Secret Weapon...

Hillary Has a Secret Weapon in the Town Hall Debate

She did scores of them around the world over four years as secretary of state—and got a lot of practice addressing women’s issues. 

By Indira A.R. Lakshmanan

The conventional wisdom about town hall debates is that they’re all about empathy; in the past, the winners were deemed to be candidates who better connected with the problems of ordinary folks posing questions. By that measure Donald Trump’s No. 1 problem will surely be that he enters the hall at Washington University in St. Louis embroiled in the biggest controversy of his campaign—the continuing uproar over the appallingly non-empathetic things he has done to and said about women. But even before Friday’s story broke about the GOP nominee's lewd bragging on tape, he was already at a unique disadvantage.

The serious challenge Trump faces Sunday is that few candidates have ever been better prepared for this format than Hillary Clinton. Her secret weapon is that she revels in town halls—and she has practiced for them far more than people realize.

All told, Clinton held 60 town halls around the world in her four years as secretary of state, an average of more than one a month, and got a lot of practice answering tough questions, especially about women’s issues (a topic certain to be front and center Sunday night after Trump boasted in a video about groping women’s genitals). As a diplomatic correspondent who traveled with her, I was there for many of them, including her first and last town halls abroad, in Japan and Latvia. Clinton may have challenges seeming “relatable” to ordinary people, as comedian Kate McKinnon has mined for laughs on “Saturday Night Live” and as Clinton’s newly disclosed Goldman Sachs speech transcripts may suggest (or at least as some Republicans are contending). She also may not be the greatest public speaker or political talent of her time, especially compared with Barack Obama and her husband, Bill Clinton. But if you thought she was well prepared for the first debate with Trump, that’s nothing compared to the hundreds of hours she’s spent in town halls.

Clinton’s town halls—dubbed “townterviews” by her canny media adviser Philippe Reines—were a unique and distinctive feature of her tenure as secretary of state, a chance for her to engage with ordinary people around the world and State Department employees back home. Other secretaries have taken questions from foreign audiences, but Clinton embraced town halls like no one in that job has before or since, making them her signature form of “public diplomacy.”

From Nairobi to Moscow to Kuala Lumpur, she practiced the art of the town hall—attentive listening, empathizing with people’s problems and offering policy prescriptions. Speaking without notes or a teleprompter, she parried unscripted questions that were often surprising, usually policy-oriented, sometimes hostile, and occasionally quite personal. In this particular format, she has an edge on reality TV star Trump, whose role on “The Apprentice” was at least partly scripted, and whose trademark campaign event is a stream-of-consciousness arena speech—not a nitty-gritty Q&A with skeptical voters.

It is true, of course, that a town hall of undecided American voters is not a perfect analogue to an audience of foreigners hosting a visiting dignitary. By her own admission, Clinton is far more in her element when she’s serving in public office than when she’s running for it. Having covered her presidential campaigns as well as her time as secretary, I can safely conclude that Clinton seems palpably more comfortable in her own skin when she’s doing a job than when Americans who’ve scrutinized her public and private decisions for a quarter-century question her judgment and fitness for office.

And as challenging as town halls could be when she was secretary, crowds overseas treated her respectfully, and questions were generally about U.S. policies or her experience as a woman in politics. She never faced affronts to her character or challenges about paid speeches on Wall Street or her husband’s infidelities—issues that may come in the next debate.

Still, Trump should beware: Clinton is fully primed for the inevitable questions about the treatment of women. At nearly every event, women in the audiences, both in first-world and developing countries, asked Clinton about obstacles faced by her and women in general, and about issues ranging from work-life balance and workplace bias to barriers to girls’ education, honor killings and sex trafficking. The sexism highlighted by Trump’s crude comments is something she has heard and talked about a lot with ordinary men and women in town halls around the world.

At a girls’ school in Kolkata, India, she talked about a powerful meeting the day before with girls who had been rescued from the sex trade, and was asked numerous times about additional scrutiny and double-standards faced by women in politics in the U.S. and India, not to mention misogyny and gender-based attacks.

“It’s true globally; it’s not limited to any one country,” Clinton replied. “Violence against women, unfortunately, is still a problem everywhere. … We do have a big agenda ahead of us, and it’s very important that both men and women be invested in changing the underlying attitudes that lead to these discriminatory practices.” A lot of heads were nodding at that moment, among both women and men in the audience.

Again, at the University of Latvia, she won applause by saying “human rights should be human rights for everyone,” a line reminiscent of the one she made famous when she attended the U.N. women’s conference in Beijing as first lady in 1995. “I go to some places where women are considered less than fully human,” Clinton continued. “I would say: You don’t have to like somebody in order to respect them, in order to give them their human rights.”

True, Clinton won’t necessarily have it easy Sunday night. While Trump is certain to face questions about his degrading videotaped remarks about forcing himself on women, Clinton will no doubt be asked yet again about the trust issue that has so dogged her presidential campaign. But she’s also had a lot practice addressing this abroad.

Consider Pakistan. It’s hard to imagine a tougher town hall crowd than the one Clinton faced in Islamabad five years ago this month, when U.S.-Pakistan relations were at an all-time low. The alliance was strained almost to the breaking point, with anger boiling over in Pakistan at civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes, the killing of two Pakistanis on the street by a CIA agent, and the stealth U.S. raid on Pakistani soil that killed Osama bin Laden without seeking Islamabad’s permission or cooperation.

In question after question, Clinton was hammered by skeptical and defiant questioners about drones, private security contractors, a slow U.S. response to Pakistani flooding, a “trust deficit” between the countries. Clinton stood her ground, acknowledging concerns but underscoring the divergent view from Washington and defending U.S. policy. A female questioner compared the U.S. relationship with Pakistan to a mother-in-law who’s never satisfied. “We are trying to please you, and every time you come and visit us, you have a new idea, so you tell us, ‘You’re not doing enough and you need to work harder,’” the woman complained.

That question, which provoked approving laughter from the crowd, broke the tension. Clinton laughed along and milked the moment with a grin, saying, “Now that I am a mother-in-law, I totally understand what you’re saying, and will hope to do better privately and publicly.” I scanned the room for reactions, and her line seemed to take a little bit of sting off the tough message she’d been delivering: that the “trust deficit” in the months after the bin Laden raid was a two-way street.

She circled back to the humorous analogy at the end, saying the alliance was bigger than this period of difficulty. “Perhaps mothers-in-law can learn new ways also … There has to be that kind of give and take. And we need your ideas and we want to listen to you, and we respectfully request you listen to us,” she said. “We are going to stay the course and do everything we can to try to overcome the difficulties … because we both have too much at stake.”

Winning a town hall debate is also about adjusting quickly to unscripted questions that could be on just about any topic. And nearly all Clinton’s town halls abroad had surprising and memorable moments.

From her first overseas event in Tokyo to her last in Riga, Latvia, I can’t remember a time she was stumped by an arcane policy question. Asked about tribal and sectarian tensions, tariffs, minority rights, atomic energy, sanctions or the expansion of the European currency zone, she had an uncanny recall for facts, figures and policy details, giving the impression of someone who either worked the issues as first lady and senator, or committed her briefing books to memory. When the Latvian moderator asked if she was OK with tough questions from the crowd, she replied dryly that she’d “been asked probably anything that you can imagine in 20 long years.”

Yes, there were those rare moments when she didn’t have an immediate answer to a narrow question. At a town hall in Tripoli in October 2011, shortly after Muammar Qadafi was ousted in a Libyan uprising, she was asked if the U.S. could provide training for dentists and advise Libyans on how to catalogue a modern library system. Clinton praised the ideas, and instructed embassy staff to take the questioners’ details and coordinate the assistance they were seeking.

One of Clinton’s weaknesses is that she can come off as defensive, lawyerly or even impatient and bristly if challenged about sensitive issues that she feels she’s already put to rest: her ill-considered use of private email, her vote to support the Iraq War, her critics’ assertions of errors in Benghazi or improprieties in accepting donations to the Clintons’ charitable foundation.

This predilection could be magnified by the forum Sunday night, if she makes a wrong move on stage. Every bit of body language and facial expression the two candidates deliver on the open stage will be more noticeable and more dissected than if they were standing behind podiums, and opportunities for missteps abound: drinking too much water, pacing awkwardly on stage, sighing, interrupting, eye-rolling or even invading someone else’s personal space. Clinton has shown herself to be a skilled debater, but every encounter is a fresh minefield, and one ill-chosen line like her “basket of deplorables” could be deadly.

Still, in Clinton’s five dozen town halls as the top U.S. diplomat, she was able to talk directly and in-depth about virtually any issue. On occasion—answering questions about women’s empowerment and gender bias, children, health care, family-friendly policies—she interlaced her life experiences so her answers didn’t sound like dry, 10-point plans as they sometimes have on the campaign trail. No doubt she’s getting coaching from her husband, who was a master at weaving in his hard-knocks upbringing and exuding an empathy that helped carry him to the White House.

In a 1992 presidential debate that was the first to use the town hall format, a woman asked how the national debt had personally affected the candidates and how they could possibly offer economic cures if they couldn’t relate to common people’s problems. George H.W. Bush was criticized for looking at his watch, which made him seem disinterested, and bungled his reply, saying, “I’m not sure I get it.” Billionaire businessman and independent Ross Perot answered by saying that the economic uncertainty inspired him to run for president—but still his answer was all about him.

Bill Clinton, by contrast, memorably walked to the edge of the stage and extended his arms to the woman, asking her to tell him how it affected her, did she know people who lost their homes and jobs? As Arkansas governor, he said, he knew the names of people who lost their jobs, and he’d been out there “with people like you all over America.” It was just a minute and a half, but he forged a visceral connection with many voters.

Hillary Clinton had such moments too in town halls outside the U.S., but they before crowds who treated her more like rock star than a lightning rod. In those settings, she came off as natural, exhibiting humor and empathy.

I particularly remember the town hall Clinton did at Ewha Women’s University in Seoul on her first trip as secretary, because the questions were unusually intimate and she was treated with a giddy, fan-girl excitement that was a world away from the “likability” challenge she had recently faced in her primary defeat to Barack Obama. Clinton’s answers were as relaxed as if she were sitting with friends around a campfire. The event offered a glimpse of the woman beneath the controversial politician—something you rarely see on the campaign trail.

The female students didn’t hide their curiosity about Clinton’s choices and experiences that got her to the highest reaches of power. Nearly every question was unabashedly personal, the kinds of things you might ask if you had a private tea with a famous person, not the things typically asked of a world leader in front of television cameras in a 2,800-seat auditorium filled to capacity.

“I feel more like an advice columnist than secretary of state today,” Clinton admitted with a laugh when a young woman asked how a young Clinton had known she was in love with her husband. “How does anybody describe love? I mean, poets have spent millennia writing about love. … I think if you can describe it, you may not fully be experiencing it, because it is such a personal relationship,” Clinton advised, sounding more like a friendly aunt than a politician.

She won’t enjoy anything close to such an adoring audience on Sunday, but there’ve been a few moments in 2016 when Clinton exposed some of what makes her tick to American voters, the elusive relatability factor that is so important to a successful town hall. In New Hampshire early this year, a rabbi asked how she balances the ambition to run for office with the humility necessary to be a public servant. Her answer opened a window onto what motivates her more than almost any other moment in this campaign. “I have had to come to grips with how much more difficult it is for me to talk about myself than to talk about what I want to do for other people,” she said.

That in a nutshell is Clinton’s challenge for Sunday night: listening sympathetically and talking about what she wants to do for other people, while also revealing something about herself. No doubt she’s reflecting even now on her best lines from four years’ worth of prep sessions around the globe.