On Friday, The Washington Post rolled out a sympathetic front-page story focusing on Hillary’s childhood and her late mother Dorothy Rodham, including the very old and repeated story of how Mom told four-year-old Hillary to go punch another girl in the neighborhood if she was bullied.
Politico’s Hillary-beat reporter Annie Garni tweeted that a 2007 Post story on "Clinton reintroing herself through mom and Midwest roots does read like it cld be written today". She linked on Twitter to a June 3, 2007 Washington Post story by Perry Bacon and Anne Kornblut that also loaded up the Mom-and-Hillary anecdotes, making clear that it might be a way of persuading impressionable voters that Hillary wasn’t an ambitious careerist plagued by scandals (as if that were untrue):
For years, when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton talked about her family, it was usually her famous husband or their well-known daughter. But Clinton has recently been discussing a more elusive figure in her life: her mother.
"She didn't have a very easy time of it as a young child," Clinton (D-N.Y.) said during an address to Democratic Party activists in California, describing the journey Dorothy Howell Rodham made in search of a home after her teenage parents divorced in 1920 and sent her away.
Drawing attention to her low-profile mother -- who is in her late 80s and lives with the Clintons on Whitehaven Street in Washington -- is one of several ways Clinton is seeking to give voters a new perspective on her biography. Armed with extensive polling data and an image road map tested in Upstate New York, the Clinton campaign has embarked on an ambitious effort to present the candidate the way they want her to be seen: as a pragmatic Midwesterner with a compelling life story of her own, rather than just the famous, and sometimes polarizing, senator and former first lady most of the country already knows she is.
Clinton tells crowds at the opening of virtually every speech that she was "born into a middle-class family in the middle of America, in the middle of the last century." One of the least-known facts about her, according to campaign operatives, is that she is a native of suburban Chicago, not Arkansas or New York.
Howard Wolfson, the campaign's communications director, said the senator is responding to the fact that voters "understandably want to know biographical information about people running for president."
"People have a sense of Senator Clinton in the Senate; they obviously have a sense of her as first lady," Wolfson said. "But most people do not know what she did before coming to Washington. We found that in New York: We ran ads in 1999 and 2000 about the work she had done prior to becoming first lady."
Now, Wolfson said, "There are people who say they know everything about Hillary Clinton, and then you ask where she was born, and they have no idea."
The challenge is more than just getting voters to connect to Clinton: She has extremely high negative ratings to try to counteract.
Introducing biographical information about her childhood and early adulthood, her advisers hope, will flesh out the familiar caricature of Clinton as an overly ambitious careerist who leaves scandal in her wake.
And eight years later, in the same early days of June, Kent Babb in the Post returned to repeat the same Clinton campaign tune. I hope someone in the Post newsroom told the new reporter that this kind of spit-and-polish story didn't really help Hillary the last time. But this just underlines the image of the Post as a Democratic rag:
This is one of young Hillary’s earliest memories, recounted decades later in her first memoir, “Living History.” She declined to be interviewed for this article, but in her book she remembers her mother, Dorothy, asking her why she wasn’t playing with other kids in Park Ridge, the suburb where the Rodhams lived.
Hillary started to cry. The problem was a girl named Suzy. Suzy was bigger, meaner, used to roughhousing with her older brothers, Hillary told her mother. She was afraid of her.
“Go back out there,” Dorothy Rodham ordered her oldest child and only daughter, nudging her out the door. Dorothy reminded her that if Suzy bullied her, she had her mother’s permission to punch back. “You have to stand up for yourself. There’s no room in this house for cowards.”
Though Dorothy deferred always to her opinionated, domineering husband, Hugh, she was perhaps the household’s strongest soul. She had spent her own childhood mostly alone, taking care of her sister when their parents left them alone for days. Dorothy was 8 when her parents put her on a train in Illinois bound for California, shuffled off to live with relatives who weren’t any more caring.
Dorothy’s grandmother once confined her to a year in her room for the sin of celebrating Halloween. She left at age 14 to work full time, as a $3-per-week housekeeper and nanny for a family that actually seemed to love one another.
Years later, Dorothy watched from behind a curtain as Hillary marched out to confront Suzy. The bully backed down, and Hillary raced home to announce her victory: “I can play with the boys now!”
These are family stories -- which could be generously altered or augmented for media consumption. No one at this paper's going back to find stories from Hillary's teenage years to make her look mean-spirited -- like say, the Post on the Romney haircut of 1965.
