Bill and Hillary moved to Arkansas in 1974, and got married the following year. They were policy wonks, and by focussing on incremental reforms—in education, rural health care, children’s welfare—they thrived politically in Arkansas, where they spent the two decades after McGovern’s defeat. They muted some of the most divisive social issues, compromised on others, and mashed together idealism with business-friendly ideas for economic growth. Old-fashioned Democratic class politics was foreign to them, even though Bill sometimes sounded like an Ozark populist. Hillary was the more passionate liberal, and from the beginning she was a tough fighter. When she took the lead on her husband’s most important initiative as governor—raising the state’s abysmal educational standards—she made an adversary of the teachers’ union. Instead of speaking for the working class, the Clintons spoke about equipping workers to rise into the professional class. Their presumption was that all Americans could be like them.
In the eighties, the decade of conservative ascendancy, the Clintons’ brand of politics seemed to provide the ingredients of a Democratic revival. But, to some, the couple’s mixture of uplifting rhetoric and ideological elusiveness suggested untrammelled ambition and hidden agendas—anything but public service. Bill and Hillary became the objects of a deep suspicion, which they’ve never been able to shake. To the left, the Clintons were sellouts; to the right, they were spies, sneaking across partisan lines to steal ideas and rhetoric that advanced their McGovernite revolution. Because Hillary’s politics have always been joined to an idea of virtue, and because she is a woman, the suspicions about her have been the greater, even on the left.
George Packer, “The Unconnected”, The New Yorker (31 October 2016), 52.