As a political figure running for president, it can be hard to connect with the average American. So for Hillary Clinton that’s where Humans of New York comes in.
The Democratic presidential nominee was profiled Thursday on the popular Facebook page (turned book).
“I was taking a law school admissions test in a big classroom at Harvard. My friend and I were some of the only women in the room,” the post began.
Clinton told a personal story of how when she was taking the test, men in the room began to verbally attack her, simply for being there.
“One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense. It got very personal,” Clinton continued.
Seemingly drawing parallels to both how she chooses to handle critics in her bid for the White House, while at the same time identifying and relating to an issue that many women face in their professional careers, Clinton said that she couldn’t respond to the attacks because she “couldn’t afford to get distracted.”
“But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk,” she said. “Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off.’”
Clinton said she takes ownership of her perceived aloofness — even if she doesn’t agree that it’s her true self.
“I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena. And if I create that perception, then I take responsibility,” she said.
Several hours after the initial post, Clinton was featured on the Humans of New York page again, further discussing the difference between how men and women in politics are perceived.
“I’m not Barack Obama. I’m not Bill Clinton. Both of them carry themselves with a naturalness that is very appealing to audiences,” she said. “But I’m married to one, and I’ve worked for the other, so I know how hard they work at being natural.”
Further striking a chord with her female supporters, Clinton went on to lament how, as a woman, she needs to approach a room full of voters differently than a man does because “women are seen through a different lens.”
“It’s really quite funny. I’ll go to these events, and there will be men speaking before me, and they’ll be pounding the message, and screaming about how we need to win the election,” she said. “And people will love it. And I want to do the same thing . . . But I’ve learned that I can’t be quite so passionate in my presentation.”
Why? According to Clinton, people find it “a little bit scary.”
“Which is funny, because I’m always convinced that the people in the front row are loving it,” she concluded.
Clinton’s HONY spotlight came a day after she took the stage at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in Manhattan for the NBC “Commander-in-Chief Forum,” which highlighted a very different side of the presidential candidate. Clinton (and then separately GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump) fielded questions about national security and was grilled on her handling of emails while she was secretary of state.
