FAYETTEVILLE -- Hillary Clinton once said she'd be happy as a policy wonk.
"I'd be happy in a little office somewhere thinking up policies, making things happen, refining them," Clinton told Diane Blair of Fayetteville in 1996. "What I really love is policy, inventing policies, seeing them put into practice, making things work."
But Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has flushed Clinton from the policy weeds into a street fight. He regularly calls her "Crooked Hillary" and has attacked her record on several fronts.
In a speech Thursday in San Diego, Clinton blasted Trump for his lack of policy knowledge, saying his ideas are "dangerously incoherent."
"They're not even really ideas -- just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies," said Clinton, who touted her policy experience as secretary of state, a U.S. senator and U.S. first lady.
Janine Parry, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, said the two front-runners in the presidential race are drastically different in their approaches to policy.
"Donald Trump is unapologetically uninterested in, even derisive about, policy details," said Parry. "The careful analysis and heavy thinking on which the day-to-day operation of government relies seems to bore him. Hillary Clinton, conversely, has long found meaning in such minutiae."
Parry compared Clinton to Hermione Granger, a character in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books.
"She's read all the books, even more than the teachers," said Parry. "She's mastered all the spells. But we all roll our eyes when she knows every answer, until her mad skills actually save us from the death eaters. Then -- finally -- we see what a badass she is. Hillary should probably somehow run as the policy nerd she is. If she embraced her inner Hermione, she might feel -- and appear -- more comfortable."
The comparison has been made before. Gail Collins, a New York Times columnist, mentioned Clinton's similarity to the fictional Granger as far back as 2000.
"She wants to sign up for all the courses, and if there's a scheduling conflict, she'll replicate," Collins wrote in an April 14, 2000, column.
But Trump paints policy with a broader brush. His supporters don't seem interested in the minute details, just the concept.
While Trump has the Republican nomination all but sewn up, Clinton still has a contender for the Democratic nomination -- Bernie Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont. On Tuesday, when California holds its Democratic primary, there's a good chance Clinton will reach the delegate threshold to secure her party's nomination, pundits say.
Blair papers
The exchange between Clinton and Blair occurred 20 years ago when the two women were discussing what Hillary Clinton would do after her husband, Bill Clinton, left the office of president in January 2001. Blair documented the conversation, shortly after it occurred, and it's included among the Diane Blair papers at the university in Fayetteville.
Blair, a UA political science professor and close friend of the Clintons, died of lung cancer in 2000. Her husband, Jim Blair, donated her papers to the university in 2005, and the collection was opened to the public in 2010.
The collection is in 109 boxes and consists of more than 200,000 pages. Sixteen boxes, some 32,000 pages, are devoted to the Clintons. Only a few of those pages are typewritten notes from Diane Blair.
Bill and Hillary Clinton taught law at the university in the mid-1970s. Diane Blair met Bill Clinton in 1972 and Hillary Rodham in 1974. Bill and Hillary Clinton married in 1975.
Diane Blair wrote two influential books, served as board chairman of the Arkansas Educational Television Commission and of the U.S. Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and was a member of the Electoral College, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. She was a guest scholar at Washington's Brookings Institution in 1993.
Her papers shed some light on Hillary Clinton's thinking during the 1990s.
Judging from Blair's notes, Clinton thought she'd have more power through policy. She told Blair that she had no real power as first lady of the United States and would have none as former first lady after her husband left office.
"I can be an advocate, a cheerleader, a nag, an enthusiast, but no real power," Clinton told Blair.
Advocacy is "a huge power," Blair responded.
"But that's not what I enjoy doing, want to do," Clinton told Blair, before extrapolating on her passion for policy.
In a 2000 interview for the Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History in Fayetteville, Blair said Hillary "knew she was going to be the traditional first lady and do all of the social stuff, but she was more interested in the policy side, and there wasn't an appropriate role model."
Jay Barth, a professor of politics at Hendrix College in Conway, said 20 years ago is a lifetime away for most people, and in particular for Hillary Clinton, who served as a U.S. senator from New York from 2001-09 and as U.S. secretary of state from 2009-13.
In 1996, Clinton was still reeling from the defeat of her proposed health-care overhaul.
"The health-care reform efforts had gone up in flames, and that had been her public policy initiative," Barth said.
Clinton could have been thinking about going back to what she does best, policy work in the trenches instead of on the stage, he said.
"I think it probably is a reminder of who she is in her heart and soul," Barth said.
President Clinton was also a policy wonk, but his style in public debate seemed less combative than that of his wife.
"He's probably a little bit more of a happy warrior type," said Barth "He's got that comfort level about that kind of engagement in the public arenas."
Honesty an issue
Hillary Clinton's honesty is being assailed for maintaining a private email server when she was secretary of state. Twenty years ago, while complaining about the media, Clinton told Blair that she "always had a reputation for honesty."
Blair suggested that Clinton try to develop friendly relations with the press, even if they were "fake friendly" relations.
"I'm a proud woman," Clinton told Blair. "I'm not stupid. I know I should do more to suck up to the press. I know it confuses people when I change my hairdos. I know I should pretend not to have any opinions. But I'm just not going to. I'm used to winning, and I intend to win on my own terms."
She told Blair she had made compromises.
"I know how to compromise," she said. "I have compromised. I gave up my name, got contact lenses, but I'm not going to try to pretend to be somebody that I'm not."
SundayMonday on 06/05/2016