Hillary’s Husband

I know that you are not going to understand what I am going to say. I am counting on that. That is the story of my life — saying things that I suspect no one is going to understand. However, saying these things, responding to an irrepressible desire to let my thoughts free, “It’s beyond my control,” as Makovich says in “Dangerous Liaisons.” So, I am going to go for it: women who, in their youth, foster the desire to hold a public office should carefully evaluate the man they are going to choose as husband. A poorly chosen husband, a bad casting, can ruin a woman’s trajectory in such a way that a woman should think seriously about whether or not the best option would be to walk solo. I brought up this theory two months ago, when Tania Sánchez left United Left (Spain) or perhaps when United Left abandoned Sánchez. To summarize, I wrote that Sánchez had more than enough with her father and brother, and to top it all off, she had chosen a love incompatible with her ambition. All of this occurred before the extravagant breakup announcement that both she and her fiancé signed but which only damaged her reputation, as is expected.

There is another woman who has not needed her husband pretty much from the beginning. This woman studied at Wellesley College, a women’s-only college that, contrary to what we might expect, does not educate its students to be that great woman who is expected to be behind a great man. Rather, it instructs its students to be in charge of their own lives without being distracted during their studies by male competition. That is where Hillary Clinton studied, that woman who has not needed a husband for many years now after being cheated on enough times. That is how they educated her: so that she would be a free and ambitious woman in the best sense of the words. However, she met the charming Bill Clinton, and all of her convictions were put aside for the man’s career.

It is far from my intention to say that a woman with the desire to lead cannot fall in love. It may be true, yes, when trying to reconcile (that persistent word) work with feelings. I know a distinguished doctor, who will remain anonymous, who has such a methodical character that when he had to convince the girl with whom he had fallen in love that he could be a great life companion, he gave her a piece of paper with 10 points summarizing the advantages that one could get from choosing him as a partner. We could see this declaration of love as cold, but the fact is that this marriage has continued functioning into old age. Maybe the type of woman who seeks to make history, in whatever context, should demand said paper from her candidate and consider it before saying yes.

Hillary Clinton, who is officially a candidate in her party’s primaries and is on the road to the presidential election, continues to be chased by the ghost of a spirited husband: his secondhand lovers, the stain on the intern’s dress and the greed that he showed after his presidency, being involved in a thousand deals and giving the best-paid talks on earth. Bill is very Bill, so much so as to be the subject of the Broadway musical “Clinton.” The musical, which has received good reviews and makes the age-old promise of any comedy — “Fun guaranteed!” — provides the public with clever jokes about the Lewinsky scandal. Given that Hillary, who appears innocent sometimes, once said that she has only fallen in love with two men in her life — Bill Clinton and Bill Clinton — the show’s writer opted for two actors to play the role of a single individual with two faces. Bill is always happy, yet smooth talking, womanizing and, thus, lying. The public laughs enthusiastically. It is fiction, yes, but the audience is thinking the entire time about the real people who the characters represent, about that woman who bit the bullet and forgave something that many other women considered unforgivable. It was not the infidelity in itself, which only a Puritan would consider a mortal sin, but rather the set-up of the situation: the office; the sin in the same house where the wife was; the intern; the right here, right now. Well, it is true that by the time Bill enjoyed that furtive fellatio from an intern Kennedy had already had all of his female employees pass by the Oval Office. However, times had changed. You feel it.

Hillary will not have an intern to kiss. She will be too busy, assuming that her almost 60-year-old nature endures the career, being president and wife, reconciling, enduring the daily meticulous and embittered analysis that critiques her mood, her behavior, her image and her smiles. No man, even being black, will ever put up with this type of judgment that is so focused on personal life. But she can. She has the courage for it. She survived a secondary role, that of first lady, of which only little remains; she handled the humiliation of her husband on a world scale; and she has already lost the primaries once. She is brilliant and is much braver than Obama. A part of the population does not agree with her, which shows her strength. However, she has a husband that she does not need. She should ask Michelle to date. The two would make, in my opinion, the best couple ever. A historic couple.