Member Since: 6/20/2012
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Hillary is TIME's Person of the Year Runner-Up
No. 2: The Aspirant
Winners get to write history. Losers, if they are lucky, get a ballad. Hillary Clinton made history for three decades as an advocate, a First Lady, a Senator, and a Secretary of State, but she will now be remembered as much for what she didn’t do as what she did. A female candidate in an election that didn’t hinge on gender after all, she became a symbol in a fight that was about much more than symbolism. She’s the woman who was almost President, she is what might have been and what will yet be.
In the autopsy of the doomed Clinton campaign, there is no shortage of fatal causes. Expectations certainly missed their target: the race between the first plausible female presidential candidate and a man who bragged about grabbing women “by the *****” did not boil down to gender. In interviews across the country in the year leading up to the election, many voters suggested that shattering the glass ceiling wasn’t an urgent priority for them. Some took it as a given that a woman will be President one day, and it wasn’t worth electing someone they believed was the wrong woman just to show it could be done.
The answer now means more to other women than to Clinton herself, who is all but certain to have run her last race. Because of Clinton, the next generation of women candidates can reasonably expect to win a debate, or a state primary, or a major party’s nomination, or the popular vote. Her discipline and tenacity will be their footholds; her caution and secrecy will be hazards to avoid. She has primed the American public to accept a woman candidate talking about issues like child care and paid family leave without sacrificing authority. By getting more votes than any other candidate, she has proven that millions of Americans will vote for a woman.
TIME.
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