Trump's Clinton marriage attacks will backfire: Column

The score now stands at Donald Trump 3, Hillary Clinton 1.

I'm not talking about debate wins. I'm talking about the number of marriages on the resumes of the 2016 presidential candidates. Each number tells a story. One is impressive; three usually means things didn’t go so well.

The rumor mill, pundits and the Twitterverse have been predicting that since Trump got clobbered in the first debate, we should be prepared for him to try to rattle Clinton by bringing up her husband’s well-documented infidelities. He has already made clear he considers them fair game.

The town hall format of Sunday's presidential debate in St. Louis, however, is not ideal for attacking a marriage. Perhaps that's why Trump told the New York Post he won't mention "Bill Clinton's past" at that event. But don't count him out; he could change his mind and if he doesn't, there is still a month and another debate to go.

Whether he continues to "go there" or just keeps saying he might, Trump is on shaky ground with this strategy.

Bringing up Bill Clinton’s extramarital track record is a political risk that may backfire with a group of women Trump desperately needs — likely white female voters with college degrees. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll last month, Trump was losing by 25 points among this cohort.

As a woman who fits this demographic, I’d warn Trump to look for more suitable fodder. Say Clinton thoughtlessly calling half of his supporters “a basket of deplorables,” or conflicts of interest at the Clinton Foundation, or her email “malfunctions” at the State Department.

What Clinton has achieved, that even some Trump supporters might applaud, is something not a lot of us can match: a 41-year marriage to the same flawed person. On Oct. 11, 1975, she vowed to stick by William Jefferson Clinton, never imagining the private pain and public humiliation to come. But she has stuck with him — for better or worse — for four decades — under intense, relentless public scrutiny.

Trump, on the other hand, is 11 years into his third marriage.

Whatever you think about Hillary Clinton, and there are millions who can’t stand her, she and her husband beat the odds. While about 50% of all first marriages in the U.S. fail, theirs did not and there were plenty of reasons why it should have.

Back in 1998, when she learned that her 51-year-old husband had cheated on her with a White House intern half his age, she was faced with a decision many, many American women have encountered: stay or leave.

She chose to stay. And they went into counseling, like so many long-married couples.

Ivana Trump, the GOP nominee's first wife and mother of his three oldest children, didn’t stay. Her marriage ended after she learned in the late 1980s that her husband was cheating on her with Marla Maples. He married Maples, No. 2, in 1993 when she was pregnant with Tiffany and divorced her six years later. Melania became the third Mrs. Trump in 2005.

Maybe as a diversionary tactic, Trump can't stop harping on the Clinton marriage. He recently suggested, without any evidence, that Hillary might have cheated on Bill. He told The New York Times he might bring up Bill Clinton’s philandering because he thought it would “repulse” female voters and turn them away from the Clintons.

Doubtful.

Hundreds of thousands of “likely white female voters with or without college degrees” have walked in Hillary Clinton’s shoes. We know the pain, the confusion, the tears, the embarrassment, the shame that comes when a spouse strays. And if it didn’t happen to us, it happened to a close friend.

We know how hard it is to get through privately, when only friends and family share the personal devastation. We can only imagine the crucible of humiliation that Hillary Clinton endured with an omnipresent media horde invading every iota of privacy she had.

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Marriage is hard work; really, really hard work. I’d wager there are few four-decade-long marriages without occasional ugly patches where it looked like everything might unravel and end up in court.

But the Clintons stayed the course, and even seem to still like each other.

If I were Hillary Clinton (and thank God I’m not!), I’d come out swinging. I’d admit being married to Bill Clinton wasn’t easy, that their marriage has been challenged over and over and over, and they’d both probably agree that they still don’t have it right. But who does?

The Clintons' weather-beaten, time-tested, scandal-ridden marriage is something to be proud of, something to brag about. It is as significant an achievement as their daughter Chelsea, and might just be the most human thing about Hillary Clinton.

Alicia Shepard is a veteran media writer and a former ombudsman for NPR whose marriage didn't make it to the two-decade mark. Follow her on Twitter @Ombudsman.

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