On a cold night in early February, Hillary Clinton looked out at the voters CNN had assembled for a town-hall event at the Derry Opera House in Derry, New Hampshire, and told them, “I never thought I would do this.”
Twenty-four years earlier, on another CNN telecast, Candy Crowley delivered this news: “Now Hillary Rodham Clinton is running for president.”
Crowley clarified: “Actually, she’s running for her husband, who’s running for president. But it can be a distinction without much difference.”
Media coverage of her presumptive nomination for president by the Democratic Party has noted its historic significance – she is the first woman to top a major-party ticket – and described how she bounced back from a primary defeat in 2008 to win.
In a literal sense, this is Clinton’s second attempt to win the White House. But a review of press accounts from her early days in the national spotlight makes clear that in the media’s eyes, the hard-charging, Yale-educated lawyer from Park Ridge, Ill., has been running for president since 1992.
One article more than any other cemented the narrative that Clinton wants to be commander in chief. It appeared in the May 1992 issue of Vanity Fair, under the headline “What Hillary Wants.” The subhead posed a provocative question: “The most controversial figure of the election year so far has been a woman, Hillary Clinton, and she isn’t even running for office. Or is she?”
But Vanity Fair writer Gail Sheehy detected in Clinton something more than a desire to continue practicing law while her husband ran the country. In an interview, Sheehy recalled pitching a Hillary Clinton profile to her editor in January 1992 – and meeting resistance.
“I was really on the case before almost anybody,” Sheehy said. “I had to really twist the arm of (then-Vanity Fair editor) Tina Brown to write about the candidate’s wife. She said, ‘No, I want you to cover all the candidates. The candidate’s wife? That’s not important.’
Sheehy’s 10,000 word opus described Clinton as a “lawyer-activist-teacher-author-corporate boardwoman-mother and wife of Billsomething, who is the diesel engine powering the front-running Democratic campaign.”
Sheehy quoted Bill Clinton endorsing his wife’s fitness for the Oval Office: “It doesn’t bother me for people to see her and get excited and say she could be president. I always say she could be president, too.”
That was almost a quarter-century ago. On the pages and airwaves of American media, Clinton has been covered much like a presidential candidate ever since.
Sheehy believes Clinton was well aware of the speculation that she would one day be exactly where she is today. Contrary to what she said in New Hampshire in February, Clinton did think she would do this.
