Call it the Guardian interview that keeps on giving. Liberty Unyielding quoted on Friday from an interview with Hillary Clinton recorded by Decca Aitkenhead for the Guardian, during Clinton’s visit to Swansea University, where the law school has been named in her honor. In that portion of the interview, Hillary was expressing how fed up she is with civility, given the political emergency the Left feels America is facing.
Additional mining from the interview has unearthed another gem. At one point, Aitkenhead asked Clinton about being a “polarizing” public figure, and posed a difficult question:
[S]urely Clinton must be aware that every media report and profile invariably describes her as a “polarising figure”. Has she ever considered the possibility that her most effective contribution to healing the country’s divisions would be to withdraw from public life?
Hillary turned it off deftly with this intriguing comparison – for which Aitkenhead supplies a little cat-scratch of a description:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
“I’m sure they said that about Churchill between the wars, didn’t they?” she flashes back sharply, a fraction too quickly for the line to sound spontaneous.
Clinton immediately backpedaled, at least formally.
“I mean, I’m not comparing myself…”
Then promptly went ahead and developed the comparison:
“…but I’m just saying people said that, but he was right about Hitler, and a lot of people in England were wrong. And Churchill was a pain. He kept popping up all the time.”
To summarize, then, Hillary is like Churchill in that he was right about Hitler, he was a pain, and he kept popping up all the time.
Well, two out of three ain’t bad. It’s not clear from her professional history how Hillary’s understanding of a dangerous foreign despot would be analogous to Churchill “being right about Hitler.” But then, she wasn’t comparing herself to him anyway.
Hillary did make this additional, Churchillian point:
Besides, she goes on, “I love what I do and I care about a lot of things, so I’m very interested in what people are doing to try to figure stuff out and solve problems. So it’s not really work to me. No, it doesn’t feel like work.”
Winston Churchill, too, was very interested in what people were doing to try to figure stuff out and solve problems. It’s likely that he never put it in exactly those terms, but it’s another natural basis of comparison between the two world leaders.
