WASHINGTON — Oy. By the time the Bushes and Clintons are finished, they are going to make the Tudors and the Plantagenets look like pikers.
WASHINGTON — Oy. 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 U.S. 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 JFK 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 kept 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 in a row. We’re Bill Murray stuck at 6 a.m. in Harold Ramis’ comic masterpiece, “Groundhog Day.” As Time’s Michael Crowley wrote in a Twitter post 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 “if Jeb Bush is in the race, he clears the field.” Jeb acknowledged Monday in Long Island — 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 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 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 unfeminist 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’ 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 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 Republican Party. Blair also said Hillary was “furious” at Bill for “ruining himself and the presidency” by 1994.
Hillary might have had a point when she said in 1993, after criticism of the maladroit firing of the veteran White House travel office staff, the press “has big egos and no brains.” But it speaks to her titanic battles and battle scars.
Hillary spent so much time searching for the right identity, listening to others tell her who to be, resisting and following advice on being “real,” it leaves us with the same question we had when she first came on the stage in 1992.
Who is she?