By the time the Bushes and Clintons are finished, they are going
to make the Tudors and the Plantagenets look like pikers.
Before
these two families release their death grip on the American electoral
system, we’re going to have to watch Chelsea’s granddaughter try to
knock off George P.’s grandson, Prescott Walker Bush II. Barack Obama,
who once dreamed of being a transformational president, will turn out to
be a mere hiccup in history, the interim guy who provided a tepid
respite while Hillary and Jeb geared up to go at it.
Elections
for president are supposed to make us feel young and excited, as if
we’re getting a fresh start. That’s the way it was with J.F.K. and Obama
and, even though he was turning 70 when he got inaugurated, Ronald
Reagan.
But,
as the Clinton library tardily disgorged 3,546 pages of official papers
Friday — dredging up memories of a presidency that was eight years of
turbulence held steady by a roaring economy and an incompetent
opposition, a reign roiled by Hillarycare, Vince Foster, Whitewater,
Webb Hubbell, Travelgate, Monica, impeachment, Paula Jones, Kathleen
Willey and Marc Rich — the looming prospect of another Clinton-Bush race
makes us feel fatigued.
Our
meritocratic society seems increasingly nepotistic and dynastic. There
was a Bush or a Clinton in the White House and cabinet for 32 years
straight. We’re Bill Murray stuck at 6 a.m. in Harold Ramis’s comic
masterpiece, “Groundhog Day.” As Time’s Michael Crowley tweeted on
Friday, “Who else is looking forward to potentially TEN more years of
obsessing about Hillary Clinton’s past, present and future?”
The Clintons don’t get defeated. They get postponed.
Just
as Hillary clears the Democratic field if she is healthy and runs, a
major Romney donor told The Washington Post that “if Jeb Bush is in the
race, he clears the field.” Jeb acknowledged in Long Island on Monday,
referring to his mom’s tart comment that “if we can’t find more than two
or three families to run for higher office, that’s silly,” that “it’s
an issue for sure.” He added, “It’s something that, if I run, I would
have to overcome that. And so will Hillary, by the way. Let’s keep the
same standards for everybody.”
We’ve
arrived at the brave new world of 21st-century technology where robots
are on track to be smarter than humans. Yet, politically, we keep
traveling into the past. It won’t be long before we’ll turn on the TV
and see Lanny Davis defending President Clinton (the next one) on some
mishegoss or other.
When
the Clintons lost to Obama, they simply turned Obama’s presidency into
their runway. Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, and a passel
of other former Obama aides, are now helping Hillary. And Bill is out
being the campaigner-in-chief, keeping the Clinton allure on display in
2014.
The
new cache of Clinton papers is benign — the press seems more enamored
of speechwriters’ doodles than substance — but just reading through them
is draining. There are reams of advice on how to steer health care,
which must have filled the briefing binders Hillary famously carried.
But did she absorb the lessons, given that health care failed because
she refused to be flexible and make the sensible compromises suggested
by her husband and allies? She’s always on listening tours, but is she
hearing? As one White House health care aide advised in the new document
dump, “We need to be seen as listening.”
Just
as in the reminiscences compiled by Hillary’s late friend, Diane Blair,
a political science professor at the University of Arkansas — some of
which were printed in the Washington Free Beacon three weeks ago — the
new papers reflect how entangled the Clintons’ public and private lives
were in the White House.
In
a 1995 memo, Lisa Caputo, the first lady’s press secretary, sees an
opportunity for the upcoming re-election campaign by “throwing a big
party” for the Clintons’ 20th wedding anniversary.
“We
could give a wonderful photo spread to People magazine of photos from
the party coupled with old photos of their honeymoon and of special
moments for them over the past 20 years,” Caputo wrote, adding that they
could turn it into “a nice mail piece later on.”
Both
sets of papers are revealing on the never-ending herculean struggle
about how to present Hillary to the world, how to turn her shifting
hairstyles and personas into one authentic image.
“Be
careful to ‘be real,’ ” media adviser Mandy Grunwald wrote to her
before the launch of her listening tour at Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s
farm in upstate New York. “You did this well in the Rather interview
where you acknowledged that of course last year was rough. Once you
agree with the audience’s/reporters’ reality like that, it gives you a
lot of latitude to then say whatever you want.”
Grunwald advises the first lady to “look for opportunities for humor” and “Don’t be defensive.”
It’s
hard to understand why so many calculations are needed to seem “real,”
just as it’s hard to understand how Hillary veers from feminist
positions to un-feminist ones.
In
the Blair papers, Hillary’s private view of the Monica Lewinsky affair
hewed closely to the lame rationales offered by Bill and his male
friends.
“HRC
insists, no matter what people say,” Blair said, after talking to
Hillary on the phone, “it was gross inappropriate behavior but it was
consensual (was not a power relationship) and was not sex within any
real meaning (standup, liedown, oral, etc.) of the term.” The president
dallying with a 22-year-old intern was not “a power relationship” and
certain kinds of sex don’t count?
Like
her allies Sidney Blumenthal and Charlie Rangel, Hillary paints her
husband’s mistress as an erotomaniac, just the way Clarence Thomas’s
allies painted Anita Hill. A little nutty and a little slutty.
“It
was a lapse,” Blair wrote, “but she says to his credit he tried to
break it off, tried to pull away, tried to manage someone who was
clearly a ‘narcissistic loony toon’; but it was beyond control.”
The
cascade of papers evoke Hillary’s stressful brawls — with her husband,
the press, Congress and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. And they evoke
the issue about her that is so troubling and hard to fathom. She is an
immensely complex woman with two sides. She is the tireless and talented
public servant. And she is the tired warrior who can be insecure and
defensive, someone who has cleaved to a bunker mentality when she would
have been better served getting out of her defensive crouch.
Talking
to her pal Blair, Hillary had a lot of severe words for her
“adversaries” in the press and the G.O.P. Blair also said Hillary was
“furious” at Bill for “ruining himself and the presidency” by 1994.
Hillary
may have had a point when she said in 1993, after criticism of the
maladroit firing of the veteran White House travel office staff, that
the press “has big egos and no brains.” But it speaks to her titanic
battles and battle scars.
Hillary
has spent so much time searching for the right identity, listening to
others tell her who to be, resisting and following advice on being
“real,” that it leaves us with the same question we had when she first
came on the stage in 1992.
Who is she?
Zombies aren't elected to the POTUS position, they're put out of ITS' misery and that's all folks!
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