Hillary Clinton, the candidate we know so well — and don't
When she was about 14, Hillary Clinton says, she wrote to NASA volunteering for astronaut training.
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 working wife in Arkansas, then as the nation's first lady — half of Bill Clinton's "Buy one, get one free" bargain.
Touched by scandal, she nonetheless emerged to become a hard-working senator, the first first lady to gain elected office.
[...] she reinvented herself again, becoming Obama's secretary of state, traveling to 112 countries.
[...] there's also a sense of impenetrability, exacerbated by Clinton's penchant for secrecy — a characteristic that's led to her greatest vulnerability now: the email scandal.
Comedy aside, the ambition tag has dogged Clinton, 68, as if it were a bad quality rather than a necessity.
The satirical website The Onion captured the irony: "Hillary Clinton Is Too Ambitious To Be The First Female President."
"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 journey came in 1995, with her famous Beijing declaration: "Human rights are women's rights, and women's rights are human rights."
Yet her image as a champion for women has been complicated by her, well, complicated marriage — she's gotten both sympathy and blame for staying with her husband.
The most difficult thing Hillary Clinton has to deal with right now, says Bernstein, author of Hillary in Charge, ''is her difficult relationship with the truth.
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."
Herron feels that we don't subject male candidates to the same scrutiny.