Hillary Clinton Talks to Lena Dunham About Marrying Bill: 'I Actually Turned Him Down Twice' 
 
 Barbara Kinney / HillaryClinton.com 
 
 When it came time for Lena Dunham to interview Hillary Clinton for her new digital newsletter Lenny , which launches September 29, she went right for the most interesting question: her marriage to Bill Clinton "Did you have anxiety about that?" Dunham inquired. "About the concept of losing your own identity in the process of joining forces with someone who clearly had political ambitions?"Clinton's answer was unusually candid. "I was terrified about losing my identity and getting lost in the kind of wake of Bill’s force-of-nature personality," she told Dunham. "I actually turned him down twice when he asked me to marry him. He asked, we were in England on a trip after law school graduation. He asked me to marry him. I said, 'You know, I can’t say yes. No, I can’t do that right now.' And then, about a year later he asked me again, and I said 'No.' He said, 'Well, I’m not asking you again until you’re ready to say yes.' And that was a large part of the ambivalence and the worry that I wouldn’t necessarily know who I was or what I could do if I got married to someone who was going to chart a path that he was incredibly clear about.""My ideas were much more inchoate," she tells Dunham of her younger years. "I wasn’t sure how to best harness my energies. And so I was searching. And when I taught at the law school, I set up a bigger legal aid clinic. I sent students to represent prisoners. I did a lot of poverty cases. I loved doing that. And I wasn’t quite sure how everything I cared about might fit into a marriage with him. And so eventually I said yes. It was a big leap of faith, and I think most marriages are. I mean, you really do just sort of say, 'Okay, I think I know what it’s gonna be like, but I don’t know for sure. Let’s find out.'""It was great," she says. "We were both teaching at that time. We got married in the living room of the house we had bought. And I was excited about it, but still, somewhat apprehensive. And then he did get elected to be attorney general about a year after we were married. And we moved from where we were living in Fayetteville, Arkansas to Little Rock, Arkansas. And I switched gears to practice law instead of teach law. So at every step along the way, I never could have predicted what I would have ended up doing."Looking back, she said,"If somebody had said when I was twenty or twenty-one, 'Are you gonna marry somebody from Arkansas? And you’re gonna teach law school at the university there, and you’re gonna move there, and, you know, that’s where your daughter’s gonna be born…' It would have never been in, you know, my mind. It’s just not something that I had ever imagined.""And, I often tell young women who ask me about my life or my career: you just make the best decision you can at the time," she advises. "Don’t be reluctant to make decisions, and don’t rush into them. I mean, give them some thought. And then finally you say to yourself, 'I think this is right for me. I’m going to, go ahead and do it.' And you just do the best you can. And I have a piece of wood that there’s a slogan on in our house up in Westchester County, which says, 'Bloom where you’re planted.' And I’ve been in lots of different places where I’ve had to learn how to bloom. And it’s been an incredible experience."Clinton's entire interview will be sent to Lenny subscribers on their launch date September 29.The Girls writer and creator cofounded Lenny , with her producing partner Jenni Konner. The weekly newsletter will cover topics ranging from politics, style, art, health and wellness to sex and relationships. As Dunham describes it: "Lenny is an email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information." ||||| The following feature appears in the February 2017 issue of NYLON. 
 
 Like many successful, so-called nasty women, Lena Dunham is a masterful practitioner of the sugarcoated business voice. You know the one; Melanie Griffith cooed it in Working Girl. Taylor Swift could offer an MBA in it. Game of Thrones’ Margaery Tyrell wrapped boy-kings around her pinkie with it. If you wield it incorrectly, though, beware: Hillary Clinton, Dunham’s political girl-crush, never powdered enough sugar on those boss pipes during the election, according to the pundits. And, well, we all know how that went. 
 
 Dunham, 30, identified with Clinton, whom she actively campaigned for alongside friends America Ferrera and Amber Tamblyn, because the demands to be a different kind of woman have burned her, too. More aggressive, more gentle, more clothed, more invisible, more whatever, it’s always changing. But after six seasons of creating, writing, directing, producing, and acting in her HBO series, Girls, which premieres its final season on February 12, Dunham has finally learned how to be her own kind of bohemian boss. She’s learned to apologize when she makes mistakes, but never to apologize for living in plain sight. And living in plain sight means asking for what you want—but in the voice, always the voice. 
 
 On a Sunday morning at Soho House, the West Hollywood outpost of the posh members-only club for creatives, Dunham and I search for a table in the buzzing dining room. We’ve already rejected the garden area, which threatened to erupt into live jazz at any minute. We could wait for a hostess, but instead Dunham sidles right up to the bar in her tan Ugg boots, heather gray sweats, and Fair Isle cardigan. “Hiiiiii,” she says in a bright, cheery tone, followed by a honeyed but firm request to be seated, her unwavering eye contact reaching state diplomacy levels. We’re led to a lovely perch by the windows. But when the waiter doesn’t visit fast enough, she’s back up to the bar. “Hiiiiii,” she says, before sweetly demanding that he come by quick. To me, she says, “I’ve always done this. I learned it from my Jewish mother. I didn’t start doing this when I got famous or anything.” Dunham tosses this off nonchalantly, but there’s a perverse thrill to it, this mentioning of her celebrity. She was perfectly polite to everyone, but realizes how close she veered to the diva celebrity cliché (and being a diva to service-industry people is the rankest of diva sins). Instead of letting it quietly gain traction, she calls it out. This is peak Dunham. Naming the chafing spots that happen in everyday interactions is her favorite sport. The trivial, the gauche, the downright forbidden—she loves all of her awkward children. Part of the game is that she recognizes you’ve noticed it, too, and she’s already one step ahead of you by having the audacity to name it. Photographed by Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello. Styled by Sally Lyndley. Coat by Prada, bathing suit by Lonely Lingerie, necklace by Energy Muse. 
 
 In person, the hyper-articulate, hyper-self-aware Dunham is a marvel to behold, if a little unnerving. She’s so observant—fluidly tracking every single time I scribble a note, eye contact like a retinal scan—that sitting across from her gives the sensation of being read by a super-high-performing care robot. She’s not cold or forced—quite the opposite, in fact. Her bare face with just a hint of coral lipstick lights up when she’s excited, which is often. She’s warm and spontaneous, funny and disarming. It’s just that she speaks and listens (every single friend of Dunham’s I talk with praises her full-body listening skills) with such tangible emotional access and presence, it’s a little uncanny. Underneath the lighthearted self-deprecation and quips about how both she and her dog Susan have endometriosis is a laser-focused mind that barely misses a thing. She admits, though, that there are gaps in her self-knowledge: “I’m realizing more and more as I get older that I’m actually way less self-aware than I thought,” she says, noting that she countered the first pings of public critique with shielding thoughts like, “‘Oh, I’ve been in therapy since I was seven. There’s nothing you could say about me that other people wouldn’t know.’ But the older I get, the more I’m like, ‘I don’t fucking know what anybody is seeing when they look at me,’ and the coolest thing is it’s not my problem.” Her hazel eyes open wide. “That’s an interesting thing. It kind of doesn’t matter. I used to think the worst thing in the world could be for someone to have a thought about you that you didn’t have yourself. Now I’m like, ‘Have at it, guys!’” Photographed by Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello. Styled by Sally Lyndley. Dress by Opening Ceremony, necklace by Energy Muse. 
 
 Have at it they do. Since its premiere in 2012, legions of futon critics have claimed they could make Girls better than Dunham. And truth be told, certain aspects of the show don’t feel right to her anymore either. “I wouldn’t do another show that starred four white girls,” Dunham, who plays Hannah Horvath, acknowledges. “That being said, when I wrote the pilot I was 23. Each character was an extension of me. I thought I was doing the right thing. I was not trying to write the experience of somebody I didn’t know, and not trying to stick a black girl in without understanding the nuance of what her experience of hipster Brooklyn was.” She wasn’t alone in her self-doubt. Jemima Kirke, Dunham’s childhood friend who plays Jessa, the long-haired wild child with a secret grounded core, hardly accepted herself as an actor on a prestige network. “I didn’t think I had earned that show,” she says. “It was like, ‘You didn’t even take a class.’ I was embarrassed to say I liked acting.” But when Jessa got her most meaningful story line—dating Adam, Hannah’s mercurial ex played by the series’ breakout actor, Adam Driver, in season five—Kirke sunk deeper into her character, thrilled to be given more responsibility by Dunham. “In the beginning,” Kirke says, “she was holding on really tight. She was a machine of creativity, of putting out this product. She’s dropped that significantly and the creativity level has gone up.” Photographed by Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello. Styled by Sally Lyndley. Kimono by Bordelle, dress by H&M, shoes by Aldo, socks by Stance. 
 
 In a season where many characters wrestled with their boldest story lines yet—Marnie (Allison Williams) got married, for instance, in a feast of twee-folk narcissism—none inspired debate in the writers’ room quite like Jessa and Adam’s budding affair. “That’s what takes someone from being kind of a shitty friend to being an actually shitty friend, but at the same time, it’s one of the ways you meet people,” Dunham says. Her beloved parents, the artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham, met this way. “I am the product of a much-discussed downtown SoHo romance,” she merrily dishes, “that put a few people in a really bad mood.” Kirke sees her character’s development as a sign of Dunham’s growth, creatively and beyond. “Lena’s becoming more free,” she says. “She wants people to understand her, but she’s also trying not to apologize so much. I don’t know why Lena Dunham, more than anyone else, is asked to fucking apologize so much.” For all of Dunham’s emotional intelligence, she has her blind spots. That desire to call out the awkward moments sometimes backfires, like when she joked about the NFL player Odell Beckham Jr. ignoring her at the Met Ball because she wasn’t attractive enough (a joke that unfortunately involved projecting misogynistic thoughts onto a black man she didn’t know). Her good friend, writer Ashley Ford, wishes more people would recognize Dunham’s efforts to broaden her perspective. “I’ve never seen her not take the opportunity to learn how her words and actions might affect other people. That’s what frustrates me about reactions to her.… She’s perceived to be this super-evil pinnacle of white feminism, but they haven’t even investigated those feelings,” Ford says of Dunham’s critics. “A lot of them decided a long time ago that they don’t like her. She can’t live by those opinions.” Photographed by Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello. Styled by Sally Lyndley. Sweater by Victor Glemaud, dress by H&M, socks by Stance. 
 
 Dunham can, however, respond to the valid concerns that she hasn’t done enough to depict life outside the white hipster bubble. Quietly, outside of Girls, she’s been building a media fempire that constitutes what Ford describes as a new platform “to support women’s voices that need to be heard the most.” Lenny Letter, the media brand she created with longtime Girls showrunner Jenni Konner, and Women of the Hour, her podcast now in its second season, are both showcases for eclectic stories, including Ford’s own gripping experience with her father, who was incarcerated 30 years on rape charges. A recent WoTH episode, “Faith & Spirituality,” featured a Muslim woman sharing dating tips, and a hilarious tale of a lapsed Mormon in flagrante with a former Orthodox Jew. In both forums, Dunham leaves her stamp, with her nurturing interviewing style and wryly vulnerable stories, but she isn’t the star by any means. Konner says that Dunham came “pretty fully formed as an artist,” but it’s been her comfort level with public life that’s grown in the past couple of years. “She’s honest and straightforward, and it comes with a price. I see it chip away at her, but ultimately, it’s more important for her to be a Hillary supporter and a supporter of reproductive rights. It’s more important to be out there,” she says. Photographed by Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello. Styled by Sally Lyndley. Top by Advisory Board Crystals, shoes and choker by Giuseppe Zanotti Design, crystal necklace by Energy Muse. 
 
 Due to her campaigning for Clinton, but also because she’s been targeted as an outspoken feminist for years, Dunham has been harassed by the alt-right brigade. After Trump won the election, her Instagram account, where she captures life with her three fur babies and boyfriend Jack Antonoff, was besieged with threats. To a certain degree, she understands why she’s a target: “So much of what we’re dealing with in America isn’t just misogyny, isn’t just racism, but is also this unspoken constant tug between people living on different sides of the class divide,” she says. “You come in and you’re like, ‘I went to Oberlin. My godparents are both art critics. I was raised at a women’s action coalition meeting,’ and that’s repugnant to them on a thousand levels. There’s a sense of snobbery or intellectualism that feels like it’s the enemy of patriotism and also the enemy of the working class, which is by no means where I ever wanted to position myself.” Dunham is clear that she doesn’t condone any threats or violence, but she’s always open to respectful conversation. Her younger sibling, Grace, a gender-nonconforming activist who has been dragged into the alt-right maelstrom before, is in a constant debate with Lena. Is it better to be radical and reach fewer people, or soften the message and reach more? “Lena is an amazing listener, and she’s not stubborn,” says Grace. “But she’ll push your thinking—she’s pushed me to really consider the goals of my activism. We go toe to toe; it’s really rigorous.” Photographed by Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello. Styled by Sally Lyndley. Raincoat by Diesel. 
 
 “Grace is my fucking boss spirit guide on this stuff,” Dunham says. “She’s definitely the best member of our family, and I don’t think anyone would refute that.” The two text daily, Facetime every few days, and spent this past Thanksgiving together serving food to trans teens at a community center. Grace is six years younger but very protective of her older sibling. “I wish she’d move to British Columbia, throw all her tech in the ocean, get a garden going, and write a novel,” Grace says. “She’s been prolific for so long. She will never stop making things, that’s one thing I know. You could tie her hands behind her back, and she’d still find a way to write.” The young woman’s curse, the need to be liked by everyone, has been one of Dunham’s toughest lessons professionally: “Sometimes being a creator, and especially being a female creator, is an exercise in shutting people’s voices out, because there are so many who think they understand better than you how to do your job,” she says. Photographed by Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello. Styled by Sally Lyndley. Coat by Prada, bathing suit by Lonely Lingerie, shoes by Christian Louboutin, necklace by Energy Muse, socks by Stance. 
 
 Threats be damned, Dunham won’t be quieting her voice anytime soon. For the final season of Girls, “we wrote in a climate where we were thinking a lot about this election, and the election was heating up as we shot the show, and that energy for sure made its way into how we tackled topics. I don’t mean to be demurring, but there are some big female issues, more than maybe ever before,” she says. While Dunham shares a home with Antonoff, both in New York and Los Angeles, the die-hard workaholic says she would hardly see her boyfriend if they didn’t intertwine their frenetic work lives. (She’s directed a few of his music videos, and he contributed two songs to the final season of Girls.) “I have no social life, I have a tiny personal life, and I work myself to the point of illness three times a month,” she says. In 2016, she had three surgeries related to her severe endometriosis. Her friends and family wonder if her pace is sustainable. That question will be carried over to the conclusion of Girls. “This is for sure the season where people are like, ‘It’s now or never. Am I going to perish in the worst apartment in Bushwick, or am I going to figure out a way to actually live where I’m not scared every day?’” she says. “It’s also a lot about examining these friendships, which we’ve looked at over five seasons, and asking, ‘Are these sustainable in any way? Why are we even doing this? And are these friendships even the healthiest thing for us, or are we holding on to hold on?’” Photographed by Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello. Styled by Sally Lyndley. Sweater by Victor Glemaud, dress by H&M. ||||| Naomi Nishi 
 
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 Journalist and activist Gloria Steinem took anything but a typical path: from working in India post-college, to an undercover mission as a Playboy Bunny in 1963, to helping found New York and Ms. magazines, to becoming maybe the most famous feminist in the world. She spoke to Cosmopolitan in her Upper East Side apartment — the same one she shared with roommates when she first moved to New York, now filled with photos and art from her travels — and it's clear she's had an absolute blast. 
 
 First of all, I have no idea if Helen Gurley Brown really was your nemesis, as has been reported. 
 
 No! Helen Gurley Brown did something very interesting and important, which is she made it OK to be sexual in a women's magazine. Up to then, there was a formula — literally a formula — that said that if you had sex, even in fiction, in a story — you had to come to a bad end. It was totally moralistic and crazy. She was very important in liberating Cosmo, and therefore women's magazines. And also, she was a great girlfriend. We had each other's backs. The notion that two women — especially two women with any kind of power — can't get along, it is so wrong. It just drives me up the wall. Every group that has less power is said to be unable to get along with each other. You know, it happens with caste, with race, with class. 
 
 In your book, you look back on the women's movement in the 1970s. Do you feel positive now that a lot of change has come and that women have been able to achieve their ambitions? 
 
 I thought we would be much further. Because I think I was just naïve. I thought things would change if we won majority support for issues—which we have on every issue now, from abortion to marriage equality. But it's not reflected in the power structure. 
 
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 Do you think it's easier to be an ambitious woman now? Is that less scary to people? 
 
 Yes. Within my memory, the very idea that a woman would "go to business," as they would have said in the suburbs, rather than be a housewife and mother, was a bad thing. So I think it's changed a lot. Still, if you don't play a submissive role, if you don't do what you're supposed to do, you get to be a loud black woman or a bitchy white woman. 
 
 How do you push back against that? 
 
 The best thing I've ever thought of to say when somebody calls you a bitch is "Thank you." I mean, it totally disarms them. They don't know what to do. Marlo Thomas always used to say that for a man to be called aggressive, he had to take over your business, but for a woman to be called aggressive, she had to only put you on hold. It's just a terrible double standard. We have to call them on it. If you call them on it, it changes people's heads. 
 
 One of the big gaps that remains is the number of men in top leadership versus women. Women don't actually aspire to those jobs in as big numbers as men, still. Why do you think that is? 
 
 Well, some of them are lousy jobs. It's not as if they're the great be-all and end-all. Until men are raising children as much as women are, women won't be able to be equal in the work place, and we are so behind as a nation, in terms of flexible work patterns and parental leave. The ballgame is to [get women to think] you can't do it and therefore you shouldn't try and you shouldn't disturb the system. You can both be there [in the workplace] and you can have the fun — and it is fun — of making change while you're there. 
 
 That message has kind of gotten lost. Going out to make social change sounds very serious and earnest, how could it possibly be fun? 
 
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 I'm here to testify. It is totally fun, it is riveting, you wake up in the middle of the night like, "Well, what if we did that?" and also you have community. You laugh at each other's jokes and you learn things. You need circles, which Sheryl Sandberg points out. You can't do it by yourself. So part of the solution is collective, and legislative, and part of it is what else Sheryl Sandberg says, which is if you're going to have a career and you want kids, the single-most important career decision is who your partner is. Is that partner going to be an equal child-bearer? 
 
 What advice do you have for finding those guys? How do you know if a guy is going to be supportive? 
 
 There's not like this perfect system, but can you be yourself with him? Can you say what you think and care about? Do you feel like you have to wear your makeup to bed? Can you be your own self with that person? And do they make you better? Some reporter once asked me what the sexiest thing a man ever did for me was, and I said, "Iron my blouse!" 
 
 You didn't get married until very late. How important was sex to you as a young woman? 
 
 Romance and sex is a great adventure. You're exploring how you feel, how the other person feels. I don't think I was ever actually single. I was always between men but overlapping them. Which is not a great thing — I kind of regret it because you end up hurting people. But that's the way I was living. I don't feel great about the idea that I would have sex with somebody that I didn't have lunch with. With hooking up, it's not a judgment, it's just a question: Is this what you really want to do, or is it the only way you know to communicate? Women are way oversexualized. 
 
 A lot of people are experimenting. There seems to be a lot more willingness to experiment with threesomes and foursomes and group sex… 
 
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 Let me just say — is the threesome one woman and two men? Or is it— 
 
 All types, but traditionally two women and one man… 
 
 The plot thins. 
 
 Miley Cyrus has said, "I am literally open to every single thing that is consenting and doesn't involve an animal and everyone is of age." So it's sort of the "I'll try anything" generation. 
 
 Seems like an extreme lack of taste. Sometimes I think a threesome is the two women are really in love with each other and they need the guy for permission. The question of who really wants to be there is a fundamental question. Who genuinely wants to be there? Who feels they have to do it for approval or to keep their partner? In my life's acquaintance, I haven't actually known of three people, all of whom equally wanted to be there. I have faith that it might happen. 
 
 Feminist role models today are so heavily pop culture-related, like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, but then we hear criticism that maybe they're not great role models, that they're not really saying anything that's shaking things up. 
 
 Oh, we can have a Beyoncé discussion. I was there when Beyoncé did Chimes for Change — you know, it's the biggest concert I've ever seen in my life, for the Violence Against Women Project — she came out and said to this audience of thousands of mostly women, "I know life is hard, but we're together for the next hour or so, and you're safe." And I thought, OK, you had me at hello. We need to build bridges to those folks, not sit and nitpick what they have on. A feminist is just someone who believes men and women are equal beings. 
 
 What can we do to combat everyday sexism, like when your boyfriend's father says, "No man is voting for Hillary?" 
 
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 Well, I would just add in the word "insecure," no insecure man is voting for Hillary. Laugh at them. To an asshole like Donald Trump, we just need to come back and say, "You think she's not a 10? You've never been a 1! If you lost your wallet, every woman would be gone." Saying something is almost always better than swallowing it and then thinking about it for two days. So if you put that [exchange] in a little text and then you can share it — and we all learn from each other. I learned from Flo Kennedy, who was a great civil rights lawyer and who was my speaking partner for a while. Nobody was better at a comeback. Some guy in some audience would say, "Are you lesbians?" and she would always say, "Are you my alternative?" and everyone would crack up. Again, it's fun. And it's consciousness-raising because you're not just doing it for yourself and the other person, you're also doing it for the people around you. 
 
 Do you think Hillary will win? 
 
 I think she could win. In 2008, I felt strongly she couldn't win because most of us are still raised by women. So we associate female authority with childhood and emotionality and irrationality. We just haven't seen enough females being authoritative in this rational, adult world. But I think she and many others have now changed enough so that maybe we can imagine it. But it won't really be cured until men are raising children as much as women. And then we'll know that men can be loving and nurturing, which they can. It's a libel on guys to say they can't. Lots of men want to be with their children, but they're penalized at work if they say so. We're restricted, true, but they're restricted too. We're all trying to complete the circle. 
 
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 Your father is a great character in the book [Steinem's memior, My Life on the Road], sort of magical kind of character. 
 
 He was a playmate, he had two points of pride: He never wore a hat and he never had a job. That enabled me to be a freelance writer because I knew it was possible. Once I was working at the Ladies' Home Journal from home, and they said I had to be in the office two days of the week. I quit. I thought, How dare they expect me to be in the office? Not rational. 
 
 You write movingly about creating your own space and realizing that you like to travel because you had somewhere to come back to. 
 
 I thought that you had to settle down. And I thought women didn't really make their own homes, they made homes for partners and children. So it took me a while to realize that you could make your own home for yourself. And the home is a symbol of the self. My big revelation was that we all need both travel and journeys, and a home — it's not either or. 
 
 And you somehow combined them. 
 
 Yeah. It took me a long time, I was well past 50. 
 
 Good, so that gives us all something to look forward to. 
 
 You'll do it much faster. 
 
 Steinem's new memoir, My Life on the Road, hits 
 
 shelves Oct. 27. 
 
 A version of this story was published as "You're Going to Have a Great Time" in the November issue of Cosmopolitan. Pick up the November 2015 issue on newsstands or click here to subscribe to the digital edition! ||||| Bill Clinton Pours On the Estrogen 
 
 By Maureen Dowd 
 
 PHILADELPHIA — His life took off, he said, when he fell in love with “that girl.” 
 
 He told a familiar love story, recounted in his memoir, about springtime at Yale Law School in 1971 and a “magnetic” girl with thick blond hair and big glasses and no makeup and a long, white flowery skirt. 
 
 He said when he first saw her in a political and civil rights class that he wanted to tap her on the shoulder but he knew if he did, he would be starting something beyond his control. 
 
 With a sky-blue tie and silvery hair and an easy smile, the 69-year-old looked healthier than he has on the trail. And he was sharp. 
 
 The Big Dog basked in the unique historic moment: a former president and a husband and a wannabe first lad making the case for a former first lady, a wife and a wannabe first woman president. 
 
 In an act of amazing self-restraint, the man who relishes the word “I” managed to make the talk, as he prefers to call his folksy speeches, all about her. He was positively uxorious. 
 
 She “calls you when you’re sick, when your kid’s in trouble or when there’s a death in the family,” Bill said of his partner of 40 years. 
 
 It has been said that the essence of the Clinton marriage is coming to each other’s rescue in critical moments. Or maybe more precisely, their byzantine conjugal dynamic works like this: One of them creates chaos — usually Bill — and then they get out of it together. Or as a former aide described the Clinton pattern: “Hubris. Funk. Reintroduction.” 
 
 “You could drop her in any trouble spot, pick one, come back in a month and somehow, some way, she will have made it better,” he said, in a line that could have applied to global crises or marital. (An earlier celebrity speaker tonight was Tony Goldwyn, who plays the philandering president in a series inspired by Bill and Monica). 
 
 After the email shaming and a bloodless campaign, tonight it was Bill’s turn to rescue Hillary from being the most unknown known person in history. One of the most liked presidents was charged with humanizing one of the least liked presidential candidates. 
 
 “One of the most seductive characters we’ve seen in American politics in our lifetime,” as David Axelrod calls Bill Clinton, had to melt the sphinx-like aura of his guarded wife. 
 
 The uncontrollable Clinton had to make the tightly-controlled Clinton seem less coiled and more endearing. The Protean pol had to take his wife’s ever-shifting personas and policies, and paint a cohesive portrait. He rivaled Ivanka in his talent for airbrushing, but he probably won’t be offering his convention outfit for sale tonight. 
 
 Hill and Bill both have 100-percent name ID but Bill’s task was to reintroduce her as “the best darn change-maker I have ever met in my entire life.” 
 
 A quarter-century after Clinton aides wrote memos about how to warm up and round out Hillary by raising her profile as a mother, Bill was still trying to drive that point home. 
 
 “My daughter had the best mother in the whole world,” he said tonight, adding that Hillary was “first and foremost” a mother, “our family’s designated worrier” who only worried about Bill’s parenting when he took a couple days off with Chelsea to watch all six “Police Academy” movies “back-to-back.” He described Hillary on her knees, lining Chelsea’s Stanford dorm room drawers with paper when their daughter moved to college, until Chelsea told them it was time to leave. 
 
 It is another example of the overcorrecting that marks Hillary’s career. In trying to feminize and maternalize Hillary, Bill almost went overboard about that “girl,” as he called her three times. He poured on the estrogen, presaging his role as helpmeet in the East Wing. 
 
 He never mentioned Donald Trump, the man he used to be friendly with and play golf with. He simply alluded to the way the Republican convention had tried to turn Hillary into a “cartoon” villainess. “Life in the real world is complicated and hard,” he said, and “a lot of people think it’s boring.” 
 
 “One is real, the other is made up,” he said of the caricature of Hillary. “You nominated the real one.” 
 
 He implicitly compared his wife to her gilded rival, limning her as someone genuinely seeking a life of service. He talked about her summer sliming fish in Alaska and all her work for poor children. 
 
 Hillary has said that she never realized how hard it was to be as great a persuader and performer as Bill until she tried to do it herself. 
 
 Bill has now given 10 convention speeches and he has had awful moments and great ones. I was there in 1988 when he talked for 33 minutes and the Dukakis delegates began cheering when he finally said “In closing…” And I was there in 2012, when he won raves for selling Barack Obama’s agenda, after the articulate-but-aloof president somehow wasn’t able to, and had to appoint Bill as “Secretary of Explaining Stuff.” This speech was slightly over 40 minutes. 
 
 Donald Trump had a soap opera actress speak at his convention but the Clintons easily topped that. Their lives have been an astonishing soap opera in which Bill has played many starring roles – the loyal spouse, the betraying spouse and the subconscious saboteur. 
 
 This was a night a long time coming for the former moot court partners, a night celebrating the promise that animates the Clinton partnership: She helped him. She moved to Arkansas for him. “I really hoped that her choosing me and rejecting my advice to pursue her own career was a decision she would never regret,” Bill said tonight. 
 
 She added the Clinton name to Rodham to please old-fashioned Southerners when Bill lost the governor’s mansion to help him win it back. Bill told the story tonight about how she engineered his comeback, noting “My experience is it’s a pretty good thing to follow her advice.” 
 
 Hillary chafed at eight years of the anachronistic role of first lady, even through slights like getting stationery with the restored middle name of Rodham missing as her husband campaigned for the White House. (She sent it back.) 
 
 “That girl” put up with the humiliations of Bill’s hound-dog ways with “that woman” and others, and let him hide behind her skirt. 
 
 And tonight Bill paid her back — and tried to extend his own legacy — even as Trump gets ready to exert more effort dragging the former president through the mud. Jeb Bush had faltered partly on dynasty fatigue, but Bill does not intend to let that happen to Hillary. 
 
 Starting tonight and through the fall as he tries to woo back white voters and older voters in the Rust Belt and the South, he is trying to conjure the halcyon days of Clinton peace and prosperity. He does not want to remind people of the shady days of Clinton avarice and deceit, or the parts of his presidency or post-presidency that haven’t aged well, like Nafta, the crime bill, deregulation of Wall Street and the Defense of Marriage Act, the Marc Rich pardon or the unseemly braiding of the Clinton Foundation with Hillary’s State Department. 
 
 Bill tried to augment Hillary’s sparse vision, talking about how she would be the right pilot for “the ride to America’s future.” “In the greatest country on earth we have always been about tomorrow,” 42 said, urging America to choose Hillary as 45. In other words: As Donald Trump tries to drag us back to the past — and to the Clintons’ past — don’t stop thinking about tomorrow. 
 
 Maureen Dowd is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.
– Hillary Clinton's desire to connect with millennial women has led her to chat with Refinery29 on sexual assault and now to an interview with "queen of oversharing" Lena Dunham. The Girls star chatted earlier this month with the sometimes "overly scripted" Clinton in Manhattan in an interview that will go up on Dunham's LennyLetter.com digital newsletter on Tuesday, Politico reports. The odd conversational couple dishes on student debt, women's health, and, yes, feminism, Politico notes. Highlights, per Politico and People: "Do you consider yourself a feminist?" Dunham asks. "Yes," Clinton replies. "Absolutely. I'm always a little bit puzzled when any woman of whatever age, but particularly a young woman, says something like, 'Well, I believe in equal rights, but I'm not a feminist.' Well, a feminist is by definition someone who believes in equal rights. I'm hoping that people will not be afraid to say that doesn't mean you hate men. … It just means that we believe that women have the same rights as men." "Did you have anxiety about" marrying Bill Clinton, Dunham asks. Responds Clinton: "I was terrified about losing my identity and getting lost in the kind of wake of Bill’s force-of-nature personality," she told Dunham. "I actually turned him down twice when he asked me to marry him. ... And that was a large part of the ambivalence and the worry that I wouldn’t necessarily know who I was or what I could do if I got married to someone who was going to chart a path that he was incredibly clear about." She calls her eventual yes "a big leap of faith." (Click for Donald Trump's latest Hillary Clinton insult.)