While many would regard former FLOTUS Eleanor Roosevelt as a trend-setting modern FLOTUS regarding her active domestic and international policy making, another modern FLOTUS has done something just as unprecedented as policy activism recently (Caroli, 2010; GWU, n.d.; NFLL, n.d.). This new trend-setting FLOTUS is Hillary Clinton, whose time as FLOTUS was in many ways modeled after that of Eleanor Roosevelt in terms of active policy making (NFLL, n.d.; Winfield, 1990). However, Hillary Clinton made history of her own in building off Eleanor’s legacy as a pioneering FLOTUS and international representative in propelling herself to various public offices, both elected and appointed, after her tenure as FLOTUS (Eksterowicz & Paynter, 2000; NFLL, n.d.; People Magazine, 2000; Watson, 2001; Winfield, 1990). Just as Eleanor Roosevelt’s active tenure as FLOTUS generated controversy in her challenge to “traditional conceptions of acceptable roles” of first ladies, Hillary’s ascendance from FLOTUS to the offices of Senator and Secretary of State (and nearly to the office of president) marks a similar historic turn for the first ladyship (NFLL, n.d.; Scharrer, 2002, p. 393). Therefore, I make the argument that Hillary was the first FLOTUS to actively use the formal and informal resources of the first ladyship as a political springboard to various public offices, serving to further redefine the role of FLOTUS as an increasingly formidable political force.
Before closely examining Hillary’s tenure as FLOTUS and how that influenced her ascendance to public office, a brief word is in order about the evolution of the office of FLOTUS. A modern FLOTUS today has at her disposal more resources than first ladies prior to Eleanor Roosevelt, with Eleanor first helping to shift more attention towards the East Wing by holding formal press conferences and serving as both a written and radio commentator (Eksterowicz & Paynter, 2000; NFLL, n.d.). Eksterowicz and Paynter (2000) argue that since Eleanor Roosevelt’s tenure as FLOTUS utilizing first informal “networks of friends and relatives” known as the Social Bureau to populate various committees, “the Office of the First Lady has become more professional in nature and has been moving in the direction of full integration with the President’s” in acquiring more specialized staff resources (p. 547). In 1977, FLOTUS Rosalynn Carter continued expanding the visibility of the East Wing relative to the West Wing by acquiring for FLOTUS more specialized staff to help meet the greater demands of the modern world on both FLOTUS and POTUS (Eksterowicz & Paynter, 2000, p. 552). This closer working relationship between the West and East Wings reveals the foundation upon which Hillary Clinton would build her expanding political career and closely related policy advocacy campaigns (Eksterowicz & Paynter, 2000; NFLL, n.d.). Essentially, this closer integration of the West and East Wings mean that a FLOTUS and POTUS can develop a symbiotic relationship of sorts where FLOTUS can “develop a public policy agenda independent of the president’s and still rely on a partnership, either professional or personal” to aid in its implementation, shown especially in the recent phenomenon of staff sharing across both wings of the White House (Eksterowicz & Paynter, 2000, p. 549).
Hillary inherited this rich network of both formal and informal resources despite her unelected position of FLOTUS upon her ascendance to the office in 1993 and endeavored to use these resources to her advantage like previous “activist” first ladies (Caroli, 2010; Eksterowicz and Paynter, 2000, p. 547; NFLL, n.d.). Hillary served to further the FLOTUS office integration with the West Wing in her assembling of a staff that would become known as “Hillaryland” in the Old Executive Office Building (NFLL, n.d.). She further broke ground when she became the first FLOTUS to have an office in the West Wing in order to more closely coordinate with executive staff (Eksterowicz and Paynter, 2000; NFLL, n.d.). Most of these staff would then go on to work with Hillary during her tenure as Senator of New York and later Secretary of State (NFLL, n.d.). However, before Hillary could begin seeking public office, she had to raise her public profile. This she accomplished early on in her FLOTUS tenure in 1993 when her husband, President Bill Clinton, nominated Hillary to chair the President’s Task Force on Health Care Reform and to serve as one of his personal advisers (NFLL, n.d.).
Thus, this appointment revealed to the public the openly activist policy partnership between FLOTUS and POTUS reminiscent of the Roosevelts or the Carters (Eksterowicz & Paynter, 2000; NFLL, n.d.). Tellingly, Hillary’s first Chief of Staff, Maggie Williams, was the first of her staff to be named Assistant to the President while working with both offices to craft a plan for health care reform that would be acceptable to both sides of the aisle in Congress (NFLL, n.d.). While the push for national health care reform stalled before Congress in 1994 due to charges that the Clinton administration’s plan would lead to “socialized medicine,” Hillary would continue to use her FLOTUS platform to build her public profile by continuing to work within government on health and related social issues like adoption (NFLL, n.d.). She would build her policy credentials among broad constituencies for her Senate candidacy by overseeing the successful initiation of programs like the Children’s Health Insurance Program in 1997 and the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, while advocating for greater resources to address womens’ and veterans’ health issues (NFLL, n.d.). Due to her status as an advisor to the president, Hillaryland aides kept Hillary informed of legislative developments in Congress and Cabinet discussions (NFLL, n.d.).
Not unlike Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary used her domestic policy advocacy to expand her policy agenda to the international arena, giving Hillary powerful foreign policy credentials preceding her Senate candidacy (Eksterowicz & Paynter, 2000). Making frequent use of the travel resources provided to POTUS and FLOTUS, Hillary would go on to establish networks with other women national leaders, speak out for gender equality in the social, economic, and political dimensions of life, and advocate for “women’s rights as human rights” at the 1995 UN Conference on Women in Beijing (NFLL, n.d.). While the policy accomplishments described above are by no means an exhaustive list, the examples highlighted here show that Hillary Clinton as FLOTUS garnered increased political capital in her use of staff dedicated both to FLOTUS and POTUS which subsequently helped her to leapfrog to elected office (Eksterowicz & Paynter, 2000; NFLL, n.d.). Now, the stage was set for her initial Senate candidacy.
Towards the end of her husband’s tenure as president in 1998, a vacancy emerged in the New York Senate seat after the announcement by Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan that he would not be seeking reelection (NFLL, n.d.). Hillary would formally announce her candidacy for the open seat in early February two years later, something that Hillary’s role model, Eleanor Roosevelt, declined to do after the death of her husband Franklin Roosevelt (NFLL, n.d.). Many of her Hillaryland staff carried over from her tenure as FLOTUS and aided in coordinating her campaigns, such as the “listening tours” in Yonkers, New York, where Hillary would meet with her future constituents and develop further political capital and intimate knowledge about local conditions critical for policy formation (NFLL, n.d.). While she would be elected Senator of New York in 2001 and again in 2006, her continued political activism and utilization of the formal and informal resources provided to her during her tenure of FLOTUS drew fierce criticisms from socially conservative segments of society that were reflected in the media’s coverage of Clinton as “more scrutinizing…and negative” in comparison with that of her Republican opponent, Rudy Giuliani (Scharrer, 2002, p. 403-404; Sulfaro, 2007). If the opposition from some corners of the media and society were increasingly vocal during the former FLOTUS’s Senate campaigns, this was magnified in her forays into the office of Secretary of State and later in her two stints as a presidential candidate in terms of increased fears of a former FLOTUS’s influence on governmental policy making as well as the potential utilization of state resources for personal political gain (Frederick & Elder, 2016; Mandziuk, 2017; NFLL, n.d.).
Aside from utilizing the formal staff resources provided to FLOTUS since the time of Rosalynn Carter, Hillary’s ascendance to and tenure as Secretary of State (2009-2013) would prove to draw heavily from the informal resources available to both former and current first ladies, while still retaining some of her original Hillaryland staff (NFLL, n.d.). This use of informal resources, akin to the social networks first ladies draw upon, was seen in the relationships between Hillary and past first ladies such as Laura Bush and Michelle Obama (NFLL, n.d.; Watson, 2001). For example, as Senator, Hillary Clinton received support from Laura Bush for her gender equality initiatives in Middle Eastern countries like Afghanistan and her subsequent support (rumored) for Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in the 2016 presidential election (NFLL, n.d.). This focus on women’s educational equality domestically and internationally was continued in Hillary’s collaboration as Secretary of State with Michelle Obama, specifically in the latter’s support of the “Let Girls Learn” program of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) (NFLL, n.d.). Further augmenting her clout in relation to women’s social, economic, and political issues on the international stage was Hillary’s drawing upon of the network of women political leaders from around the world formed during her tenure as FLOTUS (NFLL, n.d.). This network included notable figures such as former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, which proved instrumental in the establishment of Hillary’s women’s political advocacy program Vital Voices (NFLL n.d.). Thus, Hillary was able to use to her advantage various formal and informal networks she had formed during her original time as FLOTUS both domestically and internationally to effect change in policy issues important to her, such as women’s political and economic participation, and to garner further political capital (NFLL, n.d.; Watson, 2001).
Lastly, Hillary set her sights on the highest office in the land in that of POTUS ahead of the 2008 and 2016 election campaigns, before and after her tenure as Secretary of State, respectively (NFLL, n.d.). Not only does running for president require unprecedented amounts of monetary and staff resources for campaigning, but also requires a candidate to convince the voters of their leadership ability, which is often defined around stereotypically masculine standards of being a strong, decisive, and forceful leader (Anderson, 2002; Mandziuk, 2017; NFLL, n.d.). This poses special obstacles for a female presidential candidate like Hillary Clinton, who must overcome the “cultural scripts” in American politics that have framed the post of president “as a male domain,” while also defining the institution of the first ladyship as an exclusively feminine domain where a FLOTUS must subordinate her own “professional competencies” and aspirations in favor of supporting her husband’s ambitions (Mandziuk, 2017, p. 140-141). Although Hillary was the most experienced of the presidential candidates going into the 2016 election, with her tenures of FLOTUS, Senator, and Secretary of State highlighting the enormous amounts of political and other capital garnered for her, she lost both contests (NFLL, n.d.). This was despite her enormous qualifications for the office as well as her glass-ceiling shattering moment of becoming the first FLOTUS (or woman in general) to be nominated by a major party in the United States for a presidential contest in 2016 (NFLL, n.d.).
Roseann Mandziuk (2017) makes the argument that despite the enormous amounts of formal and informal resources Hillary had garnered from her time as FLOTUS, Senator, and Secretary of State that would have made a candidate competitive in a high-stakes presidential contest that Hillary’s campaigns were ultimately undermined by Bill Clinton’s campaign rhetoric. This rhetoric tended to (unintentionally) trap Hillary into the restrictions of femininity that bind FLOTUS and “further diminished perceptions of his spouse’s appropriateness to embody the presidential role” as what happened particularly in Elizabeth Dole’s short campaign for president on the Republican ticket ahead of the 2000 election (Anderson, 2002; Mandziuk, 2017, p. 150). Especially detrimental for establishing her credentials for leadership were his stories of her time as first lady of Arkansas and the United States which “exposed her violations into the realm of policy, yet also underscored her appropriately feminine interest in the softer policy issues of family and children” and serving to draw attention away from her experience in traditionally masculine domains of national security and foreign policy as Senator and Secretary of State (Anderson, 2002; Mandziuk, 2017, p. 150; NFLL, n.d.). Furthermore, while Bill Clinton, as the “prospective ‘first gentleman’” easily “can retain his role as patriarch…and dominant marriage partner without compromising his masculinity, but the female presidential candidate must sublimate her deviance and craft a performance as spouse that is both feminine and conciliatory” (Mandziuk, 2017, p. 151). Thus, even a former FLOTUS like Hillary Clinton was bound by the conflicting role expectations for FLOTUS (and for women in general) in her presidential campaign in the pressure to present her activist credentials for leadership while still not foraying into more masculine domains of policy (Anderson, 2002; Benze, 1990; Mandziuk, 2017).
In conclusion, despite not achieving the office of president, Hillary Clinton was still a history-making FLOTUS and former FLOTUS in being the first to actively use the formal and informal resources (staff, domestic and international social networks, etc.) of the first ladyship as a foundation for her forays into other public service positions, such as Senator and Secretary of State (NFLL, n.d.; Watson, 2001). Because Hillary was the first willing and able to use these resources provided to her as a modern FLOTUS to her advantage in order to achieve public office, Hillary serves to further recast the role of a modern FLOTUS as a political force after Eleanor Roosevelt first set the benchmark for a more active FLOTUS (NFLL n.d.; Watson, 2001; Winfield, 1990). While both formal and informal barriers remain in many areas of politics for a woman (especially a FLOTUS if she wishes to be politically active), such as monetary resources and persistent gender stereotyping within both the institutions of POTUS and FLOTUS, Hillary Clinton’s unprecedented leveraging of her FLOTUS resources nonetheless raises the profile of FLOTUS as a politically formidable figure outside the boundaries of influence defined by traditional tenets of FLOTUS femininity (Caroli, 2010; NFLL, n.d.; Watson, 2001).
Works Cited:
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