"America's Exhibit A": Hillary Rodham Clinton's Living History and the Genres of Authenticity

"Does she have the stuff to come on Hardball . . . into the belly of the beast?"

Chris Matthews to Howard Fineman, MSNBC 2000

In this terrain, women are held up simultaneously to often deeply contradictory standards—could Clinton, a girl, really be commander in chief? Or was she too tough and unladylike for the job?

Susan Douglas, Enlightened Sexism

As the old canard goes: a year is a millennium in politics. So what the candidate line-up will look like in 2016 is far from predictable. But for many politicos, the expectation is that Hillary Clinton will make a second run for the Democratic nomination and then for the White House. She will be 69 in 2016, not the oldest candidate; Ronald Reagan was 69 when elected. She'll have her experience as Secretary of State in the Obama administration, international bona fides, and security credibility that expand her claims to formidable expertise. Chances are she will have written another book, this one on foreign policy. Clinton's 2003 best-selling autobiography Living History will more than likely be reissued sometime before the campaign begins in earnest. It will most likely enter the New York Times best-seller list for a second time.

Given this possible future for Clinton's autobiography, I want to return to Living History to meditate on the political uses of autobiography in the gendered arena of American presidential politics.¹ Living History earned big bucks. Its audio book version won an Emmy. The book tour, interviews, and reviews that followed put Clinton in contact with a national audience of celebrity fans and potential voters that the aspiring presidential candidate would recruit into "Hillaryland."² Translations of the book, including the Chinese version, turned her autobiography into a global best seller.³

As prologue to a campaign for the presidential nomination, Living History sought to do the social work of convincing the voting public that a woman could assume national leadership. Not that Hillary Clinton was the first woman to launch a presidential bid in the US. Margaret Chase Smith, a Congresswoman and senator from Maine, made a bid for the Republican nomination in 1964, losing out to Barry Goldwater; and Shirley Chisholm, Congresswoman from the 12th District of New York, made a bid for the Democratic nomination, the first by an African American, in 1972. But Clinton was the first former First Lady to position herself for a presidential run, and the first woman with national and global celebrity status to establish a viable plan for pursuing and gaining the nomination. The "Hillary" of Living History, then, would translate celebrity aura into active support, skepticism into investment, and do so by performing a convincing political persona. But how would this woman, this feminist professional, former First Lady, and duly-elected senator, craft the story of representative American-ness in the hyper-masculinized genre of the aspiring candidate's autobiography; and how would she perform the intimacy that secures the claim to authenticity in this highly mediated form?

1. Mobilizing the "Authentic" Political Persona

Before pursuing these questions, let me comment briefly on the social action of contemporary candidate autobiography. A corporate production, the candidacy of late capitalism is crafted, packaged, marketed, displayed, polled, and sold. The presidential candidate must perform as a celebrity, sustain celebrity appeal, and successfully navigate the shoals of celebrity culture.⁴ In this densely mediated environment, the political persona is ever more deftly and promiscuously imaged, voiced, choreographed, and networked.⁵ Central to the political utility of the persona is the "life story," the story that does the political work of securing the symbolic relationship between person and political system (Corner 398), at once individualizing the candidate and projecting the candidate as the embodiment of representivity, to use Dana Nelson's term ("Representative/Democracy" 325). The aspiring candidate wants to get a book written, get it out, get it read, and get it on the New York Times best-seller list. Its very shelf life registers its power to compel voter support. In the first decades of the...