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One night at the dinner table, I told her: "You know, Daddy is going to run for governor again. If he wins, we would keep living in this house, and he would keep trying to help people. But first we have to have an election.

Skipping lightly over the remainder of that nauseating passage (Hillary Clinton proposed a "role-playing" dinner-table game in which her 6-year-old daughter had to play Gov. Clinton, and then sit and listen to hypothetical abuse of the candidate, until she cried, which she repeatedly did) one notes that the "priorities" and "agenda" haven't altered all that much. First one has to have a house, and then one has to have an election. In between, Daddy -- most ably seconded by Mummy -- makes like he wants to help people.

In almost two decades of unstinting service to the Nation magazine, I have never quite penetrated to the pulsing quick and core of New York liberalism. I understand dimly that Hillary Clinton must have somewhere to live. I also quite see that she must have something to do, and somewhere to sit. I haven't yet had it convincingly explained to me why this is all up to us, and why a nomination to the United States Senate is not just hers for the asking, but hers even without the asking.

Over the Independence Day weekend, I couldn't open a newspaper without being prompted again to wonder if I had missed something. The July 3 New York Times advised me solemnly of the predicament of the soon-to-be homeless Clinton, as it appeared from the vantage of Westchester County:

The $3.8 million North Salem house that Mrs. Clinton likes is owned by James Kohlberg, of Kohlberg & Company, an investment firm he started with his father, Jerome Kohlberg, a founder of the leveraged buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company. Jerome Kohlberg is also a Democratic contributor.

Then on July 4, Parade magazine brought me a carefully posed cover story, in garish color, about the first lady's current squat. Pegged to the bicentennial of the White House, and ostensibly written by Hillary herself, it was pitched with an affecting folksiness. ("I almost fell off of my chair ... On my birthday in 1995, I came down the formal staircase to find the entry hall transformed into a 1950s-style living room -- replete with plastic-covered divans and rabbit ears on top of a big old TV!")

But the grand historical note has also to be struck, even in these pulp pieces: "No one can enter the Lincoln Bedroom without thinking of President Lincoln drafting the Emancipation Proclamation. Or walk into the Map Room without picturing FDR commanding our forces during World War II ... The president and I know that we are only short-term tenants."

Next page | Ah, the map room, where the president had his blood drawn for a DNA match