Eleanor To Hillary: Enough Already!

The White House is angry at Jean Houston. She won’t let Al Gore out of his trance.

That’s one of the jokes Dole aides, now calling themselves Ghostbusters, are passing along. Though on a scale of 1 to Newt Gingrich, the most oddball revelation in Bob Woodward’s new book, “The Choice,” may not be that Hillary Rodham Clinton is so desperate for friends she’s hanging out with the quack and the dead. It may be that Elizabeth Dole had to schedule an office appointment to talk to her husband about whether he should run for president. (She should have had Houston channel him.)

In 1986, on the way to Tokyo, I asked Nancy Reagan if she was superstitious. Just in the usual “Don’t put a hat on the bed, don’t put shoes above your head” ways, she said, knocking on the wood-stained Formica table on Air Force One.

When it turned out that Nancy’s astrologer was charting superpower relations, I realized that the White House is a comically toxic place. The power, danger and press attention make people go kerflooey.

So what do we make of this first lady’s sorceress, or sacred psychologist? (She defines the three realms of sacred psychology as “This Is Me,” “We Are” and “I Am.”) She’s a step up from Michael Lerner, even if she, too, intends to make a career out of her 15 minutes in the East Wing.

Mrs. Clinton should have gone all the way with a candlelight seance conjuring up Marilyn Monroe, JFK, William Casey. (“Bill, about Iran-contra, did you really tell Woodward ‘I believed’?”) A talk between Hillary and Eleanor where Hillary does both sides is bound to be more self-serving than enlightening.

On NBC’s “Dateline,” Houston explained that she got the idea to be a “global midwife” and conduct imaginary conversations when her father, a gag writer, took her to Edgar Bergen’s house in Hollywood when she was 8 years old. Bergen was asking Charlie McCarthy questions about the nature of life, and Charlie was giving brilliant answers. (No wonder Candice Bergen was jealous of that stupid dummy.)

I don’t have the heart to mock the first lady’s mystic, mythic, psychic, just plain ick sessions in the solarium. It seems sad, not only about Mrs. Clinton, but about the country. Why has America developed this obsessive attention to self? Bookstore shelves are chockablock with chuckleheaded solipsism: “Claiming Your Self-Esteem,” “Self-Sabotage,” “On a Clear Day You Can See Yourself,” “Get Out of Your Own Way,” “When Helping You Is Hurting Me.”

The Age of Aquarius was bad enough, but the New Age is ludicrous. At least in the ‘60s, people were worried about civil rights, equality, peace - higher things that took place outside the bridge of their nose. Now we’re all inside the bridge.

Open any page of Houston’s book “The Mythic Life,” and you’ll be ushered into the inner sanctum. On page 296: “The inner life of this cheese would make for a best-selling and slightly salacious novel.” And page 286: “Seedless red grapes. Little circular spheres that look like Mars … englobed and nubile … the inner life of rubies.”

In this city, in this time, nothing is too strange to be believed. We debate the inner life of cheese, grapes and first ladies. What about the inner life of polenta and mahi-mahi?

Here are the Clintons at what most people would call a destination point, and all they can do is keep searching. They are so unfinished, so intellectually unstable, so uncomfortable in their own skins, so desperate to win the love of everybody, that they think they must be everybody. They constantly, unnervingly, take on different identities and gurus.

Bill Clinton has to be the only president who is still social climbing. Mrs. Clinton tries on an array of motivational mountebanks, from Tony Robbins to Marianne Williamson to Stephen Covey to Houston - the spiritual equivalent of her hairstyles.

Where is the brainy, no-nonsense Methodist lawyer who was going to keep the shambling, loosey-goosey Bill on the straight and narrow? Neither one seems to have a center now. If Mrs. Clinton did manage to channel Mrs. Roosevelt, that sterling first lady would probably tell her to pull up her socks, fight for some really good causes and stop worrying about who agrees with you.

That is what our inner-directed first lady must never forget: the outer life of cheese.