From ‘Hamlet’ to Hillary

MAY 2, 2015

Frank Bruni

IF Hillary Clinton goes the distance, she may have Shakespeare to thank.

Shakespeare and beer. Both forged one of her campaign’s chief architects, Joel Benenson. Both are among his compasses.

And I mention that not for what it portends about her message. No, I’m fascinated by what the jagged arc of Benenson’s life and career says about higher education, the liberal arts, indulging your passions, allowing for digressions and not sweating the immediate relevance and payoff of each and every step you take.

Benenson, 62, majored in theater at Queens College, part of the City University of New York. He thought he’d be an actor, but for most of his 20s co-owned a beer distributorship in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.

And now? He’s one of the country’s leading pollsters and political strategists. He played a key role in Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential races and is doing likewise in Clinton’s 2016 one.

But if his present and past seem disconnected to you, they don’t to him. After I wrote a column earlier this year extolling the study of literature and its grand masters, he emailed me: “I can personally attest to the value of Shakespeare in my current profession.”

Parsing “Hamlet” and “Macbeth” gave him an “understanding of the rhythm and nuance of language,” he explained, that’s as useful as any fluency in statistics or political science per se.

And the legacy of the beer business?

He said that almost “every single person” around him — his customers, his employees and his associates — was “living paycheck to paycheck.”

“Those conversations never left me,” he explained over a recent lunch, adding that his “value as a pollster” is his ability to write questions in the language of these men and women and to hear the answers accurately. “I know their voices.” Benenson shared his story and thoughts in part because he’s concerned, as I am, that too many anxious parents and their addled children believe in, and insist on, an exacting, unforgiving script for success and (supposedly) happiness. Go to this venerable college. Pursue that sensible course of study. Tailor your exertions to the looming job market.

They put too much faith in plotting, too little in serendipity. And it can leach joy and imagination from their pursuits. His experience illuminates a different possibility. And so, as it happens, do the experiences of many of the other main characters in Obama’s ascent. They either didn’t travel a perfectly straight line to their political destinies or weren’t conventional overachievers at the start.

David Axelrod was a journalist for a long time before he became a political operative. (Yes, there’s a difference.) David Plouffe left college, at the University of Delaware, without a diploma, and didn’t get the last credits he needed and actually graduate until two decades later, in his 40s.

Valerie Jarrett was supposed to take the degrees that she got from Stanford (undergraduate) and the University of Michigan (law school) and be a high-powered, highly paid attorney. But she gave that track a try and it didn’t suit her. So she went to work for decidedly less money in government, initially for Harold Washington, who was then was the mayor of Chicago.

There’s only so much in life that you can foretell and plan, though you wouldn’t know that from my inbox. Last week was typical: one email about a study of which college majors led to the best-paying positions; another about a proposal to make every college student do an internship, take a class in business and get career counseling starting freshman year. Both emails reflected a widespread desire to find some surefire formula for a guaranteed livelihood.

But the biographies of many accomplished, contented people aren’t formulaic. They’re accidents of a sort, except for this: By taking approaches that weren’t too regimented, these people were able to color outside the lines and surprise themselves. And their learning transcended their formal studies.

Benenson grew up in Queens, the youngest of three kids. His father died when he was 18 months old and his mother, who worked as a bookkeeper and office manager, never remarried. He chose Queens College because it was free and he could live at home. He was attracted to acting by more than the bright lights. “To do it well, you have to get at what’s going on beneath the words and the emotional content of it,” he said, adding that such attention to the details of speech and gesture is crucial “for anybody who’s communicating.”

So are a firm grasp of language and context, which drama and literature hone. In that sense, he said, he prepared for a political world of slogans, focus groups and opinion surveys by doing plays by Harold Pinter and Terrence McNally and reading novels by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.

All those glorious words really did pave the path to sound bites. “THAT term has become derogatory,” he said, divulging that he once pushed back at Obama’s skepticism of such tidy, pithy locutions by saying to him: “Mr. President, ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ is a sound bite. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand’ is a sound bite. We remember them because they reflect high principle and clarity of thought and universal truths. That’s the power of them.”

Like Plouffe, Benenson didn’t finish college right away. He left to get a jumpstart on acting, which didn’t really pay the bills. That’s where the beer business came in.

He didn’t get his last credits and his degree until his late 20s, and in his early 30s he took another sharp turn. He became a journalist. It wasn’t until his early 40s that he fully awoke to his enthusiasm for the kind of work that he does now and pivoted to it.

The lesson for young people? “Don’t think about what you want to do for the rest of your life,” he said. “Think about what you want to do next.” Maybe, he said, you “have a big goal out there and pursue it, but along the way, that line from A to B is not a continuum. The key will be identifying what you are passionate about in each of those steps along the way.”

He said that parents were too focused on mapping a straight-line journey from cradle to lucrative career. “Stop making the focus of your kids’ education a job,” he said. “College is about learning how to think critically, learning how to write and communicate your ideas.”

He keeps three copies of the collected works of Shakespeare — the plays and sonnets both — including the one from his college days. He marked it up extensively. It’s important to scribble, he said. To wander, too. Otherwise, he said, “I think you don’t discover yourself.”

© 2015