Dayhoff Soundtrack: Washington Post by Dan Zak: Ann Romney can feel Hillary Clinton’s pain

Monday, October 12, 2015

Washington Post by Dan Zak: Ann Romney can feel Hillary Clinton’s pain

By Dan Zak October 8, 2015

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/ann-romney-can-feel-hillary-rodham-clintons-pain/2015/10/08/4de781fc-6c4e-11e5-9bfe-e59f5e244f92_story.html?tid=pm_lifestyle_pop_b

Last winter Ann Romney curled up in the family mansion to write her memoir, in pen on yellow legal pads. She wanted the story to hinge on her struggle with multiple sclerosis.

The fatigue. The agony. The depression.

After she miraculously went into remission, the brutality of presidential politics became a new source of pain — which she re-lived when she saw Hillary Rodham Clinton on the “Today” show Tuesday.

Voters “just don’t connect with you,” co-anchor Savannah Guthrie said to Clinton. And “they might not like you.”

Horrible, Romney thought.

“Oh that really hurts my feelings, I have to tell ya,” Clinton said, and Romney believed her, because she has felt those feelings.

The judgments of likability.

The accusations of inauthenticity, of out-of-touchness.

“It’s like: ‘We don’t like you; how come?’ ” Romney says, mimicking the querulous media. “It’s like, really? I know her. And she’s obviously an extraordinary mother, she’s extremely brilliant, with unbelievable experience. The whole thing, with the attacks from everything, you develop — a bubble. From that. A protective bubble. Which you have to do. You have to. Whatever that bubble then projects to somebody is really not what’s inside the bubble.”

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