A colleague of mine recently shook his head as we discussed the election. “Hillary,” he said in a resigned tone, head slowly swishing back and forth. “She just doesn’t connect. I don’t think she cares. I’ll vote for her, sure, but she has to find a way to connect.”
You hear a version of this all the time as Democrats and all those fearful of handing ultimate power to a truly terrible man wonder why that terrible man is doing so well in a race he should be losing badly. Hillary doesn’t connect. Sure, say smart, educated people like my colleague: sure, she may be good in small groups but with large numbers of people…. They trail off, searching for a way to explain that what matters in modern politics — if anything matters in this Looking Glass election — is the ability to give rousing speeches and mesmerize ballrooms and stadiums and cow the press. Somehow, Trump connects to people, and Hillary doesn’t. We can debate the reasons for this, most of which have to do with her gender in one way or another. It never seems to get us anywhere.
But, as with so many things, the conventional wisdom has it completely wrong about Hillary. She is a lovely person, caring in a deep and serious way, a person conscious of her ability to help large numbers of people and at the same time able and eager to focus on the plight of single individuals. Even when she has all the right in the world to play the star and avoid the difficult, tedious professions of humanity with which we all struggle and with which we would all rather not engage, she doesn’t avoid them. She takes them on. And this country will be much better for having her as president because of that caring nature, that empathy, which is a central part of her.