Pilloried Clinton   

Were the women who covered Hillary Clinton during the campaign guilty of sexism?

Does attorney James Schroeder, spouse of U.S. Rep. Patricia Schroeder, pay enough attention to his family? Does investment banker Richard Blum gaze adoringly when his wife, newly elected U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, makes a speech? Does developer John Zaccaro, husband of the 1984 Democratic candidate for vice president, Geraldine Ferraro, bake cookies? These were issues the press never raised about the men behind the women running for high political office – even when Schroeder ran a trial campaign for president in 1987.

Yet for Hillary Clinton, a high-powered attorney and the first wife of a presidential candidate to have her own career, media scrutiny about her devotion to her husband and family was just the beginning. As the campaign progressed, the coverage dealt less with her career and more with her hair, her clothes, her "gaffes," her "aggressive" style and her chocolate chip cookies.

Many of the stories were full of loaded language conjuring up images of an "acerbic," "take-no-prisoners," "off-putting" Lady Macbeth. There was the "Wronged Woman Hillary," "Feminist Crusader Hillary" and, finally, "Sorority Sister Hillary," complete with adoring gaze and frozen smile.

No doubt, Hillary was news. Serious questions were raised about her influence as the first spouse of a presidential candidate openly acknowledged to be a key adviser to her husband. There was also the possibility that she could play an official role in a Clinton administration.

But for every serious look at Hillary's views there was a host of stories on the "overbearing yuppie wife from hell" who learned the hard way how to act meekly and wear pastels. Ironically, most of those stories were written by women journalists, presumably as career-minded as their subject.

The media were confused by Hillary Clinton. Reporters simply didn't know how to write about a post-women's movement, professional baby boomer in line to become first lady, a position "framed by the expectations of the 19th century," as the New York Times put it.

"This is a new phenomenon for the media and they're feeling their way, figuring out how to appropriately cover her; whether or not Hillary coverage should go in the A section or in the style pages," says Ann Grimes, an Washington Post assistant national editor and author of the 1990 book, "Running Mates: The Making of a First Lady."

Others say it's simply the nature of the press to oversimplify.

"I think with Hillary Clinton there is a record to be looked at," says Marjorie Williams, a Vanity Fair contributing editor who profiled Barbara Bush in August. "A lot of reporters didn't want to do the homework probably because it involves writing about ideas... So what we got instead was, 'Does America like her, does America not like her? Does she spend enough time with her family?' "

Grimes says that the 1988 campaign foreshadowed the media's treatment of Hillary. There was talk during the primaries that year of whether the first lady role might be too insignificant for the likes of Elizabeth Dole, whose husband Robert was seeking the Republican nomination. There were also some musings later about whether the outspoken Kitty Dukakis had been toned down for the campaign. But much more was written about Hillary.

The press approached her almost immediately from a traditional perspective, says Grimes, because that's how she first appeared – as the wronged woman responding last January to allegations of her husband's infidelity on "60 Minutes." "She came into the public awareness..," Grimes says, "as a podium prop and a character witness for her husband."

While the couple's performance under fire was credited with saving Bill Clinton's campaign, that night Hillary also made what became known as the Tammy Wynette slur. "I'm not some little woman standing by her man like Tammy Wynette," she said.

Only a public opinion poll could show whether it was a gaffe, says Grimes, but no national polls were taken. It was nonetheless labeled a mistake by the press. For example, on March 30, Newsweek's Ginny Carroll went so far as to deride Hillary for being "heedless of the country music vote."

Newsweek's Ann McDaniel, who covered the White House until recently, insists that comment was merited. She says the country music vote is "significant," noting that President Bush had used country music as a way to seem in touch with everyday people.

Besides the Tammy Wynette incident, the early coverage of Hillary was generally straightforward compared with later stories. In March, reporters traveled to Little Rock to review Hillary's professional work for possible improprieties the same way they investigated Zaccaro, Schroeder and Blum. "People weren't interested in her hair or clothes initially," says Eleanor Clift, Newsweek's deputy Washington bureau chief.

It was a March 15 front page Washington Post story that led to Hillary's most damaging remark. The article, by Michael Weisskopf and David Maraniss, examined her law firm's business with the state of Arkansas and her ties with the operator of a failed savings and loan, but found nothing improper.

Citing the Post article during a televised debate that night, Democratic presidential candidate Jerry Brown accused Bill Clinton of funneling state business to his wife's law firm. The next day, Hillary responded: "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas. But what I decided to do was fulfill my profession."

That sound bite was on the air for weeks. It was the gaffe of all Hillary gaffes, according to the press, showing her utter contempt for stay-at-home wives. But almost no news outlet printed or broadcast the rest of what she said, as Time finally did in September: "The work that I have done as a professional, a public advocate, has been aimed..to assure that women can make the choices..whether it's full-time career, full-time motherhood or some combination."

"Not quoting Hillary on the rest of that part was an unfortunate thing," says Margaret Carlson, Time's deputy Washington bureau chief. "The whole [quote] is about women having choices."

But other reporters say it doesn't matter that her entire statement was not quoted. "The cookies remark was a stupid remark for a political wife to make," says Vanity Fair's Williams.

The cookies sound bite helped shape the coverage Hillary received for the rest of the campaign. The "Hillary Factor" was born and stories started to appear with such headlines as "Will she hurt or help?" At that point, Hillary's favorable rating in the polls was about 65 percent. By April, when U.S. News & World Report called her an "overbearing yuppie wife from hell," only 38 percent in one national poll thought she helped her husband's campaign.

Even at their lowest point, however, her ratings never indicated that the so-called Hillary Factor turned off many voters. In April, the Gallup Organization calculated the Hillary Factor in a race between Clinton and Bush. Making an admittedly "rough" analysis, Gallup Vice President Larry Hugick said the Hillary effect actually meant a gain for her husband of 1.6 percent.

Susan Rasky, a journalism professor at the University of California at Berkeley and former New York Times congressional correspondent, says the Hillary Factor was partially fueled by Republican attacks, the media's fascination with her, and the Clinton campaign itself. "It was more manufactured than it was real," she says.

Reporters who wrote about Hillary don't agree. "The press puts a lot of emphasis on things, but we certainly don't invent them," says Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times.

By July, just before the Democratic National Convention, female stereotypes abounded in stories about the one-time feminist "crusader" who now was favoring her "softer side."

A July 13 article in the New York Times by Stanley described a Hillary relegated to discussing recipes, child-rearing and the Fourth of July, though she is not without her "occasional fugues into technocratic prose."

Stanley, like many others, attributed the change in Hillary to a vaguely defined dissatisfaction among voters with the "hardheaded careerist who dominated her mate and seemed contemptuous of ordinary housewives.

"Though some voters say they like her precisely because she is a modern role model," Stanley wrote, "so many others have been put off by her assertiveness that she has begun favoring her softer side."

Meanwhile, a Times poll cited in the same article failed to document any mass revulsion among voters. It found that 29 percent of voters liked Hillary Clinton and 14 percent did not.

Stanley maintains she was not stereotyping but covering a dramatic remake in the candidate's wife. "There was a very conscious effort to tone her down," she says. "I didn't make that up." Clinton campaign officials did not return phone calls for this article.

A Newsday article by Michele Ingrassia that same day told how an "acerbic" Hillary with a "take-no-prisoners style" had become "kinder and gentler," again with vague references to the "some" who rejected the "amibitious arch-feminist." Ingrassia wrote that Clinton had changed her presumably nasty image by tossing out her square-shouldered suits and headbands and replacing them with "softer-styled, pastel-colored dresses (bought mostly off the rack and mostly in Little Rock)." Ingrassia also described Clinton "standing by her man, gazing approvingly, if not adoringly."

Ingrassia, a feature writer, says she wrote the article to "have fun" with the campaign's remake of Hillary. "The last thing the story was meant to be was dour and serious," she says. "And based on seeing her, she did start to gaze adoringly. Trust me."

A week later, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift weighed in with "Hillary Then and Now." Clift observed that Hillary changed her image three times during the campaign, ending up as a "burned-out, buttoned-up automaton compared with the vibrant woman" she appeared to be in January. She also quoted an anonymous friend of Hillary's who told her, "As bitchy as she comes off, he really loves her."

Clift says she wanted to show how the campaign had taken its toll on Hillary, and how she had changed. As for the "bitchy" reference, "I was quoting someone," Clift says. "You can go through all the stories..and build a case that you're apparently building. But Hillary's views were covered for the most part by women reporters who were very sympathetic to her."

In August, when the Republicans openly embraced the Hillary Factor as part of their campaign strategy, the press credited them with creating it. Some conservative news outlets were more critical of Hillary than the GOP. Daniel Wattenberg, in an American Spectator article that month, called her the "Winnie Mandela of American politics" who roams the far-left fringes of the Democratic Party and advocates that children be allowed to sue their parents to resolve family arguments.

Wattenberg's article was quoted in a number of articles in the mainstream press, which only then took a serious look at her early legal writings. Conservatives, meanwhile, charged the media with being too soft on Hillary.

"Why did [the press] treat her like a bimbo?" asks Tim Graham, associate editor of MediaWatch, a conservative newsletter. "If she's a departure, a working woman and the president-elect's most trusted adviser, why wouldn't she get the same questions the others [in his camp] did? Instead we got, 'How's the bus trip? Is it fun?' "

In September, when the New York Times reported that at least 20 major publications had compared Hillary to Lady Macbeth, focus groups indicated the public didn't like the Republican attacks on her, and her favorable rating was up to 56 percent, the same as her husband's.

Even so, Time published its "Hillary Factor" cover story in mid-September, stating she "would have done well at the outset to have conformed more to the traditional campaign rules for aspiring first ladies: gaze like Nancy Reagan, soothe like Barbara Bush and look like Jacqueline Kennedy." The story, by Margaret Carlson, included results from a Time-CNN poll that indicated that Hillary would have no effect on how 74 percent of voters planned to vote.

Yet Carlson focused on the 14 percent who said Hillary made them less inclined to vote for Bill Clinton. "If the Hillary factor can mean the difference of a couple of percentage points," she wrote, "it could provide a critical margin in a close election."

Political observers find the notion absurd. "If people voted for president based on the spouse, Bush would have won the election," says Rasky.

Carlson's story also included another Time-CNN poll that asked whether Hillary is "intelligent," "a good role model for young women," "too pushy" or "doesn't pay enough attention to her family." Carlson says she thought some of the poll's questions were "terrible."

Poll questions aside, the women covering Hillary uniformly deny they used sexist stereotyping. "I'm not in the business to perpetuate female stereotypes," says Clift.

Media observers, however, say many of the stories included loaded language. "Sure [the coverage was] sexist, but in a long tradition of sexist stereotypes of first ladies," says Rasky. "Some of it comes from the fact that as a country, we've never really known quite what to do with first ladies and first families..and that doesn't necessarily make for enlightened journalism."

"Historically there's been a long-standing antagonism in Washington between women journalists and political wives," says Grimes. "I think women were fascinated by her. But Hillary Clinton, like political wives before her, got power the old-fashioned way. She's married to it. Maybe some sense of that was creeping into the coverage."

Grimes also argues that Hillary was taken more seriously than previous potential first ladies. At the close of the primaries, Hillary was invited to a breakfast interview at the Washington Post. "That was unheard of" for a prospective first lady, Grimes says. "And the questions she was asked were quite substantive."

But while some Hillary coverage was serious, media watchers lament that much of it was silly. "I think the media is the most blameworthy," says Vanity Fair's Williams, who critiqued the coverage of candidates' wives recently in the Washington Post Magazine. "We're the ones who are supposed to try for an unbiased and intelligent approach. We're the ones who have to answer for how stupid it all got." l