Hillary Clinton: Representing from the middle class to Washington

In early 1988, many Democrats looked to Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas as a future national leader. He was seen to represent a departure from the instinctual liberals — like Walter Mondale and Edward Kennedy — who were then leading figures in the party, supposed by their partisans to embody its New Deal soul.

At that year’s Democratic National Convention, Clinton was given an important speaking platform, the same slot as an obscure Illinois state senator took in 2004, and rode straight to the U.S. Senate and later the White House. Clinton’s 1988 convention speech was uncharacteristically boring, and widely judged as too long. 

{mosads}After the Presidential election, losing Democrats turned their attention to Governor Mario Cuomo of New York, who had backing from liberals but who also — as an Italian-American from Queens — was positioned to bring back so-called white ethnics who had deserted the party as “Reagan Democrats.” 

In 1990, I attended a meeting hosted by Governor Cuomo in Buffalo, and though he was seated just across a large conference table, I never got within eight feet of him. He entered and exited the room surrounded by at least 20 reporters and photographers. This was a year and a half before the next New Hampshire primary, and it was hard to dispute his status as Presidential front runner.  

During the Reagan era, I’d become acquainted with a lawyer named David Williams, a Seattle native who married a woman from Quebec, and practiced law in Montréal. In those days, his office was down the hall from where colleagues of mine worked, and I would see David from time to time when visiting the city.  

After Governor Cuomo announced in December,1991 that he would not run for President, the media started writing more about Bill Clinton, with a few stray mentions of his wife’s name. Reading his newspaper in Montréal, David Williams recognized this name. It matched that of an American lawyer with whom he had collaborated for a number of years, on various cases whose particulars straddled the U.S.-Canada border.  

By telephone, he’d spoken countless times with a woman in Arkansas named Clinton, and they had exchanged considerable correspondence. Still, the name was hardly unusual, and the woman he knew had never mentioned a connection to her state’s governor. He doubted it was the same person.

Weeks after Governor Cuomo’s announcement, the Canadian government organized a business conference in Cincinnati, for which David Williams was an invited speaker. The night before the conference, I had dinner with him and some other people, at a restaurant which faced Cincinnati from the Kentucky side of the Ohio River. It was there that I would first hear of Hillary Clinton.

David told us of reading about the Governor of Arkansas, and of noting that his wife’s name matched that of his associate, whose firm had a longstanding relationship with David’s firm in Montréal. In those days, the world wide web was virtually unknown, so David consulted a printed directory of lawyers. Among all the lawyers in Little Rock, Arkansas, he discovered, there was only one named Hillary Clinton, and she worked for the same firm David had dealt with all along.  

More than a quarter century later, Mrs. Clinton is an experienced player in the political world of Washington and the world. Yet her modesty, and her devotion to the ideal of achievement without the need for name dropping, recall another, lesser-known side of Washington: the meritocratic culture of its vast civil service.  

It was amidst this culture — under appreciated by me at the time, as by most Americans — that I grew up, in suburban Washington, during the last decade of the great postwar expansion. I remember it as an earnest and studious culture that valued high academic achievement, and the accumulation of specialized knowledge. 

My father and mother both worked in civil service jobs, as did many of their friends, and the parents of my friends. Some patrician families were part of this world, but It was largely the realm — in my parents’ day, at least — of smart and sometimes awkward strivers. Many had faced job discrimination in the private sector, including upwardly mobile African-Americans, and Depression-era Jewish kids with a cheap and very fine education from The City College of New York.

Hillary Clinton surely fits in with what remains of this culture, where personality counts for less than brains, assiduousness, and the mastery of legal codes and empirical data. 

During the middle of the last century, most adult Washingtonians were migrants from somewhere else, and they understood the local meritocratic culture as something of an outlier. My parents impressed on my brother and me that it would often be who you know, rather than what you know, which would propel you in life.  

Today, ‘who you know’ has become commodified and monetized on social media platforms, as popular culture has devalued the idea of deep preparation and the mastery of specialized knowledge. Personal qualities and a great elevator pitch have never been more esteemed. 

It’s refreshing to see a Presidential candidate who fits in with the stalwart and substantive culture of the Washington civil service, and personifies a traditional, competence-based middle class spirit which can endure anywhere. 

Whether it will help her get elected is an altogether different matter. 

Orlowek, a native Washingtonian living in Chicago, is a consultant in international business development.

The views of Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill