LOL! Morris does not like Hillary at all......
BEHIND THE MASK OF HILL'S DISGUISES AS SHE EYES RUN FOR PRESIDENT -
Dick Morris - NY Post
May 2, 2004 --
Political adviser DICK MORRIS was a first-hand witness to the two faces of Hillary Rodham Clinton during his tenure as Bill Clinton's confidante. In his new book, "Rewriting History," he offers a rebuttal to the New York senator's best-selling autobiography, showing the Hillary he knows - warts and all.
LIKE the moon, she shows us the same face each time we see her. Sometimes, she displays more, sometimes less of her visage, but always it is the same carefully presented persona: friendly, open, giggly, practical, family-oriented, caring, thoughtful, unflappable, serious, balanced and moderate.
Just like the moon, though, Hillary Rodham Clinton has a face she never shows us, a side that is never visible, never on display.
This is a voyage around that side of Hillary - the parts of her personality and history that have been rewritten, reinvented or omitted from her memoir, "Living History," and her other writings or public statements.
Some of what Hillary conceals is not dark, only unseen. Not sinister, just covered up, protected from our gaze. Parts of it, although not always flattering, would be quite acceptable if she were to expose it to full public view. With incredible discipline, however, she conceals this side of herself in order to create an idealized portrait of Hillary.
But some of Hillary's hidden side is indeed dark. Like the moon, she has been scarred by the constant pounding of political meteorites. Under their battering, she has developed a sinister side, which is chilling even to those who know her well. Some of her reinventions are defensive, a form of protective coloration to minimize her potential vulnerability and maximize her capacity to deny what she must to survive politically.
Both of the Clintons are masters of subterfuge. But Hillary's deceptions and disguises are very different from Bill's. Bill Clinton deceives himself, and fools us in the process. He pretends, even when he is alone, that he is not doing what he knows he is doing. He never tells his right hand what his left hand is up to.
By contrast, Hillary knows full well who she is and what parts of her must never be exposed to public view. She reminds herself consciously, day after day, which parts of herself to hide and which to expose.
Where Bill's instinct for deception is neurotic, Hillary's is opportunistic. He wants to hide his private life from our eyes; Hillary seeks to conceal her character from our view. But the things that Hillary hides are integral to her political essence. They are who she is and what makes her tick. Her trickery is designed to hide her most basic character and instincts from all of us.
What makes Hillary's unseen side unique is that, for the most part, it represents her real personality, her true self, far more than the person who smiles and giggles at us day and night.
All public figures use makeup to cover a blemish or two. But only Hillary wears a mask of so many layers, one that hides her true face altogether.
Who is Hillary? We need to know. In fact, it's become critical that we do so.
After all, John Kerry is the Democratic Party's candidate in 2004, but Hillary is still its most popular politician. Unless Kerry beats Bush, she can have the nomination for the asking in 2008. And even if Kerry wins and runs for a second term, it will probably be Hillary's turn in 2012. She could even run for vice president in 2004.
But is Hillary a dedicated public servant or an unabashed self-promoter? The victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy, or a shrewd operator who often gets caught in her own devious schemes? An innate politician or a reinvention of herself refined by her ghostwriters and handlers? A sincere advocate for women and children or an opportunist out for power? A New Democrat or an old-fashioned liberal?
The answers to our questions become more important as the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency becomes more and more real. In fact, the key factors seem to be gathering into a political "perfect storm" that Hillary Clinton plans to ride all the way to the White House.
Consider the omens:
* The population of African and Hispanic Americans is rapidly rising.
* Voters are drifting to the left.
* The Republican Party is low on future presidential candidates, and Hillary's strongest potential rivals there are the ones most likely to sow division within the party.
* Likewise, no major Democratic alternative stands in her way.
* Democratic fund-raisers are setting new records for an out-of-power party.
* The Clinton machine is strengthening its control over the party.
* Bereft of winning issues beyond terrorism, Republicans are still groping for a theme to replace welfare and crime, which Bill Clinton stole away from them - and George W. Bush seems destined to leave huge deficits as a negative part of his legacy.
SO things look pretty good for Hillary. She could be the first female president of the United States. But should she be?
I worked closely with her for two decades. And that firsthand experience tells me that the person Hillary's supporters want to see in the White House is a fiction - a character carefully and assiduously cultivated for decades to mask the real Hillary.
The mask is imperfect, of course. Its gaps are revealed in the questions raised frequently, by the press and the public, about the junior senator from New York - questions that remain unanswered. We'd better answer them before she gets to be president.
What qualities of Hillary Clinton's personality would characterize her presidency? And how would they influence us all?
Every man or woman who morphs from private citizen into public figure is changed forever by the journey. But Hillary's transition - perhaps the word should be "transitions" - has been unusual, and not merely because it has taken place on the most public stage imaginable. As she journeyed from campus activist to lawyer to governor's wife to first lady and, finally, to United States senator, Hillary has changed just about everything about herself - her politics, her physical appearance, even her life story.
In the process, she became not only the candidate but the cartoonist, deciding which features to emphasize and which to sublimate.
Think about it. As we all know, Hillary has changed her hair, her eye color, her dress and her face more frequently than a professional model.
But the changes run far deeper. In her decades of public life, she has adjusted her opinions, modified her ideology, altered her priorities, and revised her rhetoric.
Hillary might like to describe this wholesale alteration as a product of growth or maturity. But most of it is the result of simple calculation. Hillary Clinton's image became what it needed to become in order to maximize the chances of election to high public office.
So, again, we ask the question; Does Hillary Clinton have the character and personality to be president?
She is a highly focused, hard-working and effective advocate for women and children. But she no more possesses the political strengths of Bill Clinton than she does his personal weaknesses.
She lacks his instincts, his empathy, his political savvy, his creativity, his subtlety, his antennae, his ostensible earnestness. Bill Clinton is flexible, charming, charismatic, and solicitous; Hillary, to put it mildly, is not. Bill Clinton has a rags-to-riches story and a down-homey warmth; Hillary has neither. And while Hillary is certainly bright and book-smart, she lacks his creativity and intellect.
To warm up his audience, Bill needs only uncork the bottle and let the charm flow. Hillary must resort to contrivance and pretense.
He can be friends with anyone. She keeps a mental enemies list.
He's a natural. She's not.
Hillary Clinton, in plain fact, is a student of Bill Clinton. She is not his clone.
Bill Clinton's convictions are always open for discussion; he seems to tailor his ideology to the political needs of the moment. Hillary's political orientation, on the other hand, is fixed, her opinions ardent. Americans always had difficulty explaining what Bill Clinton stood for. No one has any difficulty identifying Hillary's signature causes: the needs of women, children and the Democratic Party base.
Yet Hillary's passion about political issues is both her strength and her weakness. It often leads her into inflexibility, and traps her within moralistic requisites that distort her political compass.
Her health-care reform program, which began as a way to lower health-care spending, became an almost theological crusade to make health benefits a universal right and entitlement. She moved fearlessly - but also heedlessly - into the teeth of strident opposition - and in the end, her failed efforts only contributed to her party's loss of Congress in the ensuing election, almost toppling her husband from office.
Hillary's tendency to treat political questions as moral issues also makes her susceptible to the lure of gurus who eagerly try to sell her on their omnibus programs of ideological utopias. Would she be vulnerable to new Ira Magaziners - the Rasputin who got her to embrace a complicated and crazy holistic approach to health-care reform? Would her apparent credulity give rise to a presidency entirely subsumed by an ideological construct?
HILLARY Clinton is passionate and, by her lights, honorable. But can she be trusted?
"Between Hope and History" was the title of President Clinton's 1996 campaign, but it would have been a better fit for his wife's autobiography.
Hillary has a disturbing tendency to concoct carefully revised "facts" about her past, her persona, her circumstances and her experiences - in other words, she has a real problem telling the truth. Sometimes her deceptions are silly. At other times, they are deeply pernicious. But even the fluffier fabrications send us a warning not to trust her.
Take an apparently innocuous example: her nutty claim that her mother named her after Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest.
Meeting Sir Edmund by chance at the Katmandu airport, Hillary apparently made up the story on the spot, telling reporters she was named after the intrepid explorer. To bolster her claim, she piled on the details: While her mother was pregnant, Hillary extemporized, she had read an article about Sir Edmund and noticed that he spelled his name with two l's - "which," the first lady said, is how her mother "thought she was supposed to spell Hillary."
She continued: "So when I was born, she called me Hillary, and she always told me it's because of Sir Edmund Hillary."
But Sir Edmund didn't climb Everest until May 29, 1953 - 51/2 years after Hillary Rodham was born. In fact, until 1951 Sir Edmund Hillary hadn't even left New Zealand for his climb in the Himalayas. Before that, he was an unknown beekeeper.
Why would Hillary make up such a silly and unnecessary story? To give the press good copy? To try to glamorize her family history by connecting it with the heroic mountaineer?
Sometimes, though, Hillary's inventions have been more than simple Walter Mitty fantasizing - as when she invented a story about 9/11 on the "Today" show, implying to Katie Couric that her daughter, Chelsea, had narrowly missed being on the grounds of the Twin Towers at the time of the attacks.
Hillary told a national television audience that Chelsea had "gone on what she thought would be a great jog. She was going to go around the towers. She went to get a cup of coffee and - that's when the plane hit . . . She did hear it. She did."
Couric told NBC's viewers that Hillary, "at that moment, was not just a senator, but a concerned parent."
Chelsea herself, though, flatly contradicted her mother's account in an article for Talk magazine, which she apparently had not cleared with Hillary. As Chelsea revealed, she "was alone at a friend's Union Square apartment in Manhattan that morning" when her host phoned to tell her what had happened.
Instead of being anywhere near the World Trade Center, she was three miles northeast of Ground Zero - clear on the other side of town.
Hillary had lied. Effortlessly, spontaneously, chillingly, Hillary simply invented the tale. Why? Did she feel the need to bond more closely with her newly adopted state at the moment of its greatest catastrophe? Whatever it was, to lie in this way at that time suggests a serious character flaw.
When Al Gore claimed to be the father of the Internet, or that his marriage was the basis for "Love Story," his exaggerations tripped him up. Would a Hillary candidacy - or presidency - be constantly embroiled in similar controversy?
If her history is any guide, this might be an area of great difficulty for Hillary: her credibility.
From the forthcoming book REWRITING HISTORY by Dick Morris. Published by arrangement with ReganBooks/HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
NEW YORK POST |
