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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

It’s The Future That Haunts First Lady

Ellen Goodman Boston Globe

This one went way over the top.

I mean, first lady Julia Tyler may have levitated tables in the White House, Mary Todd Lincoln may have held seances, and Nancy Reagan consulted her astrologer. But does anyone really believe that Hillary Rodham Clinton was chatting with Eleanor Roosevelt’s ghost in the solarium?

Even Alfonse D’Amato would have a hard time getting this story down past his windpipe.

But there it was, front and center under tabloid headlines that screamed “Hillary’s Guru!” and magazines that snidely suggested, “Hillary’s Other Side.” The networks talked about the first lady’s “spiritual advisers.” The wire services wrote about her “consciousness-raising guru.”

In the wake of assorted and distorted interviews about Bob Woodward’s new book, we were left to believe that Hillary was communing with the weird and channeling the dead. Speaking in Rooseveltian tongues.

Indeed, the “adviser” Jean Houston was made to seem like a palm reader and colleague Mary Catherine Bateson sounded like a psychic. After Woodward described Houston as someone on the fringe, the media search was on for excerpts from her work that read like the tassels on the fringe.

Well, I admit that the language of human potential movement will never roll off my tongue. Nor do I have a sign posted on my door like the one on Jean Houston’s: “I now choose to make my life light and easy and joyful.”

But this student of Joseph Campbell and Margaret Mead, a woman who believes in the importance of cultural myths and archetypal figures, isn’t doing Saturday night seances. For that matter, Mary Catherine Bateson, a cultural anthropologist and daughter of Margaret Mead, has been writing about the way women redefine their lives since her book, “Composing a Life,” became a hit - dare I say a cult hit - among women.

No, this was not Nancy Reagan changing the president’s flight schedule because the moon was in Aquarius. This was a first lady trying to make sense of the battering she’d taken by holding an imaginary conversation with another battered lady.

As Dr. Bateson says with some amazement at the uproar, “Nobody had any illusion that the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt turned up.” Indeed, ever since the 1992 election when the first “cookie speech” crumbled all over her image, Hillary has been asking herself, “What would Eleanor say?”

This time, she was trying to take heart from Eleanor’s resilience. And instead she’s getting battered for it.

I will leave it to Jean Houston to figure out what kind of an archetypal figure Hillary represents. Uppity Woman? Feminist from Hell?

But if Hillary Clinton feels as if she’s floundering in the White House, as Woodward suggests in one of the more sympathetic paragraphs, it’s not a matter of the occult. It’s in her attempt to make a whole life out of a circumscribed role.

I’m not talking about her problems with Whitewater which may or may not be a real ghost haunting this first lady. And this week, if anything, has reminded me not to discount media that would have made the Roosevelts look like the Addams.

But since the first year when she took on and failed at health care reform, Hillary Clinton has seemed stymied. You don’t need a psychic to see that this woman needs meaningful work, needs to feel that she’s making a difference.

The first lady thought she would redefine the role to fit her times, indeed our times. She’s been anything but indolent. She’s written a book, produced a weekly column, traveled, lectured, advised, mothered.

But the kind of partnership that she and her husband experienced in Arkansas and imagined for Washington is further away from reality than it was on Inaugural Day. She hasn’t made her own mark.

At the risk of invoking Eleanor’s spirit - her intellectual spirit - Mrs. Roosevelt eventually became comfortable as FDR’s eyes and legs and goad. And so, the country became comfortable with her.

If there’s a second Clinton term, Hillary will have to find her own comfort zone. A comfort zone that feels right for our generation, not Roosevelt’s. That means looking forward, not just backward.

How do you make a difference so that the next generation of women in or out of the White House will ask: What would Hillary Clinton say? That’s the real parlor trick.

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