Cultural and political image of Hillary Clinton During this time, the blended name "Billary" came to be used to refer to Bill and Hillary Clinton as a pair. Sidney Johnson, president of the Arkansas Education Association, said of the couple that "[s]omething would come down and you wouldn't know which one of them thought of it, where Bill stopped and Hillary began. That's why we called them 'Billary.'" One observer notes that "[t]he Clintons originally warmed to Billary because it suggested the public would get two smart politicians for one, but it soon became a term of derision for those who saw Hillary Rodham Clinton as too
Cultural and political image of Hillary Clinton her after Sir Edmund Hillary, co-first mountaineer to scale Mount Everest, and that was the reason for the less-common "two L's" spelling of her name. However, the first successful Everest climb did not take place until 1953, more than five years after she was born. In October 2006, a Clinton spokeswoman said she was not named after the mountain climber. Instead, this account of her name's origin "was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add." Following her marriage to Bill Clinton in 1975, she continued to be known