Gillian Brassil works in video production in Santa Fe. She has previously written for GQ and the New York Times Magazine.

In 2004, as an eighth-grader, I participated in a forensics league, a public speaking and drama competition that attracts future debaters and policy nerds. (I became neither.) My event was declamation, or memorizing and delivering a speech someone else wrote; I chose Hillary Clinton’s “women’s rights are human rights” address from the 1995 U.N. World Conference on Women in Beijing.

Middle-school me swooned over Clinton’s powerhouse rhetoric, got drunk on girl power. I loved the way it cowed my classmates into silence when I did a practice run at school. At competitions, though, the speech fizzled: I took home a handful of bronze medals, generally losing to “I Have a Dream” (understandable) or, once, a one-man reenactment of dialogue from Harry Potter (less so).“It’s these Tennessee judges,” my mother and I agreed. “They’re just not ready for Hillary’s progressive message.”


Thirteen years later, I and almost all of my friends have accepted the prevailing criticism: Clinton is in the pocket of any number of powerful lobbies; she can’t be trusted to do the right thing; her presidency would represent business as usual. I won’t claim to speak for my entire generation—though many boomers are eager to—but it’s become clear that left-leaning millennials are not picking up what Clinton is putting down. In Iowa, Democratic caucus-goers between the ages of 17 and 29 chose Bernie Sanders by a 70-point margin. In New Hampshire, he won the same age group by 67 points.

Endless theories have been put forward to explain the disconnect: Flighty youths don’t feel strong party ties or any love for the Democratic establishment. They find Clinton too rehearsed, her promises hollow. A generation that came of age in a wrecked economy, awash in student loan debt, wants a revolutionary voice, an outsider, a heaping helping of socialism. I think those explanations are more or less right. But it’s also been suggested that millennials would feel differently about Hillary if we’d been politically conscious during the Bill Clinton years and knew more about her time as first lady.

I set out to discover whether there was some truth to that. How much did I and my friends actually know about her early career? Was it an essential part of the passion that had 60-year-old women going to the mat for her? Maybe I’d grown disenchanted with Clinton not just because I’d grown up, but because she’d legitimately represented more that I cared about during her White House tenure in the ‘90s.

Last April, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes presented a tongue-in-cheek series, “Hillary for Millenials,” that addresses this possibility. In his introduction, he states, “There’s probably no other figure in public life who’s more battle-tested or has been through as many fake scandals as the former first lady. Now, she’s running for president in a country where tens of millions of people were toddlers or in grade school when she was living in the White House.” The videos are supposed to explain some of the controversies she’s weathered over her long career, but my main takeaway was: Man, Hillary used to be such a boss. I knew that she’d helmed Bill’s healthcare reform taskforce, but had always assumed it was a figurehead position, not that she’d been a real player (despite heavy criticism that she was overstepping her wifely role). Her defiance of skeptics was endearing, but even more than that, I found that era’s Hillary Clinton so much more likeable. The skit she and Bill made mocking their plan’s detractors was funny but not forced, which is seemingly impossible for her now. Her faint southern accent didn’t sound put-on (though it probably was). Her style was on point. And even when apologizing, she seemed so much less eager to please. I could never imagine ‘90s Hillary trying to compare herself to your abuela.

When I asked some friends what they knew about First Lady Hillary Clinton, they seemed surprised when I described what I’d been reading and watching. For all of us, the most immediate association we had with that period was how she’d dealt with Bill’s infidelity. “She’s still ‘the woman whose husband got a blowjob in the Oval Office,’” one friend commented. Another friend compared her presidential campaigns to Obama’s: “There was so much focus on who this guy was, his upbringing in Hawaii, his life in Chicago. I don’t know if it’s a Clinton campaign effort to avoid talking about the past because of the Lewinsky scandal, but I don’t know much about [Hillary’s] earlier career. I think if I did, I would maybe connect with her more.”

No one I talked to doubted for a second that she was incredibly accomplished and experienced, though we had a hard time pointing to specifics before she was a senator. When I asked people my age versus people my parents’ age to describe her in a few phrases, they consistently overlapped: shrewd, experienced, capable, not a people person. It seemed like millennials had successfully absorbed, via VH1 recaps and Wikipedia, the cliff-notes version of who Hillary was, and what the Bill Clinton years had been about: sax on Arsenio Hall, tech boom, budget surplus, stained blue dress. But it was hard for that bullet-point knowledge to translate into the yearning (some of) our parents felt for that time. (Interestingly, multiple friends brought up criticisms of Clinton-era policies related to current hot topics like welfare and juvenile sentencing, underscoring how much less rosy our vision of the ‘90s is than our parents’.) “It’s her turn” was a sentiment much more deeply felt by people who had watched her on the national stage for over 20 years. For us, that much time in the political machine seemed suspicious: Who could last that long without selling her soul?

That’s why it often felt tone-deaf when Hillary supporters implored young people to back her on the strength of her resumé. The New York Times endorsement called her “one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in modern history.” We already recognized that—and it did feel crazy that it wasn’t enough—but we’d cast our first votes for Barack Obama. Somehow, even after watching his causes compromised and his ambition stymied, we’re still looking for a candidate who is equally inspiring, who wasn’t yet sullied by a life in politics. (That candidate, to be clear, is not Bernie Sanders, but at least he’s a little less indebted to the establishment.) Our first meaningful exposure to Hillary Clinton was as the opponent of someone we were falling in love with, so of course we never really warmed up to her.

I had forgotten, until it came up in conversation this week, that I supported Hillary throughout the 2008 primary, and argued on her behalf in my high school lunchroom. I think I’m just getting farther and farther away from my heartfelt-speech-giving self—and so is she.