Hillary

It’s no secret that I’m not a huge fan of Hillary Clinton. Actually, to be more accurate, I’m not a huge fan of some of her politics; generally, I agree with her on a lot of things, and I admire her for a lot of non-political reasons. I don’t want her to be the 2008 Dem nominee, that much is true, but I also don’t like it when I see the press treating her like shit. While Bill Frist, who by any reasonable account is a lousy Senator, a crook, and a heartless twit, is being written up in the same paper as a scalpel-wielding superhero, with no mention of his many political failings nor his fashion choices, Hillary is done this dreadful disservice:

The two sides of Hillary Rodham Clinton -- the opposites that make her potential presidential candidacy such a gamble -- came into sharp focus Tuesday morning at the National Press Club.

For the better part of an hour, the senator from New York held forth in a disquisition on energy policy that was as overwhelming in its detail as it was ambitious in its reach.

But the buzz in the room was not about her speech -- or her striking appearance in a lemon-yellow pantsuit -- but about the lengthy analysis of the state of her marriage to Bill Clinton that was on the front page of that morning's New York Times.

Atrios quips:

Apparently one "side" is her desire to talk about energy policy in a way which is "overwhelming in its detail as it was ambitious in its reach."

Her other side is, apparently, David Broder's obsession with her sex life. Two sides indeed.

And I think that’s almost right. But the last passage in the article suggests what “her other side” really is, according to Broder.

Three times in the question-and-answer session, she referred to her husband as "Bill," praising him for seeing that his library in Little Rock incorporated a lot of energy-saving features.

Other than that, the elephant in the room went unmentioned.

“Her other side” isn’t her sex life. It’s just her husband. The two sides to Hillary Clinton are Hillary…and Bill.

This drives me insane. I’m not even sure why “the elephant in the room” needs to be “mentioned,” no less how she could mention him to the satisfaction of those who feel he ought to be. What is she meant to say? “And of course you all must remember that my husband is Bill Clinton, who is a former president of the United States, and I’m only still married to him to ride on his coattails, and yes, you’re right, you’re right, you’re right, you’re all right, I don’t have an original thought in my head or any decent qualifications of my own—it’s all because of Bill that I stand before you today. I submit wholly to being his puppet, while also simultaneously keeping up the guise of this sham marriage out of my own ruthless ambition.” Would that do it? Would that, at long last, satisfy the members of the punditocracy who can’t extricate Hillary the Senator from their vision of Hillary Bill’s wife?

You know, I think Elizabeth Dole is an idiot, and yet I’ve never felt compelled to try to minimize her success (nor her failures) by referencing her husband, Bob Dole. And, as I recall, any suggestion that Dubya only made his way to the Oval Office by virtue of his name was treated by the press as more evidence of liberal sour grapes back in 2000—even though his qualifications for the presidency were less impressive than Hillary’s are now.

If Hillary has “two sides,” they are the public façade and the private life that any politician has. In the case of our current president, those two sides are much-lauded and celebrated, his private life engaging in brush-clearing heralded as proof of his everyman credentials, through carefully constructed contortions of the truth that turn an estate into a “ranch” and an Andover grad into a “cowboy.” The press goes along with all of it, ignoring glaring cracks in the artifice. The truth is plain as day before them, but they report the lie.

The truth about Hillary—that she is an ambitious and smart woman who deserves to be where she is on her own steam and talents, who happens to be married to a former president—lies before them, too, but they choose to ignore it. Did being married to Bill Clinton give her a leg-up in a Senate race? Sure. But does she have the capacity to have achieved the same had she been married to Joe Schmoe? Absolutely. In actual fact, Hillary’s star may have risen sooner had she been Hillary Rodham Schmoe, free to pursue her own political aspirations at a time when the life of Hillary Rodham Clinton required her to stand at the side of another political aspirant.

That’s the truth the press ignores. With all the assistance they’re desperate to convey Bill has given her, they miss the obvious anchoring affect he conceivably had as well. Hillary had to wait until his political career was over before she could start hers.

If it’s true, as Broder claims, that “the drama of the Clintons' personal life [will] be a hot topic if she runs for president,” I’d love to see the press cover that angle. What does it matter if the Clintons’ marriage is over? Hillary might have been more without it, rather than less.

It isn’t the two “sides” of Hillary that interests me; it’s the two Sliding Doors futures that stretched out before her decades ago. It would be nice if the press could see the same and give Hillary her due. But I guess that’s not nearly as interesting as musing about her pantsuit and the details of a marriage, the truth of which only the two people bound by it can ever know.