Meet the Alternative History: What If Hillary Clinton Had Run for President in 2004?

Doubling back to review the second episode of Chuck Todd's Meet the Alternative History podcast -- the first was about what if Bill Clinton had resigned in 1998, the third about what if JFK had lived, which I reviewed before the second episode because the topic is so transcendent.  This second episode finds Todd talking to Curtis Sittenfeld, whose 2020 novel Rodham (which I've yet to read) is an alternate history in which Hillary and Bill don't marry.

The conversation about the novel is fun and a good entree about how authors ply their craft.  The idea that Hillary Rodham would have had an incandescent public life not as Hillary Clinton is of course a paean to Hillary, and one which certainly seems plausible.  But I thought the real payoff in this podcast episode comes when the two discuss Todd's notion that Hillary Clinton, pursuing the exact same path as she did in our reality up until 2004, might well have won the U. S. Presidency had she run for that office that year.

Among the nuggets Todd reveals in that conversation is what David Axelrod told him about something that happened in 2009: that Trump had called Axelrod offering to run the early Obama dinner which the Salahis notoriously crashed.  Axelrod never returned (or was very slow to return) Trump's call.  Trump in turn didn't turn against Obama until a year or two later.  Todd says Axelrod wondered: could Trump have been an ally of Obama and the Democrats had Axelrod graciously accepted Trump's offer back then?

It's a fascinating conjecture about the very stuff of alternate history: little, seemingly inconsequential interactions or non-interactions that can have massive effects on subsequent history, aka the butterfly effect.  If ever those was a person in politics whose path was filled with those butterflies it would be Hillary Clinton.  She came razor close to winning the Democratic primaries in 2008, and in fact won the popular vote in 2016.  Todd also offers his view that, fifty years from now there may well be more books written about Hillary than Bill, and he may be right.

See also Meet the Alternative History: What If Bill Clinton Had No Resigned? and Meet the Alternative History: What If JFK Had Lived?

Listen to Meet the Alternative History on Spotify, Goodpods, or Podchaser