Hillary Is "A Tortured Person"
In the wake of Hillary Clinton's decision to end her long, historic campaign for the presidency
Does she want to be Obama's running mate? A spot on the Supreme Court, should he win? Another crack at the White House, should he fall short this fall? The post of Senate majority leader? Something else?
The subject was raised with Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn on The Early Show Thursday by co-anchor Harry Smith, and Quinn minced no words, saying, "I've been intrigued by the questions in the last couple of weeks, 'What does Hillary really want?' And I think that the answer is that Hillary, up until now, has wanted what she thinks she should want. And what I think is that Hillary doesn't know what she wants. And she doesn't know who she really is.
"From the very beginning, when she married Bill Clinton, when she moved to Arkansas, she gave up her lucrative career, she changed her name during the campaign, 'I'll stand by my man' -- her personality changed. You remember when she first came into the White House and she had a different hairdo and a different outfit? She looked completely different. And people kept saying, 'Who is she?'
"And, even during the campaign this time -- during the Monica (Lewinsky) thing, when she stood by Bill Clinton, she was the health care maven. She was the strong one and the weak one.
And, during this campaign, she allowed him to, on some levels, sabotage her. She was feisty at some point and even shrill, and then she would cry.
"And then ... she said (after winning the New Hampshire primary), 'I found my voice.' But I don't think that she ever did find her voice.
"And I think that what she needs to do now -- and I know this sounds really strange, but -- if I were Hillary Clinton, I would go off to a retreat somewhere. ... A silent retreat. And I would stay there, I would take a sabbatical and stay there for three months, and not talk, and meditate, and think, and try to figure out who I really was and what I really wanted. I'm serious.
"I think that this is a tortured person who has run and run and run and gone for it and gone for it, and it's power, and it's this and it's that, 'I've got to be there.' There's never a moment where you see her relaxing, where you see her really stopping to smell the roses, stopping to say, 'Who am I and what is it that I want?'
"Maybe what she really needs is a wonderful, loving relationship with somebody instead of just going after power and being this ambitious person that I think she thinks she oughta be."