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The roots of a hostage crisis
The angry Cuban detainees in Louisiana are just some of the illegal immigrants trapped in the INS's permanent limbo.
By Robert Bryce and Lisa Tozzi
[12/20/99]

To the moon, Al
Al Gore and Bill Bradley square off in New Hampshire, with Ted Koppel cast in the role of marriage counselor.
By Jake Tapper
[12/18/99]

Arianna Huffington is dead wrong
In her unbelievable defense of the Serbs, the syndicated columnist condones the massacre of innocent civilians by the Serbs.
By Ian Williams
[12/17/99]

Adios to all that
Old passions run high over the fate of a little boy, but both Cubans and the exile community are ready to embrace a new future -- together.
By Joe Conason
[12/17/99]

A GOP rebel in Dixie
If passionate presidential candidate John McCain hopes to topple George W. Bush, he may have to dare to be boring.
By Jake Tapper
[12/17/99]

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Her first experiment with independence ended badly. At 18, she left the grim home of her perfectionist father, Hugh Rodham, to go to college, but it took her four years at Wellesley to shake his dour, judgmental Republicanism. When she finally did, adopting rather dour, judgmental left-wing politics instead, she quickly attached herself to another man, the needy Arkansas womanizer she met at Yale, Bill Clinton. She sacrificed her career for his and watched as he squandered the chance at a legacy for their putative co-presidency on an Oval Office affair with a big-haired intern.

Also Today Tin Ear Perhaps if Gail Sheehy listened better, she'd find that Hillary doesn't suppress emotion -- she just doesn't get it.

Now, at last, she is ready to light out on her own. Just this month, she got to enjoy the thrill of stating the obvious -- that her husband's sellout gays-in-the-military policy of "Don't ask, don't tell" has been a tragic failure -- and having the president a few days later second her emotion, while Al Gore chimed in behind them, promising he'd repeal it if elected president. At long last, Hillary gets to step out front and have the men in her political life fall in behind her. It doesn't get any better than this.

But this time, can she succeed on her own? Politically, it's not clear. Although her admirers have long said that the wrong Clinton went to the White House in 1992, voters may not agree. She lacks her husband's child-of-an-alcoholic, approval-seeking charisma. She does not feel our pain. In college -- a time when she tried on personas the way she would later try out hairdos, as though a character makeover were as easy as a cosmetic one -- she decided to call herself a "compassionate misanthrope," someone who cares about mankind but doesn't much like individual people. The label clearly stuck. The big question in the New York Senate race is whether real, live voters will ever warm to her, or her to them.

Maybe most important, it's still not clear, after all these years, what Hillary Clinton believes. The two biographies most recently published about her -- liberal Gail Sheehy's "Hillary's Choice" and conservative Barbara Olson's "Hell to Pay" -- depict a political shape-shifter who metamorphosed from Goldwater Republican to acolyte of Children's Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman in just a few years. And yet in 1996, as Edelman and other liberal friends agonized over how she could live with the man who signed the Republican welfare-reform bill, she told political consultant Dick Morris that her whiny pals needed to get over it, welfare reform had to happen and she wasn't going to listen to their complaints anymore. In the New York Senate race, so far all we really know is that she's not Rudy Giuliani (although she has a lot in common with the thin-skinned, self-righteous, martinet mayor). For the first time she'll have to run on the merits of her own politics and policies, whatever they turn out to be.

But that's what she allegedly wants. After decades of being seen in the reflected light or shadow of her screwed-up husband, Hillary is now asking to be judged on her own. When a National Review reporter, at her November almost-announcement of her candidacy, asked her if she still believed "a vast right-wing conspiracy" was behind her husband's Monica Lewinsky troubles, she snapped, "I'm not going back, I'm going forward," and wouldn't answer. Her New York campaign guru, Harold Ickes, says, "This is a race for redemption. It's really that simple -- redemption."

Ironically, the redemption of Hillary Clinton began with her humiliation by her husband last year. It was only when she was cruelly and publicly victimized that her humanity became real. Next year we'll learn whether the independent Hillary will be redeemed or repudiated by New York voters. And if the past tells us anything about the future, it will be a long, uphill and unpredictable campaign.

Next page | Hillary's confusions: From dutiful young Republican to radical acolyte