Hillary the geek!
newsandopinion.com | Put some garlic around the windows. They're baaacckk! Just when you've recovered from 8 years of our national soap opera with Ma and Pa Osbourne, one of the Clintons reemerges from a black lagoon or Indian casino or wherever political addicts reside. I feel as Harry Potter must when the evil Voldemort returns. His scar, inflicted previously on his forehead by Voldemart, throbs with pain.
The chum for Clinton loyalists rolls forth from Hillary's new Ladies Home Journal-type "Can this marriage be saved?" book, "Living History." Mrs. Clinton holds interviews with the usual softball suspects. Katie, Barbara and Lincoln Elementary's school newspaper editor, complete with nsync t-shirt, lap it all up.
This media blitz is the precursor to Hillary 24/7 in 2008. A May 30 front page New York Times story reports liberals are aghast because Sen. Clinton has turned out to not be a liberal. Staff and handlers quoted insist that Mrs. Clinton has never been liberal. The "extreme right," they explain, made her into a caricature.
Even by the Times journalistic standards this story is a stretch. Who was that pink-suited woman proposing nationalized health care? Memo to handlers: socialized medicine is liberal.
The big bombshell of the book? Until August 15, 1998, Sen. Clinton did not know her husband had an affair with Monica Lewinsky. Upon his confession, she wanted to "wring his neck," cried so hard that she couldn't breathe, and banished him to Buddy the dog.
Sen. Clinton's book does not jive with other exposes. Sid Blumenthal, former New Yorker writer and Clinton White House sycophant, also has a new book, "The Clinton Wars." Sid says Bill and Hill "bantered" right after Mrs. Clinton claims sobbing consumed her lungs. On p. 465, Kid Sid describes the Clintonian discussion of the president's August 17 telecast and expresses relief that "they [the Clintons] were still working as a team."
In Spin Cycle, Howard Kurtz (p. 295) writes that Hillary worked closely with Bill's lawyers (Bennett, Kendall, et al.) from the outset of l'affair Monica, aiming for damage control because Mr. Clinton's false deposition was a bit of a problem.
George Stephanopoulos told us Hillary has an IQ of a "gazillion." The late Ron Brown, commerce secretary in the first Clinton term, said of Mrs. Clinton, "Of course she's in the loop. She is the loop." One of National Law Journal's top 100 lawyers in the country would have us believe that the FBI trekking to the White House for some presidential DNA for a match to that on Monica's blue dress did not pique her interest. This is one dimwitted lawyer.
Most commentary concludes Sen. Clinton is lying for political posturing. But, Hillary has never been as deft with an "is" as Bill. She once told us she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary. However, he did not climb Mt. Everest until 1953. Sen. Clinton was born in 1947. Folks in her Chicago suburb called her "Hey you!" for 6 years, awaiting Sir Edmund's ascent.
Hillary's pants explain Hillary. In the Barbara Walters interview Sen. Clinton strolled her old Chicago neighborhood in flood pants. There are few things more geeky than someone wearing pants that are too short, especially when worn with sling-back shoes.
One of her famous pictures, taken during her Wellesley years, finds Hill in striped pants that no one except Davy Jones of the Monkees dared wear. Hillary can't quite get her appearance coordinated. Time shows 8 new coiffures since 1992, from color to cut to pouf.
Every woman knows a Hillary, an awkward girl who stares too long at other women. It's a stare of insecurity, a stare of data gathering. Beneath Hillary's contact lenses and blond makeover lies a women's-studies-faculty yearning to be free and dowdy.
Dowdy doesn't sell. Neither does shrill, wonkish, humorless Hillary. But bury that feminist liberal in the wardrobe and aura of a long-suffering wife, and you have a winner. Hillary exists because of Bill. Her career, from Rose Law Firm in Arkansas to senate seat, has sprung from Slick, with the senate seat more due to Monica.
She capitalizes on yet one thing more via Bill. That dorky part of Hillary, as documented in several historians' tomes on the Clintons, is completely taken by Bill. Mr. Clinton was the first "boy" to see her as something other than a study partner. Mr. Clinton saw her as a woman. His ability to take up with anything in a skirt is no news to us, but his passion, regardless of how generically applied, was a first for the bespectacled Hillary in the striped pants.
Sen. Clinton's book gets her back to the victim status soccer moms lap up. But, Hillary also brilliantly taps into the pool of women like her who lack the Gennifer Flowers/ Sharon Stone curb appeal. All those enticing broads, but Billy sticks it out with the geek from Yale. Not a bad story for a Harlequin book, exactly what "Living History" is. Women have made this book a #1 seller for the same reason they buy Danielle Steele and watch All My Children. Romance, hope, men are cads - all the same themes since Jane Austen put pen to paper. Sen. Clinton has done the same.
Odd theme for a presidential campaign.
Marianne M. Jennings |
