“He spoke of desiring her: her thick blond hair, her flowery white skirt, her magnetic personality. He was almost titillating as he recalled chasing after her and getting close enough to ‘touch her back.’ He used intimate details to reveal her feelings about his three marriage proposals.”
So begins a New York Times story by Patrick Healy analyzing Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday evening. The piece, posted Wednesday, ran under the headline: “Bill Clinton Presents His Wife as an Object of Desire,”* and said that for several minutes Clinton cast his wife as a sexual being.
“Never before has a spouse talked about a presidential nominee at a political convention quite like Bill Clinton described Hillary Clinton here on Tuesday night,” the story said. “Then again, a man has never talked about a woman in this context before.”
The piece made me think I had somehow dozed off and missed the good stuff while watching Clinton’s speech. What I heard was a spouse doing what spouses often do at it political conventions — making the candidate seem warm and human by taking voters into their more intimate, more offstage lives. Only with that Bill Clinton flourish.
That seems to be closer to what many other readers heard; some emailed the public editor to express their disbelief that The Times chose to portray Clinton’s speech as more sexual than they recalled. Doing so, some complained, bore the scent of sexism.
Here’s a typical comment, this from Patrick McClellan of Brooklyn:
President Clinton’s speech went far beyond his physical attraction to Mrs. Clinton and the details of their love life — in fact the focus of the speech was that Mrs. Clinton has always been a “change maker” — something that Mr. Healy seemed to overlook in his article. Political spouses, whether male or female, speak of their partners the way President Clinton spoke of Mrs. Clinton all the time — his speech was not nearly as novel or unprecedented as Mr. Healy seems to think it was.
Clinton’s speech was clearly unprecedented in one way — men aren’t normally the presidential warm-up act. But in taking on the role of smoothing out a candidate’s hard edges — and speaking in emotional, endearing terms — Clinton was no trailblazer.
Here’s one example, Ann Romney speaking about husband Mitt at the 2012 Republican National Convention: “I want to talk to you about love,” she says. “I want to talk to you about the deep and abiding love I have for a man I met at a dance many years ago.” She describes him as tall and nervous, as charming, warm, loving and patient. Was she the storyteller that Bill Clinton was? No, but then who is?
Was Clinton’s speech all that steamy? Perhaps it’s all in the eyes of the beholder.
Healy says Clinton spoke of “desiring her: her thick blond hair, her flowery white skirt, her magnetic personality.” Clinton didn’t actually use the word “desire.” And in addition to recalling young Hillary’s skirt and hair, he described her as having big glasses, wearing no makeup and giving off a sense of strength and self-possession he found “magnetic.” Smokin’ hot, right?
The story also depicts Clinton as almost titillating as he recalled chasing after Hillary and getting close enough to “touch her back.” But this was all the “touching” listeners were going to get.
Carolyn Ryan, The Times’ political editor, believes Healy’s piece was a sophisticated analysis of the speech. “I think the speech made some people uncomfortable — and our story examining it may have done so, too,” she said. “But I think the story captured what was a remarkable moment, in a very intelligent way.”
In Healy’s defense, several women he spoke with agreed with the author’s premise that this was a unique moment of intimacy between presidential nominee and spouse. Among them was MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Carol Gilligan, an expert in gender studies at New York University. “She’s a human being — not a god — living in a woman’s body,” Gilligan said.
After the jarring, sexualized top, Healy went on to write a more nuanced, contextual piece about Clinton’s speech and its place in history. Unfortunately, judging by the emails into the public editor, many readers may not have gotten that far.
*Several hours after the story was posted online the headline was softened to something I thought was closer to the mark: “Bill Clinton Praises His Wife’s Feminine Side”