Read Unlikeable for Free Online Page A

personal life, she’s always seemed like she had something to hide,” Bill Clinton’s former press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, said. “She had a difficult father, and she spent a lot of time trying to create an image of a functional family when she could have just said, ‘It’s my family.’ The burden of perfection was upon her, and she carried it into her marriage. There’s always this fear of letting people see what they already know.”
    It was this fear of exposure and humiliation that led one of Hillary’s biographers, Carl Bernstein, to note that she indulged in“subterfuge and eliding.”
    Put simply, it helped explain why she lied and always tried to cover up her lies.
    And it also explained why all the likeability lessons in the world weren’t going to change her and put a stop to those lies.
    â€œWhen she’s alone with a small group of friends she trusts, Hillary can be warm and pleasant,” one of her acquaintances told the author. “But when she has to stand up in front of an audience of strangers, her suspicion and mistrust of people kicks in and her facial expressions and her body language reflect a deep psychological turbulence.”
    â€œShe freely admits she’s always had anger issues,” another acquaintance said. “When she’s annoyed by people, which is often, it shows. She’s never suffered fools gladly. As far as she’s concerned, politics is all about sucking up to people she considers beneath her and unworthy of sharing her space.
    â€œShe looks at her critics as a handful of nuts,” this person continued. “Her outburst during the Senate committee hearing on Benghazi—‘What difference does it make?’—was in total keeping with her pattern of behavior. Something snaps when she’s under pressure and emotional stress. As much as anything else, Bill pushed the Spielberg likeability lessons on Hillary in order to avoid another meltdown like Benghazi when she hit the campaign trail.”

CHAPTER 6 CHAPTER 6
    â€œI’VE ALWAYS BEEN A YANKEES FAN” “I’VE ALWAYS BEEN A YANKEES FAN”
    She went to the Yankees so that she could run for senator from New York. It’s so obvious. Why is she—doesn’t she know she looks like a fraud?
    â€”Chris Matthews, Hardball
    F or as long as Hillary had been in the public eye, her advisers had been trying to give her a makeover. At times, she cooperated with these Pygmalions, but more often than not she resisted their efforts to transform her into someone more pleasant and likeable.
    But whether she chose to cooperate or not, the makeovers never stuck.
    During Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, his top pollsters, Celinda Lake and Stan Greenberg, issued a confidential memo identifying “voters’ discomfort with Hillary.” Voters admired the strength of the Clinton marriage, they wrote, but “they also fear that only someone too politically ambitious, toostrong, and too ruthless could survive such controversy so well. What voters find slick in Bill, they find ruthless in Hillary.”
    What Lake and Greenberg wrote about Hillary almost a quarter of a century ago could just as easily be written about her today:
    [Voters] perceive a political ruthlessness in her that is reinforced by their image of Bill Clinton. As one voter put it, “She knows what she wants and will do anything to get it.”
    Women have their own contradictions and insecurities about the many roles they fulfill, which heighten their ambivalence about Hillary’s life. They wonder whether Hillary shares their values or understands their lives.
    In the spring of 1993, four months after Hillary and Bill moved into the White House, the journalist Michael Kelly wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine titled “Saint Hillary.” In it, Kelly quoted Hillary as saying that she had grown tired of trying to be like