What if, instead, Hillary had married...

[Indy Texas]

...William Weld?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/13/some-of-the-juiciest-bits-of-rodham-the-hillary-clinton-movie-biopic-sex-scandal-more.html

The screenplay for the upcoming Hillary biopic Rodham implies that the young Hillary Rodham had a brief flirtation with the young William Weld when both were members of the Congressional legal team looking into the Watergate scandal. Ultimately, Hillary married a different Bill, while Weld married Susan Roosevelt, of the Oyster Bay (Teddy) Roosevelts.

What if Hillary Rodham Clinton had instead become Hillary Rodham Weld? Would she have pushed Weld towards presidential ambitions? Would she have found herself relatively constrained in Massachusetts, where up until recently the political terrain hasn't been very friendly to ambitious women? Would she have been a Republican?

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Would she have been a Republican?

She dud support Goldwater.

[King]

Would she have been a Republican?

She dud support Goldwater.

Goldwater would be a RINO today.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Would she have been a Republican?

She dud support Goldwater.

Goldwater would be a RINO today.

Well, she could have still been a Lowel Weicker/Jim Jeffords/Lincoln Chaffee Republican turned Independent or something.

[Lambsbread]

Reading that was tremendously painful.

[Mr. Morden]

Weld was talked about as having presidential ambitions in the 1990s, but obviously would not have been conservative enough to win the GOP presidential nomination.  He would have to have either had a Romney-like conversion to the right while in MA, or launch his political career in a state where he could have been more conservative, or else stay in MA but run for office as a Democrat.

(Hillary herself was of course a Republican until 1968, when she switched because she was turned off by the Nixon campaign.  Someone should do an alternate timeline involving someone like George Romney winning the 1968 GOP nomination, and what that means for the future political ambitions of Mitt, Hillary, and others, with Hillary staying in the GOP and marrying Bill Weld!)

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

What's make the Clinton/Weld dynamic even more interesting is the fact that Dick Morris had worked for both in his career, and was actually urging Weld to run in 1996. Let's say that Weld does decide to run and Morris doesn't help Clinton guide his way to the center, hypothetically you could get a Republican presidency similar to Clinton's lasting from 1997-2005, with much of the same "third way" and centrist rhetoric that Morris had Clinton saying in the buildup to re-election.

[angus]

I think it's feasible.  Weld is a contemporary of hers and a harvard law school graduate and a career politician.  He's also a tall white guy with an big nose.  All that fits in with what we would reasonably assume her taste in men should be.  Also, he doesn't seem to have goosed every skirt that walked by his gubernatorial desk so it might be a happier marriage.  She is known to have followed her husband to Little Rock, so we might assume she would also follow her husband to the Massachusetts state house, especially since she had been a Wellesley Woman prior to attending law school at Yale.  She may have been a republican, or she may not.  She was raised a Republican, and served as president of the Wellesley Young Republicans, so it's not a big stretch.  She seems only to have become interested in DNC politics after meeting Clinton, so I'd imagine that she would have been a Republican if she were going to campaign for Weld.  She did some pro bono child advocacy and was also interested in the conditions of migrant workers, and that might have had some positive overall effect on the Republican National Committee had she pushed Weld to run for President.