“She has just always been a little outside of the role that a woman normally plays and that confounds us, we don’t know what to make of it,” says Jennifer Palmieri, of her former boss Hillary Clinton.
Palmieri was director of communications on Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, a job she took up after serving as White House communications director for US president Barack Obama.
On the latest episode of the Women’s Podcast, she talks to Kathy Sheridan about her book Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World.
It is full of advice for a future female leader, but it also serves as a revealing retrospective on the 2016 election, posing big questions about a US presidential race we just can’t leave behind.
More than a year since Clinton’s devastating loss to Donald Trump, there is still “so much to unpack and examine” about what happened, says Palmieri.
For one, why did so many people have such a problem with Clinton’s ambition?
“With the concession speech, there’s Hillary, she’s a gracious loser putting the country’s interests over her own. We like that. We’re much less comfortable when [women] are seeking power, saying ‘I want to be the president of the United States and I’m the best person for it’. That, we find less appealing.
“What the campaign revealed to me is that [women] have made a lot of progress, but we still have a long way to go,” she says.
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