Hillary Clinton, the candidate we know so well — and don't
More than a half-century later, and after much hard work, much determination, and most of all, many, many obstacles — some undeniably of her own making — Clinton is no closer to actual space travel.
Americans first knew her as a governor's wife and working mother in Arkansas, then as the nation's first lady — famously claiming an office in the West Wing of the White House, not the East, as half of husband Bill Clinton's "Buy one, get one free" bargain.
Touched by scandal from Whitewater to Monica Lewinsky — but also carving out her own political identity — she emerged to become a hard-working senator, the first first lady to gain elected office.
[...] after much speculation, she announced her second run for the presidency.
[...] there's also a sense of impenetrability, exacerbated by her penchant for secrecy — a characteristic that has led to her greatest vulnerability in this election: the email scandal over her use of a private server.
"No, MINE!" blurted out Amy Poehler's Hillary, alongside Tina Fey's Sarah Palin, in agonized disbelief that John McCain's running mate was still in the race but she wasn't.
In a recent scene where Clinton herself gamely played a bartender, the fake Hillary asked Huma Abedin, her aide, "Why won't the people just let me LEAD?"
Comedy aside, the ambition tag has dogged Clinton, 68, throughout her career, as if it were a bad quality rather than a necessity in high-stakes politics.
The satirical website The Onion captured the irony in a 2006 headline: "Hillary Clinton Is Too Ambitious To Be The First Female President."
At Yale Law School, where she met Bill Clinton, she developed a keen interest in children's rights, which she pursued in post-graduate work.
There's a sense that millennials are too young to remember her efforts on behalf of social justice, particularly for women and girls on a global scale.
"Young people today want to be part of something bigger ... but they don't understand how much she shares those aspirations of theirs," Verveer says.
A key moment in Clinton's political journey — and a defining personal moment — came in 1995, when as first lady she spoke at a U.N. Congress on women in Beijing, declaring, "Human rights are women's rights, and women's rights are human rights."
Clinton's image as a champion for women has been complicated by her, well, complicated marriage — she's been an object of both sympathy and blame for staying with her husband post-Monica Lewinsky.
Nancy Herron, who didn't really know Clinton at school, reconnected with her decades later at a reunion, where Herron performed a standup routine on what it's like being in the shadows of such a famous classmate.
(Politifact, the fact-checking organization, says 27 percent of Clinton's statements it investigated were false or mostly false, compared with 76 percent of Trump's.) Another longtime observer, writer Gail Sheehy, attributes her difficulties with the truth to a defense mechanism honed over years of fending off attacks on her and her husband.
What the email mess shows, Bernstein says, is "this fierce desire for privacy and secrecy that seems to cast a larger and larger shadow over who she really is."
Others note that Clinton has naturally become very guarded, given that she's been judged, relentlessly and often unfairly, "on a huge stage, for all of her life," in Bernstein's words.
[...] too many people are interested in looking for information that reinforces their already held prejudices and beliefs," he says.
Herron, Clinton's college classmate, feels that we don't subject male candidates to the same scrutiny, always looking for another layer.