Praising Hillary With Faint Damns

Why in the world are the usually politically correct media beating up on Hillary Rodham Clinton these days? For pretending to be what she wasn’t?

I wouldn’t mind their beating on the Clinton gang for its sins, which are many and scarlet. But much of the stuff purports to be outrage that the first lady somehow has sprung a surprise on everybody by bossing her husband and refusing to be the sweet, clinging vine. That’s a surprise?

You have seen the strafing, in magazines and newspapers that will be carrying water on both shoulders for the Democrats and Bill Clinton for the rest of the campaign. It goes like this: Mercy me, this dragon lady screams abuse at him in front of the White House help; she jerks the staff around, gets the travel office people canned, tells him what to do and who knows what else? And she isn’t even accountable, these critics cry, since she wasn’t elected herself.

Well, the heck she wasn’t. Anybody who didn’t know what the buyer was getting in the Bill-Hillary package in 1992 wasn’t paying attention. Way back in the Gennifer Flowers era, when Hillary went on prime time with her “I’m not Tammy Wynette, stand by your man” declaration, every woman and even the densest of us men should have gotten the picture. This was going to be a team effort all the way, with her as quarterback.

Though I normally am slow on the uptake, a single glance at Hillary, with the glint in those big blue eyes and the set of that little chin, told me that this is a lady who isn’t likely to walk five paces behind, eyes downcast, speaking only when spoken to. She is small and sleek, but so is a wolverine. The most perceptive analysis of the Clintons was delivered by Peggy Noonan, who said that if Bill Clinton hadn’t met Hillary, he would be “the most popular law professor in the University of Arkansas Law School” today.

Whatever horrors we can find in the Clinton administration - and there are many - nobody can say we weren’t informed by word and gesture: Ms. Rodham Clinton was going to be calling most of the shots.

I am not of the Hurray for Hillary Claque. But this yuppie power addict seems to have a set of beliefs, and what she appears to believe this afternoon probably will have some resemblance to what she said she believed this morning. And there is a good chance that her stated core principles today won’t be the exact opposite of what she said they were yesterday. Anybody, liberal or conservative, who claimed that quality for her husband would be laughed off the lot.

Back in the 1992 campaign, she got raked over for her little wisecrack about how dopey voters expected her to “bake cookies” or do something equally traditional. Not this dopey voter, ma’am. Anybody who can make 100 grand on cattle futures with a $1,000 stake, her husband being the newly elected governor, is patently a bottom-line pragmatist, since her helper in this enterprise was a brass hat from the state’s largest corporation.

After the 1992 cookie backlash, she tried to soft-soap the disaffected. (Any good politician knows that a dopey voter’s vote counts just fine.) But her appearance for a photo op in the baking costume didn’t work too well. One smart aleck remarked that “Hillary in an apron is about as convincing as Mike Dukakis in a tank.”

Actually, I have a much easier time picturing Hillary driving a tank than I have seeing either Mike Dukakis or her husband doing that, but you get the point: Tough-gal Hillary hasn’t been hiding behind the drapes all this time.

She first caught the eye of the national press on her graduation day at Wellesley College. In the East Coast college pattern back then, Wellesley invited Sen. Ed Brooke to be the guest of honor and speaker, then followed up his talk with a shin-kicking denunciation of the guest and his nasty establishment. The president of the student body, one Hillary Rodham, closed her fiery speech with a poetic line: “The Hollow Men of anger and bitterness, the bountiful ladies of righteous indignation, all must be left to a bygone age.”

For the present age, that’s a thermonuclear irony: She later found for herself a front man whose plausibility and amiability are works of art but whose basic hollow qualities have been constantly remarked upon by friends and foes, left and right, early and late in his career.

One example is the morgue obituary editorial that an Arkansas daily paper wrote on Bill Clinton in the 1980s. (Newspapers maintain prewritten obits on file for eminences who may die too close to deadline.) The paper, which knew its man well, would have bade farewell to the then-governor under the headline: “The Hollow Man.”

Today, that hollow governor, growing in the role, has become the first inflatable president.

As his own party’s stalwarts frequently have complained, he is ready and willing to be, do or say whatever the targeted voting bloc of that moment wants him to be, do or say. His only focus, as one liberal put it, “is on unfocusability.” Any substance this administration has is undoubtedly due to his wife. She has plenty to answer for on that score.

But whatever else she is, Hillary Rodham Clinton isn’t hollow, and she never has tried to pretend she was. To say so is a foul and, even for politics, unsportsmanlike conduct.

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