Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon News

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]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Her cattle futures bonanza -- in which she turned an investment of $1,000 into a $100,000 windfall thanks to the insider investment tips of a political crony (and patience when her account was dangerously in arrears) -- is a textbook case of probably legal, but undeniably sleazy, financial opportunism. If the biography of George W. Bush is a case study of the invidious ways the American political system is rigged to make sure the rich get richer and the powerful hold onto their power, so is Hillary Clinton's.

Of course, both current Clinton biographies are nasty books by ambitious, competitive political women (who, like Hillary, have climbed thanks to their marriages to powerful men -- Sheehy to New York magazine founder Clay Felker, Olson to right-wing legal luminary and Ken Starr buddy Ted Olson). To prove that bad news comes in threes, Peggy Noonan's tract, "The Case Against Hillary Clinton," will arrive in January. Given all the psycho-sexual projection Hillary has had to endure, it seems no accident that a gay man, David Brock, has written the most sympathetic biography so far, "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham."

The meanness of these latest books makes me want to like Hillary Clinton, but I don't. I've always felt bad about that, partly as a feminist and partly because I don't know the woman personally, and such personal dislike seems unconscious, or at least thoughtless, a byproduct of what was a real right-wing conspiracy that took advantage of the Clintons' real screw-ups to almost bring them down. Let Linda Tripp's trial this week remind us that there truly was such a conspiracy, and Tripp was its omnipresent Forrest Grump -- there in Vince Foster's office when Clinton staffers removed his files, there as Monica Lewinsky's loyal (and wired) confidante, even available to counsel Kathleen Willey about her crush on the president (amazingly, Tripp was outside the office where the president groped Willey, but on Clinton's behalf she would describe that groping as consensual).

Hillary Clinton justifies the right's most negative caricature of liberals and feminists: She pretends to oppose corporate power while profiting from her business connections, and blames her troubles on misogyny, a shadowy male fear of smart women. But sometimes people dislike smart women, and smart men too, because they're just not likable -- they're arrogant and emotionally undeveloped, all head and no heart.

To their detractors, both Clintons seem like a mandarin class of professional meddlers who've never had to balance a checkbook, meet a payroll or soothe a colicky baby. At best they float above the rest of us in a protective bubble of righteousness and self-delusion. At worst, they're parasites, fat ticks living off the people whose hard work they have no experience of, or respect for. But clearly Hillary gets it worse than her husband, because as Peter Kramer points out, her brains, ambition and emotional obtuseness just mean she'd make a fine man -- and nobody likes that in a woman. She suffers the curse and blessing of modern womanhood: She's expected to be a whole person -- independent, empathic, sexual, spiritual, engaged in the world, attuned within -- something that is still not required of men.

I wonder if maybe it's progress, though, that now, in what Sheehy infelicitously calls her Flaming Fifties, Hillary has finally been judged sexy, as in Tom Junod's infamous October Esquire piece. Maybe her decision to finally move out from her husband's shadow has made her more vital and alluring (it's no secret that women get sexier as they get more comfortable with themselves, and their power.)

At 52, Hillary has made her latest choice -- to go for the political career she was too timid and confused to pursue at 27. Maybe she'll surprise us, even seduce us, with integrity and innovation, as she finally cobbles together what she'll do as the politician, not as the wife.
salon.com | Dec. 20, 1999

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon