Clinton Talks of Scars While Keeping Her Guard Up

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Perhaps more than any other candidate, Mrs. Clinton faces an unusual challenge in her quest for the presidency. After a political lifetime of public battles, suspicions and humiliations, she must prove she is not too hardened to inspire, or too wary to truly lead.

The scar tissue she has accumulated over the years is central to Mrs. Clinton’s political identity.


She catalogs her wounds with an air of pride and defiance. Invoking a mantra attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, Mrs. Clinton likes to say that women in politics “need to develop skin as tough as a rhinoceros hide.”

“I joke that I have the scars to show from my experiences,” she said in an interview. “But you know, our scars are part of us, and they are a reminder of the experiences we’ve gone through, and our history. I am constantly making sure that the rhinoceros skin still breathes. And that’s a challenge that all of us face. But again, not all of us have to live it out in public.”

Critics say that Mrs. Clinton’s repeated invocations of her “battles” and “scars” unfairly suggest victimhood, obscuring her own history of picking fights, jettisoning friends and vilifying adversaries. She was recently criticized for the relish with which she vowed to confront her main rival for the Democratic nomination, Senator Barack Obama. “Well, now the fun part starts,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Others cast her as someone whose ambitions have led her to become a completely political construct. Her campaign, for example, has been lauded as deft and disciplined, but also derided, in the words of the columnist Al Hunt, as “joyless, humorless and lacking in heart and soul.” A popular YouTube parody this year portrayed Mrs. Clinton and her supporters as mechanized drones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/us/politics/09clinton.html?ref=politics

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1. i had no idea the power she had in 97

After Mrs. Clinton helped thwart Republican efforts to oust Mr. Clinton from office, friends say she found solace by initiating her own run for elective office. She was not shy about invoking her embattled past during her Senate campaign in New York.

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4. You're never too old to learn something new

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5. how true

[papau]

2. So Hunt, the former Wall Street Journal bureau chief, likes Obama more than Clinton - interesting

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3. ...