![]() Shipley’s questions were intelligent but longwinded and, worse, were clearly pre-prepared, which meant that Clinton was not pressed about her answers and was allowed to say the things with which she was most comfortable, without follow-up. Clark returned at the end of the event to offer some summarizing remarks, although it was difficult to focus on them over the sound of people behind us thunderously leaving up the noisy Spark Arena stairs. If she’d wanted to be interviewed by a journalist, Clinton would have been.įrustratingly, former current events interviewer Linda Clark had been selected to give an introduction – sort of an introduction to the introductions – but did not interact with Clinton directly, which was like putting a bunch of top-shelf booze in a locked display case a party and then only serving orange juice. Shipley was the weakest link of the whole affair, though it’s not fair to blame her entirely because you’d better believe that every aspect of the night was stage managed by the Clinton juggernaut. No questions from the floor were permitted, though the occasional furious rustling from RNZ broadcasters Kim Hill and Susie Ferguson, who were sitting next to me, suggested they were thinking about vaulting 10 rows of seats and giving it a go. Clinton spoke from a podium before fielding fairly softball questions from former New Zealand Prime Minister Jenny Shipley. Of course, it is her life and if people want to pay $495 (tickets upstairs cost $195 and $295) to watch her work it out, then that’s absolutely wild, but good for her, I guess. The Clinton who emerged last night felt disappointingly timid, as though she was still figuring out what she wanted to say. That’s what I expected An Evening with Hillary Clinton, ostensibly a book tour about What Happened, would explore. On that count, I devoured What Happened greedily – not out of enjoyment at Clinton’s loss, but of a successful woman’s articulation of what the early stages of failure felt like, before the spin kicked in and she put a brave face on it. She was believed to be unsinkable and she sank. ![]() Hillary Clinton, a woman who once, early in Bill’s political career, delivered a concession speech for him because he was literally too upset to get off the floor, was still mired in shit when she wrote that book. TED Talks about failing are usually delivered from a place of success and make you feel even worse about your own inability to spin your personal shit into gold. It is a cautionary tale about how far even the most accomplished women have to go before they can be considered equal with men.īut, better than that, is a rare account of female failure told not from the other side of redemption or comeback, but from a woman whose story, at the time she was telling it, ended with that failure. But, and this is a very uncool opinion among journalists, I actually quite enjoyed Hillary Clinton’s book What Happened. You shouldn’t review anything that you are obviously going to loathe. ![]() I am firmly opposed to people reviewing things that aren’t for them, especially when it is male reviewers performatively hating books written by young women, for young women. This was, perhaps, a sign that despite the fact that I too am a woman just trying to work out what the fuck is going on in this life, the event was not really for me. One of the journalists sitting near me, also from Wellington, had brought her own Cup-a-Soups. ![]() As a freelance journalist, I did what I always do when I when I fly to Auckland for work and brought my lunch with me from Wellington in a Tupperware. Tickets for the seat I was sitting in cost $495, but I hadn’t paid for it. We all knew how that one ended.ĭidn’t we? I’m still not sure if she does. A highlights reel of her achievements and accomplishments was inadvertently depressing. “But Donald Trump won!” I wanted to howl at the ceiling of the Spark Arena, and again at the start of the event, when the same hope-filled video played that was broadcast at Clinton’s nominating convention. I am not sure if you are allowed to be a woman in public any more without playing ‘Roar’ by Katy Perry as a preamble to your entrance a shorthand that you, a confirmed feminist, will not be doing with anyone’s bullshit. The song ‘Roar’ by Katy Perry blared from the loudspeakers, a universal indicator that we, the audience at An Evening with Hillary Clinton, were about to see a famous woman speak. There was no sign of the promise she’d ‘let her guard down’, and flashes of Sarcastic Wine Mom aside, Hillary Clinton offered little more than platitudes at Spark Arena, writes Charlotte Graham-McLay. ![]()
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