Democratic presidential candidate former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that some of her difficulties in campaigning “may be gender-linked” and that some of the mistakes she’s made are due to the “inherent tension” between her need to research and think issues through and members of the press being on deadline during an interview with POLITICO’s Glenn Thrush on the “Off Message” podcast released on Wednesday.
Hillary stated, [relevant remarks begin around 14:05] “I hope I’m a better candidate. I feel like I am. I mean, I have said, in this campaign, ‘Look, I’m not a natural politician.’ I’m not somebody who, like my husband or Barack Obama, just — it’s music, right? I am someone who loves doing the job that I have. I would love having the job of president, because I know how to do it. I know what the country needs. But the campaigning part is hard for me. I think I’ve gotten better–.”
She added, “Well, you know, and some of this may be personal to me, and some of it, from all the literature I’ve read, may be gender-linked.”
Hillary elaborated, “[W]hen I did my announcement with Daniel Patrick Moynihan on his farm…it was incredibly hard for me to say the pronoun ‘I’ instead of ‘we.’ I had been a strong supporter, not just of my husband, but other people who I tried to get elected, tried to help in any way I could. I’m very comfortable saying, you know, ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘we.’ But when I had to stand up in front of people, and basically say, ‘I’m asking for your vote, I’m telling you what I want to do,’ that took years.”
Later in the interview, while discussing her relationship with the press, Hillary said, [relevant remarks begin around 28:00] “[Y]ou have a job to do, I respect the job, but sometimes I haven’t thought through what I want to say. I haven’t thought through, or I haven’t — I’ve asked for information from, you know, three or four different sources. I haven’t had time to digest it. I can’t answer the question to my satisfaction, but I know you guys are on deadline, you’ve got to write something, you’ve got to broadcast something. So I do think there’s an inherent tension here.”
She was then asked, “[W]hen you make mistakes, do you think that’s what we’re dealing with, some of the time?” Hillary responded, “I think some of the time, yeah. I think that’s true for all of us who are, like, in this pinball machine right now.”
(h/t Mediaite)
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