Hillary Rodham Clinton was once willing to share her deepest thoughts and feelings, as she did in a 1993 speech on “the politics of meaning,” delivered as her father lay dying, in which she said the country was suffering “a sleeping sickness of the soul,” and urged her fellow citizens “to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the 20th century.”
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Her reward? She was roundly, relentlessly ridiculed, most infamously in a New York Times cover story, titled “Saint Hillary,” by the late Michael Kelly, in which she expounded at even greater length on her personal passions, unaware that Kelly would use them to mock her for high-minded earnestness. In those interviews, the public Hillary Clinton was altogether different than the one the public sees today: less guarded, more candid, far more eager to embrace the “larger message” she’s so often criticized for lacking now. When Kelly suggested to her that she was “trying to come up with a sort of unified-field theory of life,” she responded in what he described as “excited” tones: "That's right, that's exactly right!"
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So Clinton would feel entitled to believe she is damned if she does, and damned if she doesn’t—a sentiment she herself has expressed more than once. Twenty-three years ago, when The New York Times’ Kelly asked why she, as an unelected presidential spouse, should set herself the task of attempting to remake society, she jumped “hard on the point,” as he put it.

The question is “irrelevant to me,” Clinton said then. “I know that no matter what I did—if I did nothing, if I spent my entire day totally disengaged from what was going on around me—I’d be criticized for that. I mean, it’s a no-win deal, no matter what I do, or try to do.”