Hillary Clinton as Legislative Activist and Legal Defendant

This chapter examines Hillary Clinton's leadership during the congressional health care debate and the investigations surrounding Whitewater—an era of her news biography marked with subterfuge and deceit. The overarching message communicated by the press was that during the health care debate, she once again talked too much and exerted too much control over her husband and his administration. Contrastingly, Clinton's unwillingness to talk enough served as evidence of her illegal wrongdoing during the Whitewater investigations. During both controversies, Clinton was pictured as smiling through the tumult, promulgating a sense of discordance between the seriousness of the allegations and her public comportment. She would consequently be disciplined through a rhetoric of violence for her outspokenness and her spatial violations as she was punished for such political and legal impropriety, corroding, once again, idyllic notions of authentic womanhood.