homes.
Both Clintons went on to make several million dollars from speaking fees.
That’s an overview of policy priorities. What adds to her warm reception in India, as noted earlier, is the interest in India and South Asia she has demonstrated extending back to her visit as first lady in 1995. As a senator, she helped create and co-chaired the Senate India Caucus. She supported the US-India civil nuclear agreement spearheaded by the Bush administration, which won congressional approval in 2008.
She has traveled extensively in India, and over the decades interacted just as extensively with Indian media, such as in “townterview” appearances with India’s leading journalists. This is a much deeper level of familiarity with India, going back two decades, than any other candidate in the race.
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