In “Hillary,” a documentary now playing on Hulu, director Nanette Burstein mines 1,700 hours of unseen footage from the 2016 election campaign and more than 35 hours of new interviews with Hillary Clinton to explore the politician and the person behind the pantsuit.
Beyond the documentary, Clinton still commands major attention as she speaks nearly full-time about the health, civil rights and economic crises associated with the current presidential administration. “We’re seeing that play out dramatically right now between COVID, and the economy and the terrible decisions made around peaceful protestors, and trying to send in the military — and so much that is contrary to the Constitution, to our fundamental values to humanity,” Clinton said. “So, I have carried with me this real sense of deep responsibility that, ‘Oh, my gosh, I just can’t bear the fact this man became president.’ For whatever combination of reasons, and there were a lot of reasons, I win a popular vote and lose the electoral college by literally a handful.”
For the 2020 election cycle, Clinton vowed that she was determined to help Joe Biden win the upcoming November election. “I’m spending most of my time trying to do everything I can to retire him and to send him back to the golf course full-time,” Clinton said.
As an early adopter of the term, she does not hold back on Black Lives Matter either. “This protest that is going on” — in response to George Floyd’s death at the hands of police officers — “it really is a kind of moment of moral reckoning,” Clinton said, noting that people could no longer ignore images of police brutality shot on iPhones. “They can’t turn away from that 8:46 minute video. They can’t turn away from the look on that policeman’s face where he just literally shifted his body and put his hand in [his] pocket and put greater pressure on Mr. Floyd’s neck. Because they can’t look away, they have to come to grips with what has gone on.”
Clinton believes that there have been changes in the dialogue about racism in the U.S. “Black Lives Matter was considered a kind of radical statement a few years ago,” Clinton said. “I remember I was criticized, I was attacked online, for using it. And I get it, and now, we’re at a different point because people’s awareness, consciousness and actual events that they now see on their phones has changed the debate.”
Clinton experienced gender bias throughout her campaign as voters responded to her differently based on their own biases about women.
“I really did feel that I was this walking Rorschach test,” Clinton said. “That people would project onto me all kinds of feelings and experiences in their own lives. Obviously, it was most apparent around my decision to stay in my marriage, which was a very painful, personal challenge. We talked, obviously, quite a bit about [that] in the documentary, and it was not easy. I felt like I was making, at the end of the day, the right decision for me, my family. And therefore, I was very much at peace with that.”