In a recent piece for The Hollywood Reporter, “Veep” showrunner David Mandel compared Selina Meyer — the callow, vainglorious, incompetent former president of the United States played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus — to Donald Trump.
“Trump, in a weird way, is sort of doing us,” Mandel said. “We’re not doing him.”
In fact, they’re doing Hillary Clinton.
This week, New York magazine features a lengthy profile of Clinton online, and while meant to be a hagiography, it actually reveals Clinton in a sad, somewhat delusional light — the Norma Desmond of American politics, still waiting for her close-up.
Here she is on May 10, working away (at what is unclear) from her dining room table in Chappaqua. “Clinton checks with her communications director, Nick Merrill, about what’s happened in the past hour — she’s been exercising — and listens to the barrage of updates, nodding like a person whose job requires her to be up-to-date on what’s happening, even though it does not.”
So much of Clinton’s existence now mirrors the fictional Meyer’s: Formerly one of the most powerful women in the world, she’s now a disgraced ex-pol casting about for influence, engaged in some light grifting, still surrounded by sycophantic and unpaid ex-staffers, attempting to write her memoirs, reporting to her offices in New York City where nothing ever happens, and establishing another foundation.
“Obviously the Clinton Foundation was something that we keyed in on,” Mandel told THR. “The idea that Selina would have a charitable foundation — one that she didn’t particularly care that much about — is one of the fun running jokes this season.”
In May, Hillary announced “Onward Together,” her new, ostensible nonprofit. The goal?
“Advance progressive values” through charitable donations. Why not keep asking for more when you’ve let down so many, so catastrophically?
There are subtler parallels to Meyer here, most incredibly the lack of self-awareness and Clinton’s satisfaction with it. “That’s not how I roll,” she said when asked about therapy. “I’m all for it for anybody who’s at all interested in it. It’s just not how I deal with stuff.
There are the days Clinton spends organizing her closets, drinking wine, reading fan mail, reliving over and over What Could Have Been. It’s all there in photographer Lynsey Addario’s portraits of Clinton, alone, the grandeur and adulation long stripped away. There’s the sense that despite her incredibly privileged life, her family, two small grandchildren nearby, only power can satisfy.
“I want to be buried with my editorial endorsements,” she told New York magazine, half-kidding. “I want an open casket and they can all be piled on top of me. You won’t even be able to see my body.”
And, of course, there is the blame cast upon the Russians, James Comey, misogyny, the deplorables, the right-wing media, voter suppression — everyone and everything but herself.
Left unmentioned in the piece is the DNC’s attempt to strong-arm Bernie Sanders out of the primaries and her campaign’s happy receipt, from Donna Brazile, of town hall topics and at least one advance debate question.
Even with these back-room assists, of course, Clinton still couldn’t win. Yet she insists to New York “what I was doing was working” and that when it comes to Sanders and Trump, “I beat both of them.”
Selina, in this season’s premiere, is successfully talked down from running again, and this, finally, may be the lone difference between the two: For all her narcissistic ambition, the fictional politician gets it. Hillary still doesn’t.