How can someone be so famous and yet so misunderstood? It’s easy if your name is Hillary Clinton.
Gary Scott Smith, author of Do All the Good You Can, contends Hillary Rodham Clinton is arguably the most misunderstood person in American political history. Smith also calls Clinton, along with George McGovern and Jimmy Carter, one of the most faith-based politicians in US history. And yet most casual observers, and even Hillary admirers, probably do not view her as particularly religious in any sense of the word. With Do All the Good You Can, Smith, a professor of history emeritus at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, hopes to remedy what he considers a historical falsity.
The problem is part perception and part inattentiveness. “Everyone sees the Hillary they want to see,” wrote columnist Eleanor Clift in 2014.
Indeed, despite her fame, many people still know little about the former Hillary Rodham. As recently as a few days ago, a colleague from a city in the Northeast told me that she thought Clinton was from Missouri. Another colleague had no idea she was even remotely religious.
Another point that Smith makes is that of all the political figures in American history, few are as despised—and admired—as HRC. With a few exceptions, no other contemporary figure is as polarizing or divisive. A great deal of the criticism often had little to do with Clinton herself but rather as the price of doing politics.
Hillary Diane Rodham was born in 1947 at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago of mostly English, Welsh, and Scottish descent. At the age of three she moved with her family to suburban Park Ridge where she was raised in a household whose Methodist roots, on her father’s side, could be traced back to the religion’s founders John Wesley and his younger brother Charles in England. Her conservative and emotionally distant Republican father Hugh raised her to be combative, determined, and self-confident. She was told as a girl she could do anything a boy could do. She took that to heart. At the same time, her mother, Dorothy, was a warm presence who offered her unconditional love and support. Daughter and mother shared a strong bond that lasted until Dorothy’s death in 2011.
In the early 1960s, Clinton joined the youth group of the First Methodist Church in Park Ridge where she met her first true mentor, Don Jones, who promoted the Methodist ideal of caring for the poor and disadvantaged. It was in Park Ridge too where the character traits that the world would come to associate with her—her deep intellect, idealism, belief in public service—were forged. Even then, Clinton was known for her somber demeanor and determination. While her girlfriends had the usual teenage crushes and pined over boys, Clinton preferred to talk about “politics, Sputnik, and sports.”
At Maine East High School—she later transferred to Maine South––she won a good citizen award sponsored by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). In a portent of things to come, she was elected class vice president during her junior year but lost the election during her senior year for president to a male student.
Through most of her adult life, Clinton has experienced extreme reactions from both sides of the political aisle. Call it the devil or angel debate. To her friends, she was loyal, warm, and funny. To her detractors, she was bossy, arrogant, and humorless. Conservatives called her a radical feminist. She has often been compared to Lady Macbeth and Nurse Ratched, or a combination of both. Which is not to say that she didn’t have her share of supporters. She did and does. At one point the media referred to her as “Saint Hillary”—but even so it came with a touch of disdain: she was the do-gooder who knew what was best for you. Such an attitude also played into the likability factor that had such an important role during her campaign against Barack Obama for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. To put it another way, she was the spinach to Obama’s chili.
But perhaps her greatest crime, notes Smith, was “gargantuan ambition.” Too much ambition was fine in a man, so goes the theory, but it was considered the ultimate flaw in a woman.
Clinton has held many titles over her long career, of course: First Lady of Arkansas, First Lady of the United States, New York senator, the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major American party, secretary of state. According to Smith, only two women on the global stage have made more of an impact than Clinton: Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel. But that fame came at a cost. Clinton, continues Smith, was “arguably the most renowned, influential, and despised first lady in American history.” She was certainly the most activist First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt.
Unlike other First Ladies, she dared to be different in another way: no other First Lady had run for public office before. It was during her successful campaign for the New York Senate seat that she began to speak openly about her Methodist faith and, writes Smith, “stressed the religious aspects of and biblical basis for some of her key policies.” But as a native of Illinois and the former First Lady of Arkansas, she was viewed as a carpetbagger much like Robert F. Kennedy before her. She was a WASP outsider from a predominantly white Chicago suburb running in multicultural New York. Worse, she was also the wife of an impeached president. Despite all this, Clinton won by focusing on issues popular with New Yorkers—on improving education, health care, and the lives of children and women. In sum, she spent eight years in the Senate. In true Methodist fashion she prided herself on being a “workhorse, not a show horse.” Her colleagues in the Senate praised her strong Protestant work ethic and collegiality.
When she served as Barack Obama’s secretary of state her popularity rating soared to 64 percent. Indeed, it’s easy to forget that for 10 consecutive years she was the most admired woman in America. And yet a mere dozen years earlier, she was at her nadir. In 1996, only 43 percent of Americans saw her in a positive light. The moral? As long as she wasn’t running for office, the public was fine with her.
Smith is nothing if not fair-minded in his treatment of Clinton, perhaps to a fault. At every turn he reminds readers what her many critics thought of her—and still think of her. She has been accused of lying, deception, financial misconduct, conflict of interest, even murder. All the scandals are rehashed here--sometimes to the book’s detriment: Travelgate, Whitewatergate, the health insurance debacle during the first Clinton administration, Benghazi, the email controversy. It gets tiresome after a while and can even be exhausting. On the other hand, Smith admits that “More lies had been told about Clinton than any other figure in American history.”
But the focus of the book is on her religious faith. Smith, after all, calls Do All the Good You Can a religious biography of Clinton. And that it is. Since her girlhood in Park Ridge, Clinton has followed the Methodist creed of “to do all the good you can by all the means you can to all the people you can as long as you can.” In between the regurgitation of the mostly bogus scandals that have dogged her throughout her career, Smith explores how faith affected her life and her attitude toward public service. As he readily admits, the role that faith played has often been underappreciated, if not ignored entirely. The irony surely does not escape him that most Americans misunderstood or even dismissed as disingenuous just how important her faith was to her. And yet, Clinton discussed her faith plenty of times and in plenty of places—at town halls and political rallies and elsewhere. But she didn’t hit people over the head with it. She was not a preacher or orator in the Obama mode. Her faith, like her character, was subtler and more nuanced. The problem was that Clinton in particular, and Methodists in general, are suspicious of wearing their faith on their sleeves. She was reluctant to discuss her personal life. A WASP reticence prevented her from promoting her religious faith as much as she could have. Smith contends she paid a high price for that reticence.
For the most part, though, the media rarely covered Clinton’s God talk or perhaps they didn’t take it seriously or thought it newsworthy. Although Clinton’s religious faith was long-lasting and genuine, her enemies accused her of using religious rhetoric to garner votes. During the 2008 presidential campaign, for example, Smith notes that a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reported that only 12 percent of the public viewed her as religious. By 2016, attitudes hadn’t changed that much: more than 40 percent of Americans believed she was not religious at all. Most religious conservatives “ignored, rejected, or even ridiculed Clinton’s faith,” says Smith. But this lack of knowledge was nothing new. Even when she was the First Lady of Arkansas many voters considered her “a godless liberal.”
And then there was the issue of sexism, which Smith addresses. “Sexism played a role in Clinton losing the nomination to Obama,” he bluntly declares. Sexism also re-emerged during the 2016 presidential campaign. Many evangelicals, Smith adds, “ignored or downplayed Trump’s affairs and boasted about his sexual prowess and conquests while blaming Clinton for contributing to and enabling her husband’s sexual infidelity.” That is, religious conservatives were more willing to accept Trump as a true Christian rather than Clinton whose religious beliefs were deeply rooted, who once taught Sunday school, and knew the Bible chapter and verse.
Smith maintains that a more and prolonged targeted campaign to religious groups might have led to a different outcome. He concludes that if she had won a mere 78,000 more votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin combined that would have been enough to win the election.
Although flawed, perhaps Smith’s even-handed biography will shed new light on this little-known aspect of Clinton’s character and career.
Do All the Good You Can: How Faith Shaped Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Politics is available at most bookstores and through the University of Illinois Press website.