Hillary is critical of her paternal grandmother too. She calls Hannah Jones Rodham—father of Hillary’s father, Hugh Rodham Sr.—“a determined woman whose energies and intelligence had little outlet, which led to her meddling in everyone else’s business.” And she remarks that, “I believe my father knew that he had to make a break from Hannah if he was ever to live his own life.”

It’s clear from Hillary’s memoir that she feels sadness, even anger, about the absence of more caring, competent grandmothers from her own life. Her current paeans to their importance, therefore, may be a bit like Barack Obama’s lectures on the necessity of fathers—behind the political positioning lies a conviction born of personal pain.

Emphasizing grandmotherhood may be authentic for Hillary in another way too. In the popular imagination, grandmothers are both caring and conservative. They dote on their grandchildren while also tut-tutting about a culture gone awry. They are pro-family in both the liberal and conservative senses of the world.

That’s a good persona for Hillary because it reflects what she actually believes. Even Hillary’s critics acknowledge that her devotion to the welfare of children runs very deep. At Yale Law School, she made children’s rights the focus of her studies, and in her first job in Washington, working for what would become the Children’s Defense Fund, Hillary investigated the appalling conditions endured by the children of migrant workers. In Carl Bernstein’s biography, A Woman in Charge, Hillary’s friend Nancy Bekavic says, “I remember being struck by this aggressive, ambitious, bright woman who studied child development and cared about children. It was unusual in some ways. Every young woman was running away from, you know, childhood and family issues. Jesus Christ, the last thing you wanted to do was family law … It was very unusual.”

When Hillary burst onto the national scene in the 1990s, her work on children gained national attention. But because of the blowback she provoked as the first non-homemaker First Lady, the nature of that work was frequently distorted. The right portrayed her as a cultural radical who wanted children to be able to sue their parents.

In 2016, however, Hillary may be more effective in conveying her real attitudes toward children and families, which are anything but radical. In part, that’s because high-profile working women are somewhat less threatening than they were twenty years ago. But it’s also because running as a grandmother may help voters see the cultural conservatism that has been part of Hillary’s worldview all along.

In his biography, Bernstein quotes a former Clinton administration aide calling Hillary “a very judgmental Methodist from the Midwest.” And it’s true. Hillary’s most important mentor growing up was a local youth minister. Despite attending college and law school in the late 1960s, she never touched drugs. And while working on George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, according to Bernstein, she carried a heavily marked-up Bible around everywhere.