There are few parlor games more irresistible on a hot August day in Washington than psychoanalyzing Hillary Rodham Clinton, who threw her fans a tasty tidbit Monday all the way from Africa. The game is even more fun if we can somehow tie in her husband. Toss in some speculation about tensions in their marriage and you've got yourself a merry old time.
But the CW on Clinton's rumble in the jungle seems misplaced this time, missing the more interesting, and much darker, reality that she confronted during her overseas trip.
"You want me to tell you what my husband thinks?" a visibly irritated secretary of State said Monday, responding to a question, misinterpreted through a translator, from a local (male) student. "My husband is not secretary of State. I am. If you want my opinion I'll tell you my opinion. I'm not going to be channeling my husband."
Veteran Hillary psychoanalysts sprang to life Tuesday offering predictably pithy diagnoses that were laced, as usual, with more than a whiff of sexism.
"She wore a lavender pantsuit and purple rage," cracked Richard Sisk of the New York Daily News, curiously speculating that Clinton's "channeling" remark must have been referring to rumors from the 1990s that Clinton once had imaginary conversations with the late Eleanor Roosevelt.
"Call it a bad hair day, which it was," Andrea Mitchell quipped Tuesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." Oooh, girl! Snap!
To Clinton watchers, the match that ignited Clinton's rare flash of genuine anger was self-evident. One week after her husband's swashbuckling mission to North Korea triggered a breathless series of "he's still got it!" storylines, the wife was toiling away on a non-glamorous mission to sub-Saharan Africa. The student's question chafed against her preexisting feelings of being underappreciated, prompting her deep-seated resentment to boil over. Or, at least, so goes their theory.
But a more likely scenario is this: A central goal of Clinton's seven-nation trip to Africa this summer has essentially been a central goal of her entire political life -- to be a strong voice for vulnerable women. It was a theme of her Senate career, her 2008 presidential campaign and her early months in Foggy Bottom.
In Congo this week, the third female U.S. secretary of State has decried the sexual discrimination and abuse that plagues the continent. On Tuesday, Clinton toured a refugee camp in eastern Congo and pledged $17 million to help erase widespread sexual abuse in the country, known as the "rape capital of the world," where the United Nations estimates that 3,500 women have been raped so far this year. The U.N. has recorded 200,000 cases of sexual violence against women and girls since violence began in 1996, according to the Associated Press. In an interview with the BBC, Clinton said she had "a very frank discussion" with President Joseph Kabila on sexual violence.
"The secretary of state is going to Goma Tuesday to draw attention to the plight of women who are victims of rape as a weapon of war" in Congo, Assistant Secretary of State P.J. Crowley told CNN. "You can't separate the [student's] question from the setting."
The student asking Clinton to discuss U.S. trade relations with China was not behaving abusively. And, as it turns out, he wasn't even demeaning the secretary; he had an entirely reasonable request -- to discuss the policies of her boss, President Obama. But the anger she displayed reflected the larger reality she had faced in Africa and a male-dominated culture she has denounced, and it sent a message that women -- whether they're heads of state, senators, housewives or schoolgirls -- should never be considered subservient to men. Whether that man is her husband, her boss -- or her president.
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