As the sun sets on the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, before we sing Happy Trails to You as Hillary walks into the sunset of this primary season, it is worth the time to reflect on the candidate herself. Who exactly is Hillary Clinton?

It seems the height of ridiculous to be asking this question now that the contest appears to be over, for it’s a question that should have been answered a long time ago by the media. But it wasn’t.

These days the media seems less and less curious as a breed. The basics of journalism, who, where, what, why and when have been replaced by gotcha pack journalism…everyone is looking to land THE story, and the breaking of the next scandal is what editors reward their writers for. We are bombarded with style pieces and hungry for substance. We are left always wanting more, completely unsatisfied with what we get.

Caricature, broad strokes, little detail, image much undefined, much ill-defined; we live in a world of cartoon imagery, thoughts go from A directly to Z, and we miss the substance between.

That is why in this eleventh hour we can say, Hillary, We Hardly Knew Ye. Hillary Clinton is but a caricature of herself, drawn over time by the in artful description of writers and pundits who clearly haven’t a clue who this woman is, and who have apparently emotionalized their views of Mrs. Clinton by their own visceral perception, perhaps of women in general.

“They” have branded Hillary bitchy, cold, calculating, witchy, polarizing, deceitful, and rude. “She only got where she is today because her husband cheated on her,” Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball had the audacity to say and get away with on his nightly show. Imagine the uproar had he said about Barack Obama, “He only got where he is today because he is black.”

Never has there been in modern times a woman more exposed than Hillary Clinton has, and never has there been a woman more misunderstood. Is it because Hillary doesn’t fit a motif by which we can brand? Americans like their public figures served to them in neat little packages, perfect little petits fours, sound bite personas easy to digest.

This is not Hillary Clinton, multifaceted, wife, mother, daughter, lawyer, politician, activist, overachiever, woman, sexual being, pretty, opinionated, braniac, multi-faceted, complicated, woman of the world, small-town girl, funny, tough, silly, tenacious, serious, passionate, ingenious, disingenuous, protean, a woman who likes her drink, a fighter.

For many she is almost too much to take in this keep it simple, stupid, or is it stupid, keep it simple world? We want to keep our choices easy; one from column a, one from column b. America is not a D all the above nation, which is regrettable.

And which may be why the media and the pundits could never quite get a grasp of Hillary and warm  to her soul; she doesn’t fit an image in an image-conscious world. And that which we don’t understand we are likely to condemn, which is what the media has done with Clinton often referring to her as arrogant, haughty, grandiose, racist, entitled, pathological, dispassionate. And, of course, that couldn’t possibly be her whole truth.

It is unfortunate for America, a country where once we celebrated leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, Ben Franklin because they were interesting, complex, smart,  and innovative, if not quirky Renaissance men, that such complexity derails us today. We elect our leaders based on their biographies, on their likeability factor – the great question of the last political seasons having been: Who would you rather share a beer with?

Well, it looks as if the Party has chosen their drinking partner, a guy named Barack Obama… the Party not quite ready to embrace its first truly Renaissance woman. 

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