Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says she’s not as good a politician as her husband, former President Bill Clinton, or as President Obama and that expectations for women in the public eye are often rather high.
“I think Mika and I understand this, and maybe it’s because still today, when you are a high-achieving woman — particularly one in the public eye — you really are just expected to perform at a higher level all the time,” Mrs. Clinton said in an interview that aired Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“And there are not enough experiences with different styles or different approaches that women make,” Mrs. Clinton said. “Men, my goodness — you know, there’s a million different ways you could be successful, you could communicate and all the rest of it. And look, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.”
Host Joe Scarborough had been talking about how his co-host, Mika Brzezinski, was doing more preparation for the interview than he was and asked Mrs. Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential front-runner, if she ever looked at how her husband did things and thought “it’s not fair.”
“I am not a natural politician like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama,” she said. “So for me, it really came through the root of service; it really came from my deep conviction that we had to make sure that this country we all love kept producing opportunities for everybody, and I see that narrowing, and I see people being left out, and it upsets me.”
“And so I invest a lot of energy and a lot of my own emotion into what I do and I think sometimes, instead of that being as easy to understand as I would like it to be, it sometimes is a little nerve-wracking,” she said.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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